The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
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Colour Me Political
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2
<b>What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.</b>
<p></p>
<p>On Facebook, now acclaimed as one of the most popular social
networking sites in the world, the one thing that almost all the users engage
is, in updating their status updates. These updates can be varied – capturing
personal moods and emotions, reporting on things that strike one in the course
of a normal day, offering political opinions, suggesting movies and books to
friends, and often making public announcements of important events in life. The
updates appear as a live feed, updates in almost-real time, letting people in
networks connect, know, discuss and share information about their personal
lives. Often, to outsiders, these updates would appear pointless; I remember
somebody asking me, “But why would I want to know what you had for breakfast?”
Many status updates indeed border on the everyday and ordinary, of no interest
to anybody but the immediate networks.</p>
<p>However, in the first half of January in 2010, Facebook
users across the world started observing a strange pattern. Many people in
their networks were making one word status updates with the name of a colour.
Just that. A colour. Facebook users woke up to find “Green!”, “Red!”, “White!” “Black!”
in their live feed. No explanations and a cryptic silence. It was a viral
phenomenon, with the colours appearing across the board, in different parts of
the world, spanning all languages, cultures, and contexts. Also, it was
observed, almost all of the users putting this update, were women. It created a
lot of discussion, speculation, curiosity and conspiracy theories. Blog posts
discussing this phenomenon started appearing. People were twitting about it.
There was an element of surprise, and perhaps of frustration, because the
people making those colour updates were refusing to offer any explanations.</p>
<p>Eventually, after a few internet years (about 3 days, I
think!) the word got out. It was a meme. A meme is an internet gene (because it
replicates) which spreads virally, through different social communication and
networking sites. It invites people to participate in a series of actions,
either to answer a question or perform a certain act, and pass it along. The
colour updates were a part of the meme which was doing the rounds on the
internet:</p>
<p> "Some fun is
going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color,
nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls, no men .... It will be neat to
see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see
how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in
their status."</p>
<p>
What the message managed to do was take an
important cause and through fun, and play, and a little bit of excitement, got
young women around the world to ponder on the possibility, cure and prevention
of breast cancer. What was just a personal update capturing space suddenly
became a place of political mobilisation and participation. Both, men and
women, reading those colours, took a moment to think about breast cancer and
spread the word among their friends. Discussions, which started with curiosity,
ended with a sombre note. While there are speculative theories about how some
women in Detroit started this particular meme, there is no credible source of
information.</p>
<p> What is particularly of interest, is how, without any apparent
funding, or organisation, or the infrastructure that generally accompanies such
behemoth projects, this viral meme captured more attention and had more people
participating than most campaigns started by traditional activists or
governments. What Facebook, and other spaces like it offer, is the
infrastructure and the potential for such massive movements. As the Digital
Natives grow up with new technologies, they change the landscape of political
and social transformation. And the cryptic colour updates is telling us the
story of how things will change in the future.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital ActivismDigital NativesYouthSocial Networking2011-08-04T10:34:27ZBlog EntryCelebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013
<b>Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013</a>, a two day event organized by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a> to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Indic_Languages">Spoken Wikipedia</a>, and to bridge the <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/27/nine-out-of-ten-wikipedians-continue-to-be-men/">gender gap</a> of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Day 1</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.</p>
<h3>Day 2</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.</p>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/IMG_4124.jpg/@@images/31ee6a90-3009-45fa-8166-6a30bbf5d590.jpeg" style="float: left; " title="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" class="image-inline" alt="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" /></p>
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<p>One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article</p>
</th>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org">WikiCommons</a>. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases.</p>
<br />"Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on <a class="external-link" href="http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%9C">Marathi Wikipedia.</a>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.</p>
<h3>Also see:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Wikipedia Summit Pune: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Wikipedia Club Pune: <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune</a></li>
<li>Pictures: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Spoken Wikipedia Project: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India</a></li>
<li>Pune Club facebook page: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune">https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Video</h3>
<ul>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: center; ">
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<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature"><embed height="371" width="450" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed>
</object>
</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaDigital ActivismAccess to KnowledgeDigital AccessWikimediaWikipediaYouthVideoOpen AccessOpennessEvent2013-04-16T12:48:40ZBlog EntryCall for Applications: 'Maps for Making Change' - Using Geographical Mapping Techniques to Support Struggles for Social Justice in India
https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy/maps-for-making-change
<b>Deadline: 20 November 2009.
