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Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies
<b>Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies</em> is an anthology that revisits the debates and scholarship that have arisen around youth and technology in the last decade or so. It is a timely intervention that invites some of the most influential scholars who have contributed to and shaped the discourse around “digital natives” to come and revisit their original ideas from the last decade. The term “digital native” probably bears witness to the strident discourses that, more often than not, fall into the trap of exotically glorifying or despairingly vilifying young peoples’ engagement with digital technologies. As Buckingham points out in his foreword to the book, these conversations either take up the language of a “generation gap [that] entails a narrative of transformation and even of rupture, in which fundamental continuities between the past and the future have been destroyed” or they guise themselves in an “almost utopian view of technology—a fabulous story about technology liberating and empowering young people, enabling them to become global citizens, and to learn and communicate and create in free and unfettered ways” (p. ix). The essays seek a point of departure from these tried and tested arguments in order to provide a “balanced view” on the topic. And so we have a distinguished author list from the world of digital natives scholarship, coming together not only to ponder on their own contributions to the field and how those ideas need to be upgraded, but also to provide new contexts, concepts, and frameworks to understand who, or indeed, what, is a “digital native,” often in tension with their earlier work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In its ambition of revisiting existing debates and providing a “research-based approach by presenting empirical evidence and argument from international researchers in the field,” the book succeeds unevenly (p. xi). Despite its efforts to chart a point of departure, some of the essays end up falling into some usual traps. For example, despite the fact that the oldest digital natives are probably in their thirties, they are thought of as being young. They are defined only as “students” within formal learning institutions without looking at the radical potential of learning outside organized education, embedded in their everyday practices. The digital natives remain an object of research and the peer-to-peer structures that are supposed to shape them, but do not feature in the methodologies of researching them. This notwithstanding, the essays still offer a historical and social perspective on the debates around digital natives in certain developed pockets of the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the first section, “Reflecting on the Myth,” Thomas’ essay “Technology, Education and the Discourse of the Digital Native” introduces a tension between the techno-euphorists and the “digital luddites,” which replays itself through the rest of the contributions. While Thomas places himself between “technoevangelism” and “technoskepticism,” Prensky, who coined the term “Digital Natives” in 2001, then introduces to us a new binary of “digitally wise” and “digitally dumb” (p. 4). Prensky reviews the responses that his opposition of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” have produced over the last decade and emphasizes that his coinage was at the level of a metaphor, and was not to be taken seriously. Prensky agrees that the earlier opposition might be discarded because it evokes too many simple responses based on skills with technology. Digital wisdom, for Prensky, is in the ways in which digital technologies enhance the human brain “to anticipate second- and third-order effects to which the unaided mind may be blind” as the world becomes too complex for the “unenhanced human brain” to cope with it (p. 23). Typically, Prensky’s argument creates a dichotomy of those who can (and will) and those who will be outside of this web of digital enhancements. His analysis tries to complicate the idea of human wisdom by looking at questions of ethics and agency, but the final formulations appear cliche´d, merely re-creating the older tensions rather than thinking through them. Jones’ following essay on the “Net Generation” is more persuasive, where he argues for dismissing the idea that “nature of certain technologies . . . <em>has affected the outlook of an entire age cohort</em> in advanced economies” and instead should unpack how “new technologies emerging with this generation have particular characteristics that <em>afford certain types of social engagement</em>” (p.42).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the second section, titled “Perspectives,” the essays take up two different tones.The first is about looking at digital literacy, skill, and fluency in everyday practices of digital natives, and how they shape our contemporary and future sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. Banaji, in exploring the EU Civic Web Project, echoes Jones’ ideas. The presumptions within education about an entire generation as “born with technologies” has consequences in the field of civic action, where programs for citizen action are designed with expectations that the young people will have core digital competencies and literacy. She does not push that argument further, but in her study of the two Scottish e-initiatives, one can see the promise of a radical reconstruction of civic engagement movements, where the young participants are not going to be satisfied as mere participators, and will demand a space for their voice to be heard.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Takahashi’s essay on the <em>oyaubibunka</em> (“thumb culture”) mobile generations in Japan stands alone in its analysis of an Asian context—though many might argue that Japan, with its developed economy, can hardly be counted as a typically “Asian” perspective. Takahashi is rooted, both in practice and discourse, in youth and technology in Japan, where the youth often experience close-knit community experiences through mobile interfaces, in their otherwise alienated modern habitats. Almost as a response to Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), Takahashi shows how collaborative and cocreation cultures ranging from the mobile novels on Mixi to everyday interaction on Social Networking Systems is bringing in new kinds of social spaces of belonging. The essay, however, resists simply celebrating this space and works in complex ideas of freedom, control, risks, and the tensions between traditionalization and modernity in Japan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Zimic and Dalin, writing from a similar heavily connected Nordic region, pose a different set of questions in their essay, “Actual and Perceived Online Participation Among Young People in Sweden.” For Zimic and Dalin, in a space where connectivity can be taken for granted, the further question to ask is not whether digital natives participate online or not, but whether they participate in ways that are expected of “a digital citizen in the information age” (p. 137). Through empirical data and case studies, the essay shows the different kinds of activities that youth engage with and also concludes that though engaging in civic issues is important to the young people’s sense of belonging to participatory cultures, using the Internet does not provide an “automatic guarantee” toward participation, and “assistance is required in order to engage them in relevant activities” (p. 148).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second set of essays in this section all cluster around the digital native as a student. Locating the digital native within educational institutions, they look at the ways in which the ideas of learning, pedagogy and engagement with the text are changing with the rise of digital technologies. Levy and Michael look at two case studies involving students in Australian high schools, to “facilitate a deeper understanding of products and processes in multimodal text construction,” which they think is core to interactive communication technology literacy skills (p. 85). The data is rigorous and rich, but the conclusions are a bit of a disappointment: digital natives need to better manage their time and resources and they need to learn traditional skills in order to cope with their educational environment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The trend of an exciting hypothesis and conclusion, which do not necessarily leave you with anything more than what you already knew, continues in this section. Erstad sets out on a journey to see how digital literacy posits challenges to educating the digital generation and ends by suggesting that the digital divide should address questions of “how to navigate in the information jungle on the Internet, to create, to communicate, and so forth” (p. 114). Similarly, Kennedy and Judd want to unravel the mystery of why “students, who are so clearly familiar and apparently adept with Internet tools, are at times so poor at using the Internet academically” (p. 119). Through empirical research and interaction with students, they end up making an argument against the Googlization of everything (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), suggesting that “satisficing strategies” of information search, defined by a need for instant gratification and not looking beyond the first information sets, has produced “a generation of students that has grown up with Google [who] may over-value expediency when locating and selecting appropriate scholarly information” (p. 132). On similar trends, Levy proposes to question the assumption of whether all “young children are inherently ‘native’ users of digital technology” for implications on our future pedagogy within the new textual landscape (p. 152). The case studies and the frameworks built are interesting, but they reveal nothing more than the claim that the essay begins with by Marsh et al. (2005) and Bearne et al. (2007) that “young children are immersed in ‘digital practices’ from an early age and that they often develop skills in handling screen texts even when they are not exposed directly to computers at their own homes” (Levy, 2011, p. 163). The implication is clear: change our schools to accommodate for these new textual practices and help children capitalize on their digital competence and develop “digital wisdom.” But it is a recommendation that has been around for at least a decade, if not more.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The third and concluding section of the book, “Beyond Digital Natives,” is possibly the most promising part of the book. Bennett and Maton seek to look beyond “nuanced versions of the idea” and move the debate on to firmer grounds of how the rise of the digital natives is going to affect the policies around educational technology” (p. 169). They engage with a body of work that is specifically oriented toward building empirical evidence-based frameworks for understanding the potential role of technology in education. With a fine conceptual tool that makes distinctions between access and usage, they systemically dismiss the “academic moral panic” that characterizes conversations around youth-technology-change.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For Bennett and Maton, the object of inquiry is not the digital native but the body of discourse that surrounds this particular entity—and they make a plea for research rather than imaginings, showing how the influential work in the area has been plagued by unsupported claims, unevidenced observations, and futuristic imaginations, which paint a poetic picture of digital natives but offer very little in terms of furthering the argument. It is also noteworthy that they do not flinch from critiquing the colleagues who also feature in the same book, as an idealizing and homogenizing group that has shown “diversity rather than conformity” (p. 181).