Maps for Making Change is a two-month project specifically designed for activists and supporters of social movements and campaigns in India. It provides participants with an exciting opportunity to explore how a range of digital mapping techniques can be used to support struggles for social justice. It also allows you to immediately develop and implement in practice a concrete mapping project relevant to your campaign or movement, with full technical support. Interested in joining us? Send in your application by 20 November 2009. </b>
<p align="justify"><em><strong>Background</strong> </em></p>
<p align="justify">Most of us think of maps as representations of territory. But have you ever wondered why <em>bastis</em>, slums, unauthorised colonies and monuments of minorities and poor people rarely are given prominence on maps – or at times are even absent altogether? All too often only seats of power, such as big hospitals, the colonies of the rich and diplomatic missions, receive detailed mention. This is because maps simultaneously also function as representations of relations of power and control: which places, communities, historical monuments, townships, colonies and roads are highlighted on a map reflects the power and control that various communities and classes possess or lack. In modern times, this is particularly obvious in planning processes, which incorporate maps as crucial tools in villages and cities alike. To challenge the practice of privileging the powerful on maps, and to create maps from the margins and of margins, therefore has emerged as an important aspect as well as a tool of our fights against injustice in society.</p>
<p align="justify"><em><strong>Maps for Making Change</strong></em></p>
<p align="justify">Today, with the emergence of new technologies such as GPS and the Internet, mapping techniques have advanced beyond the confines of professional cartographers and can be mobilised and used to fight for social justice by anyone with an interest in maps. Are you someone concerned with the state of social justice in the country today? Are you working closely, as an activist or a supporter, with a campaign or social movement? Are you interested in exploring how digital geographical mapping techniques might help facilitate or support your advocacy and awareness raising campaigns and understanding of the power relations in society? Perhaps you already have some ideas on how maps can fit into your work, but you require technical support to put these into practice? Then this is for you.</p>
<p align="justify">Maps for Making Change is a two-month project that will provide you with the opportunity to explore how mapping can be used to support your campaigns, struggles and movements to fight against injustice. It is jointly organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) and the Tactical Technology Collective (Bangalore and London), and brings together activists and technologists. Over the course of the project, participants will:</p>
<ul><li>
<p align="justify">explore and share ideas about the possible uses of geographical maps within the context of campaigns and movements in India;</p>
</li><li>
<p align="justify">try out a range of mapping tools and get training and support in the creation and use of maps;</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li>
<p align="justify">develop and implement your own mapping project, involving the creation and use as well as dissemination of maps, relevant to your campaign's or movement's advocacy and goals.</p>
</li></ul>
<p align="justify"><em><strong>Format</strong></em></p>
<p align="justify">Maps for Making Change will take the form of three workshops, with time in between each for participants to work on a mapping project of their choice. The first workshop will take place in Delhi on 3 December, and will be an introductory event, where tools and tactics will be explored and discussed and participants can determine the nature of the information they need to collect to implement their own mapping project. The second workshop will take place over 3 days during the first week of January (exact dates and location to be decided), and will involve actual work on mapping projects, using data and other resources collected by participants in the intervening time. The third workshop will be a two-day event during the first week of February (exact dates and location to be decided), and will be the time for participants to provide overall feedback, as well as to do the final touches on the projects and launch them. Not only during the workshops, but throughout the two-month project period, and at every stage of the development of your project plan, technical support will be available to help participants make your ideas a reality.</p>
<p align="justify">The organisers will cover travel and accommodation expenses of those who are selected to participate in the project. There is no participation fee. By applying, applicants commit themselves, however, to devoting the necessary time to this project. Where relevant, an organisational commitment to allow you to do this would also be required.</p>
<p align="justify"><em><strong>Who should apply?</strong></em></p>
<p align="justify">This is an event for activists and supporters of movements and campaigns based in India. Preference will be given to applicants that intend to use the project directly for their work within a campaign or movement. Applications are welcomed from individuals, but also from groups of people who are working within the same campaign or movement and who would like to develop and implement a mapping project together. Those who have been centrally involved in designing and implementing communication strategies of campaigns and movements are particularly encouraged to apply, but such a role is not at all a prerequisite to be part of Maps for Making Change. Participants from appropriate backgrounds who simply want to explore the technology and its uses without immediately implementing it will be welcome in so far as space allows.</p>
<p align="justify">We would like to also encourage applications from students who are involved with campaigns or movements and who would like to learn these skills so as to use them in their advocacy efforts. Students will be provided with special assistance during the programme.</p>
<p align="justify">All participants should have some familiarity with computer use. While more advanced technology skills are useful, they are not essential: technology support will be provided as required for all participants to ensure that everyone completes their own mapping project.</p>
<p align="justify">Regretfully, we will be able to accommodate translation only from Hindi to English and vice versa, so applicants will need to be comfortable with either of these languages.</p>
<p align="justify"><em><strong>How to apply</strong></em></p>
<p align="justify">Please answer the questions below in Hindi or in English. You do not need to write long responses (up to 300 words max), but please provide us with enough information to understand your involvement in and commitment to campaigns or movements for social justice, as well as your skills and interest. We also would like to know why you want to be part of the Maps for Making Change project and what are some of the contributions (of whatever kind) you could make to it.</p>
<p align="justify">You can send your answers by email to <a href="mailto:mapsforchange@cis-india.org">maps4change@cis-india.org</a>, or by post to:</p>
<div align="justify" class="visualClear">Maps for Making Change</div>
<div align="justify" class="visualClear">c/o Centre for Internet and Society</div>
<div align="justify" class="visualClear">No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers</div>
<div align="justify" class="visualClear">14, Cunningham Road</div>
<div align="justify" class="visualClear">Bangalore 560052</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;" class="visualClear"> </div>
The last day for applications is 20 November 2009. Early applications will make us very happy though! :)<em><strong><br /><br />Application Questions:</strong></em>
<p> </p>
Please provide answers to all the following questions.