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Palfrey and Gasser, whose <em>Born Digital</em> (2008) has been the guide for lay readers to understand the nuances and complexities of the area, in their essay, begin by acknowledging that “digital natives” is an awkward term. However, they argue, it is still a term that resonates deeply with parents and educators, and that this resonance should not be taken lightly by researchers. Their decision was to use this term, albeit with caution and discretion, strategically to refer to a small subset of young people and the gamut of relationships and engagements they have with digital technologies. The suggestion is to use the term and in every usage, look at the unevennesses and awkwardness it creates, thus actually unpacking an otherwise opaque relationship which is reduced to “usage” or “access.” Their concerns are more about the quality of information and access, infrastructure for critical literacy and digital fluency, and making legible these everyday practices to larger implications for a future that they posit is bright and hopeful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Deconstructing Digital Natives</em> is an interesting revisit of a term that has grown in different ways through the first decade of the new millennium. However, the book still remains located in the same geopolitics in which the early discourse of digital natives were grounded—developed, privileged locations where connectivity, affordability, and ubiquitous digital literacy are taken for granted—reminiscent of the frantic cries one hears in piracy markets in Bangkok, “same, same, but different.” The revisiting does not seem to feel the need to explore other contexts. A few essays talk about factoring in local and contextual information in understanding digital natives, but the scholarship reinforces the idea of how technologies shape and are shaped by identities in some parts of the world, and that these identities can be heralded as universally viable, with a little nuancing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The questions that have emerged in this discourse in the recent years, remain ignored. What does a digital native look like in the Global South? Can we have new concepts and frameworks which emerge from these contexts? Is it possible to produce accounts in languages and ideas that are embedded in everyday practices rather than forcing them to become legible in existing vocabularies? One would hope that the next book that deconstructs digital natives would also deconstruct the prejudices, presumptions, and methodological processes that are embedded in this field.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>References</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Bearne, E., Clark, C., Johnson, A., Manford, P., Motteram, M., & Wolsencroft, H. (2007). Reading on screen. Leicester: UKLA.</li>
<li>Marsh, J., Brookes, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L, Roberts, S., & Wright, K. (2005). <em>Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies</em>. Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.</li>
<li>Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). <em>Born digital</em>. New York, NY: Basic Books.</li>
<li>Turkle, S. (2011). <em>Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other</em>, NY. New York: Basic Books.</li>
<li>Vaidhyanthan, S. (2011). <em>The Googlization of everything: (And why we should worry)</em>. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.</li>
<hr /></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span class="visualHighlight">Nishant Shah is the Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. He is the principal researcher for a Global South inquiry into digital natives and sociopolitical change, and recently edited four-volume book, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, which is available as a free download at <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>. Correspondence to: Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: nishant@cis-india.org</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span class="visualHighlight">Download the file (originally published by Taylor & Francis) <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/deconstructing-digital-natives" class="internal-link">here</a> [PDF, 66 Kb]</span></li></ul>
<ul>
<li><span class="visualHighlight">Read the original published by Taylor & Francis <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17482798.2012.697661">here</a></span></li></ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedResearchers at WorkBook ReviewDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:51:06ZBlog EntryCitizen Activism the Past Decade
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/citizen-activism-the-past-decade
<b>Call for Contributions to the ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ newsletter, ‘Citizen Activism the Past Decade’. Deadline: August 15, 2012.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The past decade (2001 – 2011) has been marked by unprecedented democratic protests across the globe. Not only have citizens risen against autocratic regimes or systemic corruption, which is not unprecedented in itself, but also, a spark in one region inflamed solidarity among neighbouring nations to pick up the placards and march for change. Plenty has been written about the strategic deployment of social media, Web 2.0 platforms and Smart-gadgets by the digital natives (the youth and the old alike) to rewrite the rules of citizen activism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In this issue of the newsletter, we explore the mechanics of activism aided by media: web, social, digital, and traditional. What do we understand by a cause and how does it find resonance at the local and global platforms? Is the digital native a community player or a global citizen? How do digital natives connect, collaborate, mobilize and bring about their visions of change? The aim is to not establish or reinforce these dichotomies, if indeed they exist, but to understand the dimensions of the stage the digital natives operate on <em>and if that stage is a synecdoche for global youth-led civic action.</em> A case in point: <strong>‘Slut Walk’ </strong>moved from being a one-off march in Toronto to becoming a global movement and came full circle when small towns and cities across the world organized protest marches with a local ‘twist’.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Topics that contributors can explore:</h3>
<ol></ol>
<ul>
<li>What do we understand by citizen activism? How has citizen activism changed over the last 10 years with the advent of new media tools?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Youth as 'change agents'. Are protest movements youth oriented today? How are civil rights movements of the past decade different from the wave of movements that marked the 60s? (women's lib, LGBT rights, civil rights, disability rights). Explore the mechanics of organizing, mobilizing and measuring the success of a campaign in both the cases.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Participatory Politics and Web 2.0 | Value and power of the Network in effecting change | Mobilizing support and consensus within the network |studies on politically active youth using social media | digital natives as apathetic citizens | Is Slacktivism still a misunderstood term?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Kony 2012 video campaign | interviews | what went wrong and what did they do right? | Rise of DIY activism | mechanics of digital activism | resources, tools and strategies</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Rise of the ‘Glocal’ (global with local resonance) cause | Slut Walk and Co – global protests inspiring local campaigns | Children of globalization with global stakes supporting local causes – how does this work?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Role of new media as a vehicle for civic engagement | Are new media and traditional media mutually exclusive in influencing citizen action? | How are new media strategies deployed by citizens in comparison with traditional media engagement?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Learning from past campaigns: citizen activism initiates and strategies in history that inspire modern campaigns (The ‘Walk to Work’ protest in Uganda protesting against fuel price hike and removal of subsidies is similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s <em>Dandi</em> <em>March</em> in pre-independence India to protest against Salt Tax).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Finding commonalities in citizen activism across Asia, Africa and Middle East | Explore the citizen action campaigns that have shaped political discourse in the past decade | Explore some of the most successful youth action campaigns of the past decade </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">How do we measure value, quality and success of campaigns? When does a protest officially end? Studies that explore the life-cycle of a protest or movement </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The future of activism: new technologies, new demography, new forms of engagement | art and activism | Gamification </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Role of non-governmental organizations and civil society networks in fostering political change | collaboration between NGOs and social media activists / independent protesters</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">State and the empowered citizen | State response to protest | surveillance and censorship</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Technologies of protest</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Studying citizen activism | digital native research methodology to study citizen activism</li></ul>
<ol></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To know more about the topics you can write about, please write to: <a class="external-link" href="http://mailtonilofar.ansh@gmail.com">nilofar.ansh@gmail.com</a> (Nilofar Ansher, Community Manager). Contributions can be in the form of essays, notes, commentaries, reviews (book or paper), dialogues and chat transcript, poems, sketches / graphics. Essay word count between 800-1,600 words. Send your entries along with a brief bio and a profile picture by August 15, 2012.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">View previous issues of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' newsletter here: <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/newsletter" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/newsletter</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/citizen-activism-the-past-decade'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/citizen-activism-the-past-decade</a>
</p>
No publisherNilofar AnsherFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:52:44ZBlog EntryRevisiting Techno-euphoria
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria
<b>In my last post, I talked about techno-euphoria as a condition that seems to mark much of our discourse around digital technologies and the promise of the future. The euphoria, as I had suggested, manifests itself either as a utopian view of how digital technologies are going to change the future that we inhabit, or woes of despair about how the overdetermination of the digital is killing the very fibre of our social fabric. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/revisiting-techno-euphoria">Published</a> in DML Central on July 5, 2012</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A way out of it, for some of us working with young people and their relationships with (as opposed to usage of) technologies, is to think of digital technologies as a paradigm through which everyday life is reconfigured, or as contexts within which we evolve new relationships of power and negotiation. Or to put it plainly, it has forced us to think of digital technologies not in terms of tools and gadgets, infrastructure and logistics (though those are also important) but as embodied experiences that reshape the very ways in which we conceptualize our everyday life.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">When we talk of digital natives in India, the immediate spaces that they inhabit conjure up images of big crowded IT cities that are transforming into hubs of international outsourcing industries and IT development. We presume that digital natives would be found in the 12% of the Indian sub-continent where broadband access is available. We often narrow our focus to look at urban, middle class, affluent, English speaking, educated youth who occupy extremely privileged positions in their social, cultural and economic practice.