<p align="left">1) Basic personal information:</p>
<ul><li>
<p align="left">Name:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Gender:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Date of birth:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Nationality:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Affiliation/organisation:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">E-mail address (if available):</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Telephone and emergency contact number(s):</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Preferred language of communication:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Veg/non veg:</p>
</li><li>
<p align="left">Anything else we should know about you (allergies, medical condition, special needs):</p>
</li></ul>
<p align="left">Are you applying individually or as part of a team? If as part of a team, please provide the names of the other team members here;</p>
<p align="left">2) Where are you from, where do you live now, and what is your current movement/organisational affiliation (movement/organisation you work with, its mission, position you have within it, is your organisation a non-profit, etc.)?</p>
<p align="justify">3) What is your wider experience of working with campaigns or movements for social justice? What kinds of initiatives have you been involved in? What kind of responsibilities have you taken up within these?</p>
<p align="justify">4) Have you been involved with any technology projects for non-profit organisations or campaigns or movements for social change? If so please briefly explain your experience (what worked, what didn't, what did you like, what not, etc?) and your role within the project. If you haven't been involved with such a project, please explain why you are interested in exploring the use of technology for social change.</p>
<p align="justify">5) Why are you interested in joining Maps for Making Change in particular? How can you and your movement/organisation benefit from your participation?</p>
<p align="justify">6) Do you already have an idea in mind that involves using maps for social change and that you would like to develop into a project that can support the work of the campaign or movement that you are involved with? If so, please explain.</p>
<p align="justify">7) To help us better understand the kind of technical support we will need to provide during Maps for Making Change, please describe your current technical expertise and ability.</p>
<p align="justify">8) All participants are encouraged to teach as well as to learn. What kind of contribution to the group's learning do you think you could make?</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>If you require more information about the project or about the application process, please email us at <a href="mailto:mapsforchange@cis-india.org">maps4change@cis-india.org</a>, or call us at 080 4092 6283.</strong></p>
<p align="justify">Looking forward to hearing from you!</p>
<p align="justify">The Maps for Making Change Team</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy/maps-for-making-change'>https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy/maps-for-making-change</a>
</p>
No publisheranjaDigital ActivismPracticeWorkshopResearchers at WorkMaps for Making Change2015-10-05T15:04:12ZBlog EntryBeyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause
<b>Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. </b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">The last decade
has witnessed an escalating interest among academics, policy makers, and other
practitioners on the intersection between youth, activism, and the new media
technologies, which resulted in two narratives: one of doubt and the other of
hope. The ‘hope’ narrative hinges on the new plethora of avenues for activism
at the young people’s disposal and the bulge of the population, stating that
the contemporary forms of youth activism represent new ways of conceiving and
doing activism in the present and the future (see, for example, UN DESA, 2005).
The ‘doubt’ narrative, on the other hand, questions to what extent the digital
activism can contribute to broader social change (Collin, 2008) and some
proponents of this view even call it ‘slacktivism’, stating that online
activism is only effective if accompanied with real life activism (Morozov, 2009).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Before assessing
the potentials of youth’s digital activism to contribute to social change, it
is imperative to first gain a comprehensive understanding about this emerging
form of activism. A brief review of existing literature on the topic found that
most of the analyses are centered on three perspectives, each with its own
approach, strengths, and weaknesses: the technology centered, the new social
movements centered, and the youth centered perspectives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The technology centered
perspective places a great emphasis on the instrumental role of the internet
and new media (see, for instance, Kassimir, 2005; Shirkey, 2007; Brooks and
Hodkinson, 2008). It discusses how internet savvy young people are able to
exercise their activism differently, because the technology can remove
obstacles to organizing, provide a new platform for visibility and make
transnational networking easier. In this perspective, the Internet and new media technologies are seen as enabling tool sand the web is viewed as a new space to promote
activism. However, this perspective mainly stipulates that there is already a
formulaic form of activism that can be transferred from the actual, physical
sphere to the virtual arena; it does not consider that the changes caused by
the way the youth are using technologies in their daily lives may also create
new meanings and forms of activism. This perspective is the most dominant in
literature on the topic, being the lens used by the pioneering studies on
youth, Internet, and activism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The new social
movements centered perspective goes beyond that and looks at how new meanings
and forms of politics and activism are created as the result of the way people
are using new media technologies and the Internet. This perspective is leading
the recently emerging literature on the topic and emphasizes on the trend of
being concerned on issues related to everyday democracy and the favour towards
self organized, autonomous, horizontal networks (for examples, see Bennett,
2003; Martin, 2004; Collin, 2008). However, this perspective treats young
people merely as ‘vessels’ of the new activism and neglect to examine how their
lives have been shaped by the use of new media technologies and the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The youth
centered perspective, represented for example by Juris and Pleyers (2009),
acknowledges that ICTs have always been part of young people’s lives and that
it intersects with other factors in shaping how they conceive politics and
activism. Most of the studies in this perspective were done with youth
activists in existing transnational social justice movements, such as the
global anti-capitalism or environmental movements. Nevertheless, this
perspective mainly views youth activists as ‘becomings’ by defining them as the
younger layer of actors in a multi-generational group that will be future
leaders of the movement. There are very few researches on autonomous youth
movements that are created and consist of young people themselves and look at
the youth as political actors in its own right. In addition, the majority of
studies also focused on the youth as individuals but not as a collective force.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">In addition to
the shortcomings of each perspective, there are also common gaps in the current
broader body of knowledge on the intersection of youth, new media technologies,
and activism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Firstly, existing
researches tend to define activism as concrete actions, such as protests and
campaigns, and the values represented by such actions. It neglects other
elements that constitute activism together with the actions and values, such as
the issue taken up by the action, the ideologies underlying the formulation of
action, and the actors behind the activism (Sherrod, 2005; Kassimir, 2005). Divorcing
these elements from the analysis gave only a partial view of what youth digital
activism is.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Secondly, the
majority of studies zoomed into the novelty of new media technologies and how
they are being used as a point of departure to investigate the topic. This
arguably stems from an adult-centric, pre-digital point of view, which overlooks
the fact that internet and new media has always been ‘technology’ for most
young people just as how the radio and television have always been ‘technology’
for the previous generation (Shah and Abraham, 2009). This way of thinking
divorces the ‘digital’ from the ‘activism’ in digital activism; consequently,
it ignores all the other factors that are causing and shaping youth activism and
fails to capture how youth actors themselves are viewing or giving meaning to
this digital activism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Finally, researches
on the issue skew excessively on developed countries. It must be acknowledged
that the ‘digital divide’, or the unequal access to and familiarity with
technology based on gender, class, caste, education, economic status or
geographical location, in developing countries is deeper and that the digitally
active youth are a privileged minority. Yet, a neglect to understand their
activism also means a failure to understand why and how the elite who are often