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, the story* I want to share with you today comes from an unusual location in India – from the village of Banni in the desert region of Kutch, located at the North-Western borders of India and Pakistan. In this small village that is about 80 kilometers from the biggest town with amenities like hospitals and schools, almost every household has a smart phone with access to the internet. In the absence of more popular forms like radio, which are disallowed because of the proximity to the turbulent India-Pakistan borders, the Chinese-made smart phones become the de facto interface of communication and cultural production. The phones become not only the life-line in times of crises, but also everyday objects through which the villages stay connected with the world of cultural production and entertainment. The internet services on the phones allow them to access Bollywood songs and movies, images and games, popular television programming and other popular cultural products in the country. In many ways, Banni is probably more digitally connected than many parts of the larger cities in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, the strong influence of Islam in this fairly homogenized community means differential access for the people who live in it. Women, according to the village doctrines, are not allowed access to technologies for fear of corruption. Hence the smart phones are all exclusively owned by men who have complete access to the information highway whereas the women do not have immediate ownership of such interfaces. And yet, the women in the village are quite updated about the latest news, gossip, politics, information about the weather, and cultural productions like TV soaps and Bollywood movies. This discrepancy between lack of access to digital technologies on the one hand, and a fairly comprehensive access to information of their choice is perplexing at first. Till you turn your attention to the children, who, in their pre-pubertal space, are not segregated so clearly into the technology publics and privates, and hence can navigate the spaces which are otherwise so gender exclusive.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These children would not usually be recognized as digital natives because they are not particularly tech savvy and they do not have direct and unlimited access to the digital devices or connectivity. However, they become interfaces through which the information consumed by the male population permeates and travels to the female population in the village. The children become embodied interfaces, who imbibe the information from these digital devices and re-enact it for the women in their own private spaces. The village now has its own child-stars who not only pass on the local news and information, but also re-enact, on a daily basis, scenes, songs, and story-lines from the soaps and movies that are popular with the women in the village.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the gendered politics of technology access and the creative ways in which children are able to work as embodied interfaces is interesting – and perhaps needs more space than is afforded here – what remains interesting to me is how this story disrupts the regular narratives of techno-euphoria. It cannot be explained away merely in terms of usage. It cannot be used to claim radical social change in community and gendered relationships. It is difficult to make a technology-empowerment argument though this. What is perhaps most interesting is that it shows how we need to start thinking about digital technologies as producing new ecosystems that reconfigure our understanding of who we are and the roles we play in developing social relationality. The digital natives in these stories are not merely the children – though their embodied interface produces startling insights into how personal relationships with technologies are produced. The men who have access to the phones and have mastered digital literacy in navigating through these phones, the women who become the last-mile consumers who have found creative ways of staying connected despite their lack of access, and the children who become the nodes in this technology-information infrastructure, are all digital natives of a certain kind. They might not have claimed that identity and indeed might never want to. And yet, the very conditions of everyday life, as they are mediated by the presence of digital technologies in Banni, help us understand the social structures and information relationships in ways which are more complex than theorized by our techno-euphoric attention to network visualizations which are heavily determined by usage and action.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This story from Banni is layered and needs unpacking at many different levels. However, it shall always remain, for me, a catalyst to re-think the focus and framework of our technology discourse, and talk about digitally mediated identities (digital natives or otherwise) in a vocabulary that moves beyond usage, infrastructure and access. It emphasizes, for me, the idea that the gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital -- which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Read Nishant's last post <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/techno-euphoria">here</a><br />Link to the picture <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pranavsingh/1311922613/">here</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">* <em>I am greatly thankful to my friend Rita Kothari at the Indian Institute of Technologies, Gandhinagar, for first introducing me to this context and its peculiar technology ecosystem</em>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:53:49ZBlog EntryAcross Borders
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/across-borders
<b>A friend and I were at a cafe in Bangalore the other day, when an acquaintance walked in. After the initial niceties, and invitation to join us for coffee, the new person looked at us and asked a question that sounded so archaic and so unexpected that we had no answers for it: How do you two know each other? This innocuous question threw us both off the loop because we didn’t have an immediate answer. </b>
<p>Nishant Shah's <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/across-borders/970341/">article</a> was published in the Indian Express on July 5, 2012</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">How do we two know each other? My story would begin with Livejournal — a community-based blogging platform that was popular in the early Noughties and was the first large-scale digital network I belonged to, and where I spoke with and befriended people writing in that closed social network. My friend probably pins it down to Twitter and how our blogging-friendship solidified through the charms of 140-character direct messages. There is another story somewhere, that we discovered later, when we added each other on Facebook and realised that we have a few close friends in common. Over the last many years, we have also worked together on a couple of projects, have caught up IRL (In Real Life) whenever we visit each others’ cities — Mumbai and Bangalore — and have thought of ourselves as friends, without trying to form a narrative that identifies the point of origin.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">When you compare this state of being, which is increasingly the default mode of being for many young people who cement their relationships through digital connections, with how we used to get to know people even two decades ago, we know that things have changed dramatically. For the longest time, the act and fact of knowing somebody was to find physical, material and communitarian similarities — filters that allowed us to hobnob with others like us. Of course, we were always progressive and cosmopolitan, but a quick sweep of any social circle would show that we were mostly confined to people who shared common stories with us. Sometimes these stories were of material proximity, we grew up in the same neighbourhoods, went to the same schools, etc. Sometimes these stories were of class and affordability, we belonged to the same clubs and hung out at similar places. Sometimes these stories were about an imaginary sameness, of religion, community, family etc.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If there is a truly democratising principle that the digital revolution brought to the fore, it can be seen in this destabilising of an older world order, where we are quite comfortable in coexisting and embracing those who are unlike us. I do not mean this to be a celebratory moment where the flat, non-discriminatory and inclusive societies are finally being built. Indeed, the digital networks have their own set of filters that eventually allow us to connect only with people of the same ilk. If you are online in India, you are necessarily talking to people who speak in a particular language and speak it in a particular way. Grammar, diction, fluency, references to global cultural icons and productions, consumption-based lifestyles, all betray the different locations (physical or otherwise) that people come from and serve as extremely strong filters to determine who we connect with.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This, sometimes, even translates into gadget snobbery. For example, a young friend told me that she finds it impossible to connect with people who don’t have a BlackBerry phone because she doesn’t know how she can sustain relationships without being constantly in touch through the BlackBerry Messenger. Similarly, the celebration of social applications like Instagram, which were available only to iPhone users, warns us that there are severe economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that abound in cyberspaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, in the middle of these complications, digital natives are not only a mobile-wielding generation, but also a mobile generation. They are fluid, not necessarily tied to the geographies of their origin, and often imagine themselves, as travelling across different networks and systems, like the information traffic on the internet. This dislocation of the fixity of where we are from and who we are, is one of the most exciting results of the digital turn. The fact that we are able to not only step out of these older networks, which are often entrenched in old-world politics that perpetuate mindless discrimination, but also fabricate new communities and collectives that bring together a diversity, for me, is heartening. While these new social forms will have their own set of problems — gendered, social, linguistic and class-based — they are also the new forms of our socio-cultural being. And there is hope that as the physical translates into the digital, there is a possibility of reconfiguring our pasts and recycling them for more collaborative and shared futures.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/across-borders'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/across-borders</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:55:41ZBlog EntryThe Bots That Got Some Votes Home
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home
<b>Nilofar Ansher gives us some startling updates on the "Digital Natives Video Contest" voting results declared in May 2012, in this blog post.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It was a hint of suspicion raised by one of our colleagues at the Centre for Internet & Society that spurred our Web Analytics team to check into the voting activity of the contest that was all about the ‘<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives" class="external-link">Everyday Digital Native</a>’. And while we acknowledged and celebrated the ‘digital’ in the native (users of technology), we forgot the human part that the digital has to engage with. Following weeks of deliberations, we now have conclusive evidence that points to irregularities in voting numbers of the Top 10 contestants. We are now staring at the elephant in the room: those innocuous little automated scripts we sweetly nicknamed, ‘bots’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Internet bots, also known as web robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey. In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots (Source: Wikipedia).</p>
<h3>What irregularities?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You would see how a script or bot would have played a role in ‘automating’ the votes for a video. The Top 10 videos received a combined voting number of 20,000+. The discrepancy occurs at the juncture where the votes polled on the front end (the webpage where the contestant video was visible to the public) did not match with the number of hits the page received on the backend (this is the analytics part). For instance, the top polled video has some few thousand votes more than the number of people who actually visited our CIS website in the same duration. This prompted a review of the logs and the possible “hand” of a nonhuman agent acting on its human creator’s command to drive up the votes.</p>
<h3>How was this done? The Technicalities</h3>