perceived to be politically apathetic are engaging with their community to
create social change.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">The weaknesses
identified above demonstrate that our understanding on this particular form of
contemporary youth activism is currently obscured. Hence, the two narratives of
‘hope’ and ‘doubt’ lose their relevance given that the subject of assessment,
the digital youth activism, is not even clearly understood.</p>
<p>Based
on the above overview of the limitations, it is imperative to find a new way to
approach to understand the phenomenon of digital youth activism. I will explore
the possibilities of such an approach with the following arguments as the
starting point.</p>
<p>Firstly,
I argue that the key limitation lies on the adult-centric perspective in
viewing youth’s engagement with new media technologies, thus what is essential
is to go beyond the ‘digital’ and focus on the ‘activism’ part of youth digital
activism. Secondly, I argue that exploration of the
issue from the standpoint of the youth political actors themselves is crucial
to counter the adult-centric perspective dominating the literature on this
topic. Thirdly, since so many researches divorce the youth from the context of
their activism, it is crucial to focus on a particular case study to a tease
out the nuances of youth digital activism.</p>
<p>I
have the opportunity to explore the approach through a study with <a class="external-link" href="http://blog.blanknoise.org/">The Blank Noise
Project</a>, an initiative to address the problem of street sexual harassment in
public spaces that originated in 2003 in Bangalore. It has since expanded into
nine cities in India with over 2,000 volunteers, all young people between 17-30
years of age. Known for their unique public art street interventions as well as
their savvy online presence, The Blank Noise Project was also chosen because
its growth and sustainability over the past seven years are a testament to its
legitimacy and relevance for youth in India. </p>
<p>The
research does not aim to assess the contribution of The Blank Noise Project to
social change nor does it claim to represent all forms of youth digital
activism in India. Rather, it aims to offer insights on one of the forms of
digital natives joining forces for a cause. The research is interested in the
following questions: how do young people involved in the Blank Noise articulate
their politics? Who are their audience? What are their strategies? What is
their conception of the public sphere? How do they organize themselves? How do
they represent themselves to others? How do they see and give meaning to their
involvement with the Blank Noise? How can we make sense of their initiative? While
‘activism’ is the popular term that is also used in this research, is their
initiative a form of activism or is it something else altogether? More importantly,
how do these young people define it by themselves? For the next few months, I
will share stories, questions, and reflections that emerge along my journey of
exploring those questions with The Blank Noise Project on the CIS blog. </p>
<p> </p>
<p></p>
<p><em>This is the first post in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory" class="external-link"><strong>Beyond the Digital </strong>series</a>, a research
project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism
conducted by Maesy Angelina with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS
Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. </em><span class="description"> </span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Bennett,
W.L. (2007) ‘Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age’, paper presented at</p>
<p>the OECD/ INDIRE Conference on Millenial
Learners, Florence, Italy (5-6 March).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Brooks,
R. and Hodkinson, P. (2008) ‘Introduction’, <em>Journal
of Youth Studies</em> Vol. 11:5,</p>
<p>p. 473 – 479</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Collin,
P. (2008) ‘The internet, youth participation policies, and the development of</p>
<p>young people’s political identities in
Australia’, <em>Journal of Youth Studies </em>Vol.
11:5, p. 527 - 542</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Juris,
J.S. and Pleyers, G.H. (2009) ‘Alter-activism: Emerging cultures of
participation</p>
<p>among young global justice activists’, <em>Journal of Youth Studies </em>Vol. 12 (1): p.
57-</p>
<p>75.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Kassimir,
R. (2006) ‘Youth Activism: International and Transnational’, in Sherrod,</p>
<p>L.R., Flanagan, C.A. and Kassimir, R.
(eds.) <em>Youth Activism: An International </em></p>
<p><em>Encyclopedia,
</em>p.
20-28. London: Greenwood Press.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Martin,
G. (2004) ‘New Social Movements and Democracy’, in Todd, M.J. and Taylor,</p>
<p>G. (eds.) <em>Democracy and Participation: Popular protests and new social movements</em>,
p. 29-54. London: Merlin Press.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Morozov,
E. (2009) ‘The brave new world of slacktivism’. Accessed 19 May 2010 <</p>
<p>http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19/the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Shah,
N. and Abraham, S. (2009) ‘Digital Natives with a Cause? A Knowledge</p>
<p>Survey and Framework’. Accessed 7 April
2010 < <a href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause">http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause</a>></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Sherrod,
L.R. (2006) ‘Youth Activism and Civic Engagement’, in Sherrod, L.R.,</p>
<p>Flanagan, C.A. and Kassimir, R. (eds.) <em>Youth Activism: An International </em></p>
<p><em>Encyclopedia,
</em>p.