<p>The following graph shows the extremely high level of voting requests just before the closing date (March 31, 2012). This would not be extraordinary except for the fact that two or three entries had an exceptionally higher vote count relative to their page views as per the analytics statistics.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/quickhist_march_april.png" alt="null" class="image-inline" title="Voting requests by date" /></p>
<h3>Analysis of the voting against the http requests for the voting link against page views</h3>
<div>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr style="text-align: center;">
<th>
<p>Entry</p>
</th>
<th>Actual Votes Recorded (1)<br /></th>
<th>Direct http requests to votes (2)<br /></th>
<th>http requests for normal page view access (3)<br /></th>
<th>Recommended adjusted vote count (4)<br /></th>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-media-dance" class="internal-link">Digital Dance</a></p>
</td>
<td>268</td>
<td>448</td>
<td>198</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">198</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/big-stories-small-towns" class="internal-link">Big Stories, Small Town</a></p>
</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>112</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-natives-contest/entries/connecting-souls-bridging-dreams" class="internal-link">Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams</a></p>
</td>
<td>1113</td>
<td>2018</td>
<td>1685</td>
<td>1113</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/finalist-summary/deployed" class="internal-link">Deployed</a></p>
</td>
<td>191</td>
<td>479</td>
<td>195</td>
<td>191</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p class="internal-link"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/from-the-wild-into-the-digital-world" class="internal-link">From The Wild Into The Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>10317</td>
<td>11880</td>
<td>810</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">810</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/i-am-a-ghetto-digital-native" class="internal-link">I Am A Ghetto Digital Native</a></p>
</td>
<td>321</td>
<td>365</td>
<td>844</td>
<td>321</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/life-in-the-city-slums" class="internal-link">Life in the City Slums</a></p>
</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>94</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/who-is-a-digital-native" class="internal-link">Digital Natives</a></p>
</td>
<td>111</td>
<td>328</td>
<td>102</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">102</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/with-no-distinction" class="internal-link">With No Distinction</a></p>
</td>
<td>369</td>
<td>557</td>
<td>1232</td>
<td>369</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world" class="internal-link">Digital Coverage in a Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>9622</td>
<td>13650</td>
<td>181</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">181</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3></h3>
<span class="internal-link"> </span>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are the public votes displayed on the contestant’s page through the thumbs up icon</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests to the voting link against each video when the user clicked on the thumbs up icon.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests which are collectively related to the video page (page view). A normal human user would browse through a page first, which downloads some other urls, such as the HTML for the page, JavaScript, images, and so on. A normal vote request would be included collectively. A direct http request to the voting link on the other hand does not do this, and only makes a specific request to vote without downloading the other parts that make up the page.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">A normal human vote count should be the same or less than the number of page views. Only three videos highlighted show abnormal behaviour and it is recommended these be adjusted to the page view counts.</li></ol>
<h3>Are you saying contestants cheated?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the use of programming scripts to accrue votes is no new tactic and we should, in fact, have a more robust mechanism to monitor such activity during a contest, we cannot prove the culpability of the human agents. The contestants might be innocent actors with overzealous friends or colleagues who ran the voting scripts. As of now, since there is no way to ascertain their part in this irregularity, it’s best we give them the benefit of the doubt. What comes through loud and clear is that once you do away with the scripted votes, four contestants still manage to have enough votes to maintain their positions in the final five. In the fifth position, we now have a contestant from the top ten finalists, who has secured the requisite votes (after vote adjustment) to propel him into the final five.</p>
<h3>Recommendation</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘Digital Dance’ (Cijo Abraham), ‘From the Wild into the Digital World’ (John Musila) and ‘Digital Coverage in a Digital World’ (T.J. Burks) had additional vote url counts than page views. It is recommended that the total votes for these videos be adjusted to the page view counts, and not the actual vote counts as displayed on their individual web pages (thumbs up icon) during the voting period.</p>
<p>The rankings of the adjusted voting would now read as:</p>
<ol>
<li>Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams – Marie Jude Bendiola (1113)</li>
<li>From The Wild Into The Digital World - John Musila (810)</li>
<li>With No Distinction - T.J. K. M. (369)</li>
<li>I Am A Ghetto Digital Native – MJ (321)</li>
<li>Digital Dance – Cijo Abraham (198)</li></ol>
<h3>Transparency at CIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘The Digital Natives with a Cause?’ research inquiry is shaped around concerns of transparency, equity and community accountability. In our research methods as well as in outputs of the different activities, we have always maintained a complete transparency of decision making processes as well as in depending upon the incredible people we work with to help us learn, grow and reflect openly on the concerns that we have been engaged with. We strive to follow this method and in publishing these statistics, we want to ensure that there is complete transparency about the votes that were accrued and how the final winners were selected. We also take this opportunity as a learning experience to re-think the question of the non-human actors in our networks and further about the nature of participation and reputation online. We hope that the publishing of these results will help answer any inquiries on how the process unfolded.</p>
<h3>View Logs and Source Code</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/logs-during-voting-period" class="external-link">All logs from the web server for this period</a> (24.7MB) Identical IPs are from caching server.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/main.R">R script to evaluate data for table</a></li></ul>
<h3>What next?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Since we spotted the error in time, we haven’t disbursed the prize money of EUR 500 to each of the Top 5 contestants. They will now receive the prize along with a chance to participate in the Digital Native workshop-cum-Webinar, slated to be held in July 2012. The top 10 videos will be showcased in this event.</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home</a>
</p>
No publisherNilofar AnsherFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:56:10ZBlog EntryHyper-connected, Hyper-lonely?
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/hyper-connected-hyper-lonely
<b>The Digital Natives newsletter, part of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' project, invites contributions to its April-May 2012 double issue. </b>
<p>The April issue puts the spotlight on an emerging trope in society and media: the more connected we are to our gadgets, peer network and social media, the lonelier we feel. The debate, which traces its opening volley to Sherry Turkle's book 'Alone Together', will look at the recurrent media commentary that points to pop-surveys, anecdotes from psychologists, and conscientious academics who talk about increasing isolation among heavy gadget users. Since our gadgets are more often than not net enabled, it doesn't take a giant leap to infer that people who spend a lot of time online count themselves as part of the Lonely Hearts Club. Is loneliness a peculiarly modern phenomenon? <br />Editor: Shobha Vadrevu </p>
<p>In the May issue, we look at a technology that was considered sci-fi a decade ago, but is now the next best thing since our Smartphones: Augmented Reality. How do scientists and geeks go about augmenting our reality? How inspirational have movies (remember Minority Report) been in engaging imagination with what is commonplace and common sense? Does Google Glass excite you or scare you senseless? Would you still make distinctions between the virtual world and the real one? <br />Editor: Nilofar Ansher </p>
<p>We invite short pieces, lengthy reflections, haikus and verses, cartoons, graphics, videos, and other forms of creative expressions for both the issues. Deadline: June 21, 2012. For more information, email: <a class="external-link" href="mailto:nilofar.ansh@gmail.com">nilofar.ansh@gmail.com</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/hyper-connected-hyper-lonely'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/hyper-connected-hyper-lonely</a>
</p>
No publisherNilofar AnsherFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:57:46ZBlog EntryDigitally Analogue
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digitally-analogue
<b>Why there is nothing strictly analogue anymore, examines Nishant Shah in this column that he wrote for the Indian Express.</b>
<p>It is a given, that in the fight between the digital and the analogue, you have a certain perspective or an opinion. If you are a bibliophile and crave for the smell of second-hand books and the feel of freshly uncut pages, you probably object to e-readers and tablets which give you a book-like experience that is not quite the same. If you enjoy photography, you still value old film rolls, techniques of complex editing, and the sepia-coloured flatness that the film has to offer. If you are a cinegoer, you cherish a secret fondness for those days when the camera attempted to capture a realism which was stark and more believable than reality. You might miss receiving and writing letters, might get annoyed by the lightning fast expectations of communication, and are horror struck at the idea of buying clothes online, foregoing the pleasures of window shopping.</p>
<p>For each argument that is made in favour of the analogue, there will be an equally strong and strident voice that elucidates the joys and possibilities that the digital has to offer. The techno-savant will point out that the easy availability of digital technologies has democratised the realms of cultural production, granting more access and diversity to expressions from different cultures. It should be mentioned that the huge possibilities of manipulating, reproducing and transferring digital data, without any loss to the original has resulted in new forms of intricate and subversive cultural production. The speed of access and communication has mobilised resources and people in unprecedented ways, to make changes in their environments, empowering the citizen as an agent of change rather than a beneficiary of change.</p>
<p>In all these debates, there will be valid and contradictory arguments that will coexist, each extolling the virtues of their analogue or digital positions. While there is no correct position to take in this debate, there is something else that I want to draw our attention to. In both these debates, which seem to be about technologies, there is a presumed focus only on consumption of technology products. Or, in other words, in this over-emphasis about whether the final product should be consumed using digital or other technologies, there is a complete and total neglect of technologies of production that shape these cultural objects. This betrays two things for us to ponder over.</p>
<p>The first is about our relationship with the technologies that we use. As technologies, especially digital technologies become ubiquitous, easily affordable and available to us on mobile interfaces, and emphasises ease of access, there also seems to be an alienation of the user from conditions and modes of production. We seem to position ourselves only as consumers of tech products — often reducing our interaction with these technologies as spectators, or audiences or users. This is ironical because, it seems to perpetuate the schism between the digital and the analogue, while actually hiding the fact that most of our so-called analogue products have undergone dramatic change in their modes of production, which are facilitated and shaped almost entirely by digital technologies. You might enjoy the tactical experience of picking up a print book, but it might be good to realise that the entire book was put together by using digital interfaces. And while the book might seem to be a non-digital object, even the way it reaches the last mile — through e-commerce websites like Flipkart, or even your local stores, where it gets stored, sorted, and indexed — is also through a digital environment.</p>
<p>The second thing that this faux debate exposes to us is the futuristic dream of convergence. Convergence as a concept has been bandied around for about a decade now, where all our existing modes of living, facilitated by different technologies, are to be translated into the digital, thus seamlessly available through a single device which can perform everything. Convergence is the Holy Grail that marks our aspirations of the future. And debates of the analogue versus the technological sustain that illusion that it hasn’t really been achieved yet. However, as you look around you, you quickly realise that the analogue networks that we fantasise about very rarely exist. The analogue-digital divide is often reduced to the physical-virtual dichotomy and this is a false one. Analogue referred to certain kinds of technological practices where the human agent, by using the technological network could perform certain functions. So the older telephone networks, for instance, were electronic but analogue. However, our telecommunication went digital way before the phone became smart.</p>
<p>While those of us who were not born digital natives — we still remember what an audio cassette looks like and the smell of screen printing — will negotiate with the form of our access to cultural objects, it is also time to realise that being non-digital is no longer an option. And that what we think of as analogue, is often only a form, because the mode of production, design and distribution has gone digital when we were not looking. So it is good that you are reading this in print, as a part of a newspaper, but this column (like all other items in this publication) was conceived, written, delivered and printed entirely using digital interfaces. These are objects which now need to be thought of as digitally analogue. </p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/digitally-analogue/953982/0">Read the original published by the Indian Express on May 27, 2012</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digitally-analogue'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digitally-analogue</a>
</p>
No publishernishantcyberspacesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T12:00:09ZBlog EntryWe Are All Cyborgs
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs
<b>The cyborg reminds us that who we are as human beings is very closely linked with the technologies we use.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/we-are-all-cyborgs/942874/0">Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on April 29, 2012</a></p>
<p>If you look at any illustrated
history of human civilisation, you will quickly realise that it is also a
history of technology. From the discovery of fire by Homo sapiens to
the contemporary homo digitalis, there is no escaping that technologies
of different kinds have not only changed the way we live but also helped
us realise what it means to be human. Often, we treat these
technologies as external to us, thinking of them as tools that we deploy
to perform a particular task. However, as our technologies become more
transparent, intimate and customised, we realise that we are developing
relationships with the technological devices that surround us. So, if
your laptop crashes, you feel crippled. There are people who proclaim
that they feel amputated without their cellphone. It is quite reasonable
to feel lost without the information compass of the internet.</p>
<p>This
relationship between human beings and technologies has been very
concisely defined in the idea of a cyborg. A cyborg is a
human-technology synthesis which enhances our capacities to live as
human beings. While it might seem like a slightly new idea, once you
realise that we constantly live with technologies and often internalise
them in our bodies, it is not difficult to wrap our head around it.
Think of people with pacemakers or prosthetic limbs or different
implants in their bodies, who experience technologies as an integral
part of their everyday life. Similarly, think of the wide range of
technology apparatus that you depend on to live a “regular” human life.
We have also seen iconic cyborg representations in popular movies — from
the absolutely unforgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 to
our very own dimpled Shah Rukh Khan as Ra.One — there has been a
persistent imagining of the human being as we know it, evolving to
become some sort of a super man, enhanced by advancements in digital
technologies of virtual reality.</p>
<p>There
has been a growing anxiety, almost a moral panic, about how
technologies are alienating us, replacing face-time with inter-face time
so that we are all growing “alone together”. There is also, across
generations and users, a growing separation of those who work with
technologies and those who don’t. There is much concern about the human
becoming corrupt because of the ubiquitous presence of the pervasive and
invasive technologies around us. In the face of these anxieties, the
cyborg stands as a culturally significant and timely reminder that we,
as human beings, are very closely linked with the technologies that we
use. And that we need to stop thinking of technologies as merely gadgets
and tools that surround us. The different objects that remind us of the
presence of technology are not the same thing as technology itself.
Technology is a way of thinking about things, a way of relating to the
world around us. The most intrinsic forms of technologies are the ones
that we don’t even recognise as a part of our innate mental make up.</p>
<p>Do
this simple experiment. Right now, while you are reading this, do not
look at any clock or time-measuring device and guess what time it is.
Chances are that you will be, give or take a few minutes, more or less
accurate. Even if you are temporally challenged, you will at least know
what part of the day it is, morning, afternoon, evening or night. The
point is that we are absolutely and completely creatures of time. We
cannot think of ourselves outside of it and even when we might be
dramatically wrong about it, there is no escaping the fact that we are
always thinking of ourselves and the world around us through time.</p>
<p>We
experience our lives and our relationships in cyclical notions of the
clock’s face, thinking of our actions as borrowed from the future, lived
in the present, and relegated to the archives of the past. It then,
must come as a bit of a shock (it certainly did to me, the first time I
was made to realise it) that time is not natural. Time is a human way of
measuring a passage of actions. Time is a technology which has now
become such a potent metaphor of life that we have forgotten to make the
separation of the human and the technological.</p>
<p>And
thus, whether you might be a tech-savvy digital native or a
byte-fearing luddite, there is no denying the idea that when it comes to
technologies of time, you are already a natural born cyborg. This
ability of technologies to become transparent and an inalienable part of
who we are forms cyborgs. The process through which they become
transparent is not easily accessible, but it does begin by an
internalisation of the technology’s processes in our everyday
vocabulary. So the next time you think of yourself as a system that
needs to be upgraded, or unable to pay attention because you don’t have
enough bandwidth, remember that you are engaging in a flirtatious
relationship with the digital. And slowly, but surely, we are all
turning into cyborgs, as the new technologies rearrange patterns of our
life and living.</p>
<p><em>digitalnative@expressindia.com</em></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyborgsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T12:00:54ZBlog EntryFraming the Digital AlterNatives
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/framing-the-digital-alternatives
<b>They effect social change through social media, place their communities on the global map, and share spiritual connections with the digital world - meet the everyday digital native. </b>
<p>The Everyday Digital Native video contest has got its pulse on what makes youths from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds connect with one another in the global community – it’s an affinity for digital technologies and Web 2.0-mediated platforms coupled with a drive to spearhead social change. The contest invited people from around the world to make a video that would answer the question, ‘Who is the Everyday Digital Native’? The final videos received more than <del>20,000</del> 3,000 votes from the public and our top five winners emerged from across three continents!</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/framing-digital-alternatives" class="internal-link" title="Framing the Digital Alternatives">The Digital AlterNatives Featurette </a>(PDF, 2847 KB) is a peek into the minds of digital natives as citizen activists. The 10 featured interviews of the Digital Natives video contest finalists don't fit the stereotype of the Globalized Digital Native: Young Geeks apathetic to 'Saving the Planet'. Rather, these are affirmative citizens, young, middle aged and senior, who consider digital technology as second nature for use in personal, professional or socio-political capacities.</p>
<p>The 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' is a collaborative research-inquiry between The Centre for Internet & Society, India and HIVOS Knowledge Programme, the Netherlands into the field of youth, change and technology in the context of the Global South. The three-year research project has resulted in the four-book collective, 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?' published in 2011. Read more about the project <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook" class="external-link">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/framing-the-digital-alternatives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/framing-the-digital-alternatives</a>
</p>
No publisherNilofar AnsherFeaturedWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:28:03ZBlog EntryD:Coding Digital Natives
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives
<b>Nishant Shah was invited for a public talk at the University of California, Los Angeles. He presented the work done on Digital Natives and spoke about questions of participation and resistance. The talk has been featured in the YouTube channel.</b>
<p>Nishant spoke about the ways by which technology revolution and change has been characterised through the question of voice (how technology has enabled for alternative voices to emerge as ways by which they can be heard), question of amplification (what 10 years ago might have been local phenomena are becoming global spectacles) and the question of power (what really happens when voice and amplification comes to an end). <br /><br />Nishant said that in the last three years of revolutions we have also now witnessed this extraordinary thing where lot of promises were made of different kinds of revolution but which never materialised in terms of what they intended to. Citizen action happens but it doesn’t lead into anything concrete. One of the examples from India was the Anna Hazare’s campaign or India’s fight against corruption. There was this immense amount of campaign on the corruption in Indian bureaucracy and political society... the only instance of mass mobilisation that we saw in India in recent times apart from the cricket series...and how the campaign in seven short months has totally disappeared from public discourse.</p>
<p>For more, watch the <strong>video</strong> now:</p>