2-10. London: Greenwood Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Shirkey,
C. (2008) <em>Here Comes Everybody: How
Change Happens and People Come </em></p>
<p><em>Together</em>. New York:
Penguin Books</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>United
Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs / UN DESA (2005)</p>
<p>‘World Youth Report 2005: Young People
Today and in 2015’. Accessed 7 April 2010 <http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unyin/documents/wyr05book.pdf></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyYouthDigital ActivismDigital NativesBlank Noise ProjectBeyond the Digital2012-03-13T10:43:37ZBlog EntryBetween the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground
<b>In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.</b>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.</p>
<p>In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).</p>
<p>This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.</p>
<p>This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.</p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[<a href="#1">1</a>] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[<a href="#2">2</a>] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.</p>
<p>Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.</p>
<p>In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.</p>
<p>Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.</p>
<p>While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).</p>
<p>Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.</p>
<p>Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.</p>
<h2>Snapshots</h2>
<p>We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[<a href="#3">3</a>] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.</p>
<p>The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[<a href="#4">4</a>] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.</p>
<p>As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."</p>
<p>Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.</p>
<p>Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."</p>
<h2>Propositions</h2>
<p>These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.</p>
<p>In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.</p>
<p>It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.</p>
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of </span><span class="Apple-style-span">interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.</span></p>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">References</span></h3>
<p>Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. <em>Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website</em>. New York: Crown Publishers.</p>
<p>Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.</p>
<p>Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. <em>The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom</em>. New York: Public Affairs.</p>
<p>Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” <em>Foreign Affairs</em> 90, (1); p. 28-41.</p>
<p>Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. <em>Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation</em>. London: Berghahn Books.</p>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">End Notes</span></h3>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model </a><a name="1">might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian </a><a name="1">regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from </a><a name="1">Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ </a><span class="Apple-style-span"><a name="1">story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.</a></span></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="3">[3]More information about the programme can be found at </a><a name="1">http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ </a><a name="1">Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="4">[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined </a><a name="1">that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, </a><a name="1">the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, </a><a name="1">where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.</a></p>
<p><strong><span class="Apple-style-span">Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CDACS-DS-15-v3-fnl.pdf">here</a></span></strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:14:04ZBlog EntryBetween the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism
<b>In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><em>Cross-posted from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CDACS-DS-15-v3-fnl.pdf">Democracy and Society</a></em>.</span></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.</p>
<p>In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).</p>
<p>This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.</p>
<p>This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.</p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[<a href="#1">1</a>] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[<a href="#2">2</a>] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.</p>
<p>Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.</p>
<p>In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.</p>
<p>Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.</p>
<p>While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).</p>
<p>Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.</p>
<p>Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.</p>
<h2>Snapshots</h2>
<p>We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[<a href="#3">3</a>] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.</p>
<p>The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[<a href="#4">4</a>] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.</p>
<p>As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."</p>
<p>Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.</p>
<p>Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."</p>
<h2>Propositions</h2>
<p>These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.</p>
<p>In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.</p>
<p>It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.</p>
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of </span><span class="Apple-style-span">interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.</span></p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">References</span></h2>
<p>Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. <em>Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website</em>. New York: Crown Publishers.</p>
<p>Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.</p>
<p>Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. <em>The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom</em>. New York: Public Affairs.</p>
<p>Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” <em>Foreign Affairs</em> 90, (1); p. 28-41.</p>