<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YvY__z3jN7M" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>Date: March 9, 2012<br />Time: 12 to 1 p.m.<br />Venue: Library Conference Center Presentation Room, University of California</p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvY__z3jN7M">Follow the video on YouTube</a>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:30:14ZBlog EntryHabits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living
<b>“Networks” have become a defining concept of our epoch. From high-speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like Facebook that transform the meaning of the word “friend,” from blogs that foster new political alliances to unprecedented globe-spanning viral vectors that threaten world-wide catastrophe, networks allegedly encapsulate what’s new and different. </b>
<p> </p>
<p>To understand the impact of networks, most analyses—scholarly, popular, and strategic—have focused on mapping networks. Using network tools to describe networks, this move conflates description and explanation (it assumes that simply discovering the existence of networks is enough) and transforms specific persons/things and relations into interchangeable nodes and lines in a diagram. Not surprisingly, most analyses also privilege technology as the unifying power behind networks: the term “twitter revolution,” for instance, widely used to describe events from Moldavia to Egypt, erases local political concerns in favour of an internet application. Although understanding universal characteristics of networks is important, this emphasis also risks making the concept of a “networked society” a banal cliché, incapable of addressing the differences between various “networks,” or the odd transformation of networks from a planning tool—a theoretical diagram, a metaphorical description—into actually existing phenomena, into lived experiences.</p>
<p>To renew the conceptual power of networks, <em>Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects</em>—a global collaborative project of which the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University will be an important locus—concentrates on changing habits of living. Habits are crucial to understanding networks not simply as broad organizational structures, but also as structures created through constant actions that are both voluntary and involuntary. As Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued, “habitus” is a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function … as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends.”<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>; Habits are things that individuals hold that in turn define and hold individuals: they link the individual to society through repeated actions that also tie a person’s inner state (their mind) to their outward appearance (a habit is traditionally a type of clothing). Habits are ‘man-made nature’: they are automatic seemingly instinctual and at times uncontrollable actions (for instance, drug habits) that are learned. Habits in this sense are closely aligned with “affects”: unconscious emotional responses to environmental stimulants that are central to the formation of individual perception. Thus although habits let us address similarities across human, animal, physical and non-physical realms (the characteristic growth of a crystal is a habit), habits are also uniquely personal and societal, and thus allow us to address important differences usually elided in network analyses. Habits are “glocal”: local actions that spread globally, but not necessarily universally; they spread the effects of local actions elsewhere through specific trajectories.</p>
<p>The point, to be clear, is not to oppose habits to networks, but to understand the subtleties and power of connectivity by bringing these two concepts into dialogue with one another. Habits scale from the individual to the network in a number of ways, from the twitchy 'Lifestream' checking of Twitter enthusiasts, to co-ordination arranged by mobile phone and GPS, to the very conceptual foundation of computer science for which classic problems, such as the Travelling Saleman or Dining Philosophers combine strong technical requirements of resource allocation and network design with fables about everyday life. As the work of Dr. Matthew Fuller (a foundational new media theorist / artist and co-organizer from Goldsmiths) reveals, the cross-over between the technical and the experiential is what produces value and novelty in contemporary computing. The point is also to think through habits of living as possible points of transformation and intervention: as the term habitat makes clear, they also imply a certain sheltering and practice of care, something which the SARAI collective in New Delhi has addressed in their work in new media. This notion of habitat and change has also been further addressed, specifically in terms of “the archive in motion,” by Eivind Rossaak—an international expert in film and media—and his research group at the National Library of Norway, Oslo. Their creative rethinking of the archive and the role of media technologies is crucial to understanding the radical mobilization, perpetuation and preservation of habitual media and memory practices. The work of Nishant Shah—the director of the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and co-editor of the groundbreaking Digital AlterNatives with a Cause —highlights that, to understand how new media affects habits of living, we need to rethink assumptions about “digital natives” and imaginings of “netizens.” He has also started a far-reaching research program investigating the relationship between affect and participation. Dr. Kelly Dobson’s—chair of Digital + Media at RISD and an innovative and much lauded new media artist—work focuses on the intimate “caring” relationship between machines and humans, which emerges from mainly non-intentional interactions, such as noise and vibrations. Lastly, <em>Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects</em> seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed. (This is the focus of my current book project).</p>
<p>As the above paragraph outlines, this inter-disciplinary project will be a global interdisciplinary collaboration. This project initially emerged from discussions between members of SARAI and myself and quickly expanded to include the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Digital + Media Department at RISD, the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and the National Library of Norway. In addition, we plan to invite participants from: Amsterdam, Buenos Aries, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, amongst other places. At Brown, in addition to faculty in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, we would like to involve people from the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for the Study of Women, and the Watson Institute for International Studies.</p>
<p>The project, will comprise a series of workshops, artist residencies, a large public conference to be held at Brown University, and eventually leading to an edited online and a print publication. Each workshop will be attended by a core group of five scholars/artists who will participate in all the workshops and the conference, as well as group of participants that will vary according to the location. Ideally, this will continue as a three-year project, with each group playing a major role in convening the events for one year.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Wendy Chun (Professor, Brown University), Kelly Dobson, Chair, Digital + Media, RISD, Providence, Matthew Fuller, David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London and Eivind Rossaak, Associate Professor, Department of Research, National Library of Norway, Oslo.</p>
<hr />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>].Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), 72.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living</a>
</p>
No publisherWendy Chun, Kelly Dobson, Matthew Fuller and Eivind RossaakNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:38:42ZBlog EntryInterface Intimacies
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies
<b>Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together, talked about how the digital technologies, replacing interface time with face-time, are slowly alienating us from our social networks. There has been an increasing amount of anxiety around how people in immersive and ubiquitous computing and web environments are living lives which are connected online but not connected with their social and political contexts.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>While there are instances and examples of mobilisation, social networking meets, group formations, etc. there is a growing worry that on an everyday basis, we live our lives more in the company of gadgets, ambience technologies and digital platforms than with people.</p>
<p>At the same time, users of technologies often express their engagement with technologies in affective terms, where they seem to form intimate relationships with their technologies. The interfaces that we see all around us, constantly deflect our attention, emotions and desires on to different surfaces, creating flattened universes with the promises of deep immersion. Especially as the internet becomes mobile and digital interfaces become ubiquitous – from large scale billboards to small wearable devices; from sites of work to spaces of pleasure – there is a new form of intimacy which is shaped, designed, experienced, and lived through interfaces.</p>
<p>The digital interfaces become polymorphous sites of affection, love, desire, aspiration, seduction, transgression and stability. The interface is growing so integral to our everyday lives, that we start thinking of them as metaphors through which we understand ourselves and the world that we connect to. We talk about ourselves as systems that need to be ‘upgraded’ or ‘connected’. We think of the world as a network through which we ‘recycle’ our lives and ‘connect’ to our ‘peers’. The interfaces, are simultaneously opaque and transparent – They allow us to connect to the digital other, crossing boundaries of geography and time, and they also deny us access to the actually mechanics which bring the interfaces to life.</p>
<p><em>Interface Intimacies</em> is a research cluster that is interested in digging deep into interfaces, to examine peoples’ relationships with the digital interfaces around them. What are the affective relationships that people have with their interfaces? What goes into anthropomorphising an interface? What are the larger politics of labour, performance and ownership that surround interface design? What are the ways in which people simulate presence and connections through their interfaces? How is the human presumed in Computer-Human interface design? What aesthetic and political moves are we witnessing with the rise of interface mediated publics? What and who is made opaque when interfaces become transparent? When interfaces get distributed, what are the possibilities and potential for art, theory and practice to move into new forms of politics?</p>
<p>These are the kind of questions that this research cluster seeks to address with a special focus on Asia. The intention is to build a knowledge network of researchers from different disciplines – Art, Architecture, Computer Human Interaction Design, Digital Humanities, New Media Theory, Urban Planning, Public Infrastructure Design, Software Studies, Interface Design etc. – to enter into a dialogue around Interfaces and how they define contemporary conditions of life in their contexts.</p>
<p>The project hopes to organise a workshop exploring these ideas leading to an edited anthology and a special journal issue of peer-reviewed academic scholarship. The project hopes to kick off in February 2012 and take about 18 months till completion.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Audrey Yue (Melbourne University), Namita Malhotra (ALF)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies</a>
</p>
No publisherAudrey Yue and Namita A MalhotraInterface IntimaciesNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:40:18ZBlog EntryLocating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile
<b>From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice. </b>
<div id="parent-fieldname-text" class="plain kssattr-atfieldname-text kssattr-templateId-blogentry_view.pt kssattr-macro-text-field-view">
<p>The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to
broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of
space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of
locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging
more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition.
The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce
an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and
pervasive.</p>
<p>As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and
will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy
around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in
the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and
experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011).
However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media
that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and
political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media
as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011)
area of the everyday.</p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to address this knowledge gap by
undertaking close studies of locative media in three
locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and
analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both
developed and developing contexts. </p>
<p>These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies
like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century
migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading
regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller
& Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific
provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into
locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of
digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised
landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these
cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs
locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping
new narratives of place. </p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to collect and analyse some of the
emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the
rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for
the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:</p>
<ol><li>Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.</li><li>Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.</li><li>Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.</li><li>Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.</li></ol>
<p>By
bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing
the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological
innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture
the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By
doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about
surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art
towards <strong>nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices</strong>.</p>
<h3>Significance and Innovation</h3>
<p>The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural
practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While
much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth
2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva
& Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through
devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in
which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to
substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of
locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.</p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> is<strong> original </strong>in its <strong>topic</strong>, <strong>method</strong>, <strong>outcomes</strong> and <strong>industry collaboration</strong>. <strong>Firstly</strong>,
it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the
emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around
mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of
parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva &
Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies
internationally to explore locative media over time in specific
locations. <strong>Secondly</strong>, it deploys a variety of methods
(such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of
use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone,
iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and
socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile
media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D)
(Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and
Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will
investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and
Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific
region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or
Eurocentric in focus.<strong> Thirdly</strong>, through multi-site
analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in
which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and
transnationalism. <strong>Fourthly</strong>, by pioneering the first
multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile
will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative
media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual,
group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of
significance and innovation. <strong>We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media</strong>.
In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational
context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility,
migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive,
the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’
generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media
that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to
figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and
socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As
Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic
approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping
categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the
cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media;
the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace,
the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media,
ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and
prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility
across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to
name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian
and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and
Shanghai—exploring locative media can <strong>provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice</strong>
through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and
quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et
al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is,
data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing
media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need
for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of
locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural
and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to
frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing
mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa
Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon
case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of
mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the
Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local
dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older
forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this
nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative
media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in
innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but
also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan
University,<em><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to contextualise the research in
terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the
Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies
(see below for more details).</p>
<p><strong>We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights
into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging</strong>
through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and
Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the
impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although
place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth
2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices
around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts
upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the
digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter
into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these
cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in
which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the
rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame
and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses
overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is
especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications
(apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come
with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased
accessibility to augmented<br />reality (AR). Instead of replacing the
analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up
‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR
mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to
unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology
mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative
media augment and simulate in everyday practices.</p>
<p><strong>We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy</strong>
and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual
and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of
locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream,
questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped
by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish
and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of
‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural
implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For
others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps
and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning
field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for
in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their
cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on
intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by
developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative
media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays
in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future
implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a
rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the
questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not
only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by
providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but
also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking
research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in
arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and
consumption, the Asia-Pacific.</p>
<p><strong>National Research Priorities</strong>: With the rise of
smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned.
And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon
individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF
Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given
this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon
locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is
needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an
increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals,
communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative
that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in
Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within
the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at
the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future
technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is
fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus
contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the
strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile
media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of
locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative,
cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the
Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for
how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and
identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not
only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also
to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media
intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place
which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile</a>
</p>
No publisherLarissa Hjorth and Genevieve BellNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:41:47ZBlog EntryWe, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human
<b>The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments. </b>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of
cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few
questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and
practical design around Internet and Society:</p>
<ul><li>How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?</li><li>How
do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How
do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?</li><li>What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?<br /></li></ul>
<em>We , the Cyborgs</em>, is a first of its kind research inquiry that
locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the
challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her
seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as
a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary
creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of
human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation.
In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in
practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of
questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are
we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have
produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places
them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in
her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of
Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to
technology’.
Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated
from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those
moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is
suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the
technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How
does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the
axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies
in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in
designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where
there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg
citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we
need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the
regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.
<strong><br /><br />Methodology</strong>
<p>Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg
in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how
bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different
processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming
cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care,
Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the
body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like
post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In
the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks,
ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology.
<em>We, The Cyborgs</em>, aims to bring together a wide range of
researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations
including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning,
Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies,
Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate
around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their
fields.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human</a>
</p>
No publisherashaCyborgsNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:42:16ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia
<b>The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.</b>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>The digital turn in education has been described across a wide range of initiatives and processes. These include the introduction of digital tools and gadgets as a part of the learning environment, building digital archives and repositories of learning and curriculum building, facilitating remote access to education through information and communications technologies infrastructure, improving quality of access to education and learning resources, building diverse and customised syllabi to accommodate for alternative and contesting perspectives, building peer knowledge communities of information and knowledge production, and including non-canonical material and experiences into formal institutions of education. Different locations, contexts, geo-political circumstances, socio-economic factors, and cultural differences influence the spread, rise and integration of digital technologies in mainstream education. Much academic, policy and implementation attention has been given to these processes and several models of new learning environments and infrastructure have been postulated over the last two decades. The democratising promise of internet technologies has been largely if not exclusively about education, learning, literacy and production of knowledge from different parts of the world.</p>
Wikipedia, one of the first and possibly the largest user generated content websites, that aims to put together the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’ in an open encyclopaedia, stands as the figurehead of such a digital turn. It questions and subverts the traditional analogue forms of knowledge production and relationships. The much discussed experiment conducted by Nature (Giles, 2005 and Orlowski, 2006) that established Wikipedia as an almost equal (if not more) reliable source of information to the fountainhead of print-based knowledge <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em>, has become the touchstone by which digital collaborative knowledge structures seek their validity within mainstream classroom pedagogy and learning.
Wikipedia itself has emerged as an object of deep scrutiny and contestation, with warring factions going strong about its strengths and weaknesses. The supporters look at how this collaborative peer-to-peer structure has changed knowledge relationships that defined consumers, producers and mediators of knowledge. They see in the rise of Wikipedia, and other such wiki-based structures and user generated content sites that remix, reuse and share knowledge within the digital realm, the potentials and possibilities of changing the futures of knowledge ecologies and economies. The detractors of Wikipedia make a strong case for specialised and expert curatorial practices of knowledge, without which the information explosion of the digital world would collapse all distinctions between speculative writing and rigorous accountable research.
<h2>Concerns</h2>
<p>In the seemingly unbridgeable differences of these two contesting positions, there is however, a set of common presumptions which remained unquestioned and unchallenged. The example of Wikipedia accordingly serves to throw in sharp relief these more general questions regarding digitally produced knowledge and digitally enabled learning practices.</p>
<h3><strong>Design of Trust</strong></h3>
<h3></h3>
<p>The first among them is the concern around Authority and Authorship (Liang, 2010). Increasingly, as Wikipedia becomes a de facto global reference site available in different languages, there is a growing dependence on the authority of information available on Wikipedia. Given that the number of users of Wikipedia is exponentially higher than the number of editors on Wikipedia, there are many users who never confront the structures of participation, processes of editing, and questioning the source of information (Harouni, 2009, Broughton, 2002) found on the site. This is not a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. Given the explosion of user generated sites which often gloss over the problems of authority and authorship, misdirected or misguided information, there is a need for digital criticality which can help people sift through different kinds of information and develop the capacity for effective critical judgment regarding both truth or falsity and rhetorical persuasiveness or manipulation. Especially within the context of scholarly and academic research and learning, classroom teaching and pedagogy, there is a need to define new parameters by which information introduced in the classroom or learning environment needs to stand deeper scrutiny regarding reliability (over authority).</p>
<h3>Flattened Politics</h3>
<p>The second concern has to do with the depoliticized perception of participation, collaboration and knowledge production on Wikipedia (Graham, 2010). Not only are geographical counters, experiential knowledges and non-standard forms of citation (Prabhala, 2010) ignored on Wikipedia, but they are also rendered redundant under the guise of objectivity. The essentially viral nature of information online and conditions of easy replicability that allow for copy and paste cultures often means that the information gets de-contextualised and de-politicized from its original intentions and circuits of production/distribution.</p>
<p>In many ways, Wikipedia’s adherence to an encyclopaedic model, promotes the idea that there is universal, objective knowledge which can be produced and understood without engaging with the politics of context, language, translation, evidence, etc. This adoption of an older model of aggregating knowledge becomes problematic in the light of new perspectives and theories of reading and writing, which establish knowledge as a contested terrain rather than the benign site that can be mediated through protocols, bots and procedures (Miller, 2007 and Rosenzweig, 2006). In classrooms, students and teachers are both faced with problems when they encounter the simultaneously authoritative and collaborative, definite and tentative nature of information on Wikipedia. The flattened structure of information further complicates our engagement with the larger contexts it refers to and often hinders the learner’s ability to go beyond the self contained universe of Wikipedia, unable to engage with that which has been omitted or left-out and only concentrating on that what has been written and represented.</p>
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<h3>Technology as Tool</h3>
<p>The third concern marks a larger anxiety with the Web 2.0 technologies
and their integration with formal structures of education and learning.