<p>Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. <em>Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation</em>. London: Berghahn Books.</p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">End Notes</span></h2>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">[1]</a> Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">[2]</a> Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site">http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="3">[3]</a> More information about the programme can be found <a href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause">here</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="4">[4]</a> Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism'>https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismDigital NativesResearchNet CulturesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-10-25T05:58:59ZBlog EntryActivism: Unraveling the Term
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term
<b>After discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about how they relate with the very term of activism.</b>
<p></p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph"><strong><em>Youth's Popular Imagination of Activism</em></strong></p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph">As a start, I need to clarify
that ‘activism’ is not a concept that the participants are generally concerned
with. For a majority of them, the conversation we had was the first time they
thought of what the term means and reflect whether their engagement with Blank
Noise is activism. Regardless of whether one identifies Blank Noise as a form
of activism or not, all participants share a popular idea of what activism is.</p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph"> Generally speaking, at an abstract level all
participants saw activism as passionately caring about an injustice and taking
action to create social change. At a more tangible level, all participants
mentioned three elements as popular ideas about <em>doing </em>activism. The first is the existence of a concrete demands as
a solution to the identified problem, such as asking for service provision or
state regulations. Since these demands are structural, activism is also seen
dealing with formal authority figures in the traditional sense of politics, the
state. The second is the intensity and commitment required to be an activist,
for many participants being an activist means having prolonged engagement,
taking risks, and making the struggle a priority in one’s life. In other words,
being an activist means “<em>... being
neck-deep, spending most if not all of your time, energy, and resources for the
cause” </em>(Dev Sukumar, male, 34). The third element relates to the methods,
called by some as ‘old school’: shouting slogans, holding placards, and doing
marches on the streets – all enacted in the physical public space. This popular
imagination of activism becomes the orientation for participants in deciding whether
Blank Noise is a form of activism and whether they are activists for being
involved in it.</p>
<p><strong><em>Activism
as the Intention and Action</em></strong></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;"><em>“I have an idea of what activism is but not what it exactly
looks like.” </em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Apurva Mathad, male,
28).<em> </em></p>
<p>For
those who think that Blank Noise <em>is </em>a
form of activism, there was a differentiation between the idea at the abstract
level and how it is manifested at a more tangible level. The definition of
activism is the abstract one, while the popular ideas of doing activism do not
define the concept but present the most common out many possible courses of
actions. Blank Noise is fulfils all the elements in the abstract definition: a
passion about an injustice, having an aim for social change, and acting to
achieve the aim. Hence, Blank Noise is activism, but the way it manifests
itself does not adhere to the popular imagination of doing activism. The
distinction between Blank Noise’s methods with popular ones was emphasized,
along with the difference in articulating goals.</p>
<p>Interestingly,
not all participants who share this line of thinking called themselves as
activists for being involved in an activism. Again, it must be reiterated that
no participants ever really thought of giving a name to their engagement prior
to the interview. Instead of saying ‘I am an activist’, they said ‘I guess I
could be called an activist’ for the fact that they are sharing the passion and
being actively involved in a form of activism, albeit in an unconventional
manner.</p>
<p>Those
who would categorize Blank Noise as activism but not call themselves activists
related with a particular element on the popular idea of <em>doing </em>activism, which is getting “neck-deep”. They were helpers,
volunteers, idea spreaders, but not an activist because their lives are not dedicated
for the cause or their involvements were based on availability. On the other
hand, these participants all said that Jasmeen is an activist for being
completely dedicated to Blank Noise from its inception until today.</p>
<p><strong><em>Activism as Particular Ways of Doing and Being<br /></em></strong></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;"><em>“What are the repercussions if activism is so fluidly
defined? It can mean not questioning </em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;"><em>privilege... not seeing the class divisions and still call
yourself activist.” </em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Hemangini Gupta,
female, 29).<em> </em></p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph">Most participants did not consider
Blank Noise as an activism. Generally, this can be explained by the
discrepancies between Blank Noise and the popular imagination on the tangible
ways of <em>doing </em>activism. Blank Noise
does not propose a concrete solution or make concrete demands to an established
formal structure nor did it march on the streets and make slogans. However, the
underlying attitude to this point of view is not of a younger generation
finding the ‘old’ ways of doing activism obsolete. Rather, there was an
acknowledgement that the issue itself causes the different ways of reading an
issue and taking actions to address it.</p>
<p>Furthermore,
there is an appreciation to the achievements and dedication of activists that
deterred them from calling themselves activists. These people referred to their
occasional participation and the fact that Blank Noise is not the main priority
in their lives as a student or young professional despite being a cause they
are passionate about. As reflected in the opening quote, being an activist for
some participants also means deeply reflecting on their self position in terms
of class, acknowledging their privileges, and putting themselves in a position
that will enable them to imagine the experience of people who are also affected
by the issue but has a different position in the society. In other words, being
an activist is not just about <em>doing </em>but
also about critically reflecting on one’s position in relation to the issue and
how it influences the way an issue is being pushed forward. Thinking that they
are not up to these standards, these youth choose to call themselves
‘volunteers’, ‘helpers’, or ‘supporters’.</p>
<h2><em>Youth: The Activist, the Apathetic, and the Everyday</em></h2>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;" class="Normalfirstparagraph"><em>“Blank Noise is a public
and community street arts collective that is volunteer-led and attempts to
create public dialogue on the issue of street sexual violence and eve teasing.”
</em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;" class="Normalfirstparagraph"><em>(</em>Jasmeen Patheja)</p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;"><em>“... a
group of people against street sexual harassment and eve teasing.” </em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Kunal Ashok, men, 29)</p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">“... <em>an
idea that really works.” </em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Neha Bhat, 19)</p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph">As clarified before, the
participants did not use the words ‘movement’ and very few used ‘activism’
during our conversations. Instead, the terms they used to describe Blank Noise
are represented in the quotes above: collective, community, group, project, and
even as an idea. These phrases do not carry the same political baggage that
‘movement’ or ‘activism’ would; they also do not conjure a particular
imagination that the other two terms would. These phrases are de-politicized
and informal; they imply fluidity, lack of hierarchy, and room for
manoeuvre. </p>
<p>The
implied meanings in the terms reflect the debates on the average youth and
political engagement. For the past decade, various youth scholars criticized
the dichotomy of youth as either activists or apathetic in explaining the
global trend of decreased youth participation in formal politics. The activists
are either politically active Digital Natives engaged in new forms of social
movements influenced heavily by new media or sub-cultural resistances, which
only account for a fraction of the youth population that are mostly completely
apathetic. This dichotomy ignored the ‘broad “mainstream” young people who are
neither deeply apathetic about politics on unconventionally engaged’ (Harris et
al, 2010).</p>
<p>These
mainstream young people actually are socially and politically engaged in
‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people
who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and
lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very
involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to
other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by
the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as
political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal
political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist,
hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of
activism (Harris et al, 2010). Internet and new media technologies are credited
as an enabling factor, being a space and a medium for young people to express
their everyday activism. </p>
<p>All
of the research participants, perhaps with the exception of Jasmeen as the only
one who has constantly been the driver Blank Noise its entire seven years, are
these everyday makers, people who were involved with the Blank Noise either on
a daily basis as a commentator, one-time project initiator and leader, or
people who were active when they are available but remain dormant at other
times. Blank Noise is a space where these individual forms of engagement could
be exercised while remaining as a collective. The facilitation is not only by
the flexibility of coming and going, but also the lack of rigid group rules and
the approach of allowing Blank Noise to be interpreted differently by
individuals. Considering that the mainstream urban youth are everyday makers
who would not find ‘old’ or ‘new’ social movements appealing, this can be the
reason why Blank Noise became so popular among youth; however, I would also
argue that the fact that Blank Noise is the first to systematically address eve
teasing is a determining cause.</p>
<p>The
implications of this finding, together with other concluding thoughts, will be
shared in the next and final post in the Beyond the Digital series.</p>
<p><em>This is the <strong>ninth</strong> post in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory" class="external-link"><strong>Beyond the Digital </strong>series,</a> a research project that aims to explore
new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina
with Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge
Programme. </em></p>
<p><em>References:</em></p>
<p>Bang,
H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September
2010. <a href="http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf">http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf</a></p>
<p>Castells,
M. (2009) <em>Communication Power. </em>New
York: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Harris,
A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’
young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, <em>Young </em>Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32</p>
<p><em>Image source:</em> <a href="http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/tweet-now-feb-17-27.html">http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/tweet-now-feb-17-27.html</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyDigital ActivismDigital NativesBlank Noise ProjectBeyond the DigitalResearchers at Work2015-05-14T12:25:05ZBlog Entry10th International ISTR Conference
https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference
<b>The 10th international ISTR conference was organised by ISTR at Universita Degli Studi Di Siena in Italy from July 10 to 13, 2012. Nishant Shah gave a lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism. </b>
<p>Nishant Shah spoke as a panelist in the panel "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change".</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This Tenth International Conference of ISTR marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of this global community of scholars and interested others dedicated to the creation, discussion, and advancement of knowledge pertaining to the Third Sector and its impact on human and planetary well-being and development internationally. <br /><br />In this era of far-reaching changes in the way that societies are organized, the Third Sector is playing a critical role and has significantly gained importance in many countries. Democratization and the role of civil society in social integration and participation are in the spotlight with recent mobilizations particularly in the Middle East and ongoing suppression of civil society under authoritarian regimes in parts of the world. New media, social networks and other technological innovations raise new opportunities and challenges for organizing collective action and the diversity of civil society. Marketization and its impact on the Third Sector is attracting renewed research interest as welfare budgets are cut and the role of nonprofits is called into question in difficult fiscal times in many nations. A second type of marketization is also attracting attention particularly the growth of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the emergence of social enterprises and changing philanthropic paradigms. International research toward a better understanding of the implications of these changes continues to gather momentum.<br /><br />ISTR’s Tenth International Conference in Sienna, Italy offers an excellent opportunity for further dialogue on these and other changes in an environment of rigor, reflexivity, authenticity and creativity. Siena encapsulates a mix of tradition and innovation that is woven from ancient webs of social engagement and enduring beliefs in justice through periods of peace and conflict. It provides an excellent setting to explore the role of third sector studies as an integrative science with short and long term objectives geared towards understanding and addressing societal concerns. Three exciting plenary sessions will canvas major theoretical and practice developments in the Third Sector and highlight the rich history and accomplishments of the host nation’s Third Sector.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">See the event details on<a class="external-link" href="http://www.istr.org/events/event_details.asp?id=191250"> ISTR website</a><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.istr.org/resource/resmgr/siena/supplementalprogram.pdf">Read</a> the program supplement for ISTR's 10th International Conference</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference'>https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital ActivismDigital Natives2012-08-05T08:03:28ZNews Item