It has to do with new configurations of power, recalibrated hierarchies
of learning and teaching, and distributed communities of learning which
might not often be cohesive and concurrent. With the unqualified
emphasis on digital gadgets – OLPC, Smart Boards, iPads – and ubiquitous
connectivity, there is often a danger to reducing these structures to
sheer functionality. There have been experiments where pedagogues have
merely introduced user generated sites as reference material and ways of
accessing information without actually looking at how they posit
questions to existing education systems. The larger trend of distrusting
non-academic spaces continues.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/DC.jpg/image_preview" title="Digital Technology" height="270" width="363" alt="Digital Technology" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
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<p>A lecture on the problems of Wikipedia
is immediately followed by a ban on or “policing” of the use of
Wikipedia as a reliable resource, trying to create a false and divisive
distinction between offline and online learning tools (Davidson, 2007).
With the increased focus on ‘Digital Natives’ within education policy
and everyday classroom pedagogy, there is a call for changing the
existing classroom and replacing it with a digital classroom – a classroom that challenges the teacher-student relationships, the
authority of the prescribed curricula, and the form of learning and
teaching within college and university structures. The Digital Classroom
is often mistaken to be a virtualisation of the contemporary classroom,
where virtual presences and cloud-based resources of learning structure
the syllabi and the methods of learning. However, the larger anxieties
are about rendering the physical classroom digital by establishing new
relationships and structures at the levels of curricula design,
teaching, learning and evaluation. The need is to look beyond the social
media as a tool, and start unpacking the transparency of the digital
interface and the perceived non-hierarchical nature of information
filtering (Geiger, 2010) on Wikipedia and other such user generated
content portals.</p>
<h3>Quality of Access</h3>
<p>The fourth concern draws from digital internet rhetoric of Do It Yourself. There is a heavy promotion of howthe only thing that stops a student (or anybody who is a learner) from being an intelligent and engaged student is lack of resources. This rhetoric finds bolstering in other political movements like FLOSS and A2K (Willinsky, 2006). There is a presumption that the teacher is merely a proxy for the paucity of resources and that once the students have unlimited access to the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’, they will be able to Learn everything on their own. The DIY University models, the proposition of phasing out teachers and investing in digital infrastructure instead, the idea that the digital native student has instinctive abilities to navigate through knowledge systems (like a fish does to water), all obfuscate not only the traditional learning processes but also reduce all learning to Access.</p>
<p>There is no debate about the quality of access. Even when factual errors are spotted, it is celebrated as an opportunity to improve so that information on Wikipedia is by definition flawed and always potentially in the process of being improved. There is little theorisation of both the role of a teacher in a classroom and the relationship with information access and learning. The presumption that the only gating factor to better education is lack of resources glosses over questions of social and economic disadvantage, political contexts, age, language, race, gender, sexuality, social support, etc., that come into play when designing inclusive education systems. Instead, there is a promotion of fact-based skill-oriented learning that fits the larger neo-liberal agenda of producing workforces who necessarily should not have to be critical in their everyday labours (Achterman, 2005). Universities and colleges are finding increasing pressure to produce students who work within such flat knowledge horizons towards market expansion and promotion of information capitalism rather than a critical learner who is able to deploy lessons learned from education in order to question and change the reality of the conditions within which s/he lives.</p>
<h2>Rationale<br /></h2>
<p>Given these dramatic measures and accelerated changes happening in academia and within the university systems across the worlds, it is necessary to dwell on what a digital college classroom and learning environment looks like in the time of Wikipedia. A synthesis of perspectives from different stakeholders in varied disciplines, engaging with knowledge production, consumption, distribution and access is necessary to understand what the futures and contours of the university system and classroom pedagogy are. The ambition is to look at Wikipedia as a symptom of our times rather than a site of analyses.</p>
<h2>Call for Proposals</h2>
<p>This is a call for proposals towards a special Reader, from people who are interested in producing historical and contemporary accounts of relationships between education, technology, learning, and pedagogy in order to map existing crises and questions of our present times. We take the classroom as the unit where different processes and flows of the education system meet. In this context, we invite researchers, academic practitioners, students, artists, new media theorists, education policy actors and historians of knowledge to look at the <em>Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia</em> as an opportunity to question global trends in education and ways by which Wikipedia (and other such structures) can be fruitfully integrated in formal education towards better learning. Proposals can be for producing theoretical accounts, critical analyses, case-studies from one’s practice, review of information and knowledge, narratives of art and activist interventions, regional and local snap-shots, and other innovative forms by which the diverse and complex questions can be elaborated.</p>
<h2>Key Questions</h2>
<p>Proposals can be inspired by but not limited to some of the questions listed below that we identify as beginning points for engaging with the area:</p>
<ol><li>What does a digital classroom look like? If we had to think beyond just integration of digital tools into the classroom, what are the new models and structures of classrooms (physical, pedagogical, or otherwise) that we are looking at?</li><li>What are the new relationships that we are mapping in the time of Wikipedia – student-teacher, teacher-curriculum, student-classroom, student-student, technology-education, pedagogy-learning? How do we account for the shifts and map the transitions?</li><li>How do we understand the changing nature and function of the university and education with the rise of the internet? What are the policy and practice visions of the University of the Future?</li><li>What does the integration of Wikipedia and similar structures in everyday classroom practice lead to? What does it change and for whom?</li><li>What is the role of the teacher in the age of ubiquitous information access? How do we restructure our ideas of pedagogy, learning and evaluation?</li><li>What are the historical tensions between technology and education that are being replayed with the rise of the digital?</li><li>What does the rise of Wikipedia mean for our traditional understandings of data repositories? What are the politics and implications of Wikimedia’s other projects on Alternative Citation, Wikipictures, GLAM, etc. on the larger knowledge ecology and industry?</li></ol>
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<p><strong>References</strong>:</p>
<ol><li>Achterman, D. (2005). “Surviving Wikipedia: Improving student search habits through information literacy and teacher collaboration”, <em>Knowledge Quest</em>, 33(5), 38−40.</li><li>Davidson, C. (2007). “We can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies”,<em> Education Digest</em>, 73(1), 15−18.</li><li>Geiger, S. (2011). “The Lives of Bots”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Giles, J. (2005). “Internet encyclopedias go head to head”, <em>Nature</em>, 438(7070), 900−901.</li><li>Graham, M. (2011). “Wiki Space: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Harouni, H. (2009). “High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies with and Despite Wikipedia”, <em>Harvard Educational Review</em>, 79 (3), 473-494.</li><li>Liang, L. (2011). “A brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Miller, N. (2007). “Wikipedia revisited” <em>ETC: A Review of General Semantics</em>, 64(2), 147−150.</li><li>Orlowski, A. (2006, March 26). Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study, <em>The Register</em>. Retrieved December 17, 2011, from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/</a></li><li>Prabhala, A. (2011). <em>People Are Knowledge</em>. Documentary retrieved from December 17, 2011 from <a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/26469276">http://vimeo.com/26469276</a>.</li><li>Rosenzweig, R. (2006). “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past” <em>Journal of American History</em>, 93(1), 117–146.</li><li>Willinsky, J. (2006). <em>The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship</em>. MIT Press :Massachusetts.
<hr /><strong>Collaborators</strong>: Dr. David Theo Goldberg, <em>University of California
Humanities Research Institute</em> and Claudia Sullivan, <em>Digital Media and
Learning Initiative, HASTAC</em>.<br /><strong>Photo source</strong>: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=digital+classrooms&l=1">Flickr</a> (Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution).<br /></li></ol>
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No publishernishantWikipediaResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia2015-10-05T14:53:30ZBlog Entry