Publications

Whose Change is it Anyway?

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:56:47Z

This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies.

The White Paper by Nishant Shah was published by Hivos recently.

However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?

Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.

Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.

Click to download the full White Paper here (PDF, 321 Kb)

For more details visit /digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

For more details visit /digital-natives/blog/dnbook

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: /research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit /raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

pushpa — 2012-01-03T10:28:41Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

Download the Digital Natives Report here

For more details visit /digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-with-a-cause-a-report

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers

praskrishna — 2015-05-15T11:34:35Z

The Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon conference co-organised by Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society is being held from 6 to 8 December at the Hague Museum for Communication. The position papers are now available online.

The emergence of digital and Internet technologies have changed the world as we know it. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are all undergoing a significant translation, across the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies. These processes also affect the ways in which social transformation, political participation and interventions for development take place.

The programme has three main components. The first is to incorporate the users (often young, but not always so) as stakeholders in the construction of policies and discourse which affect their lives in very material ways. The second is to capture, with a special emphasis on change, different relationships with and deployment of technologies in different parts of the world. The third is to further extend the network of knowledge stakeholders where scholars,practitioners, policy makers and the Digital Natives themselves, come together in dialogue to identify the needs and interventions in this field.

In the late summer of 2010 two workshops, in Taiwan and South Africa, brought together 50 Digital Natives from Asia and Africa to place their practice in larger social and political legacies and frameworks. The ‘Talking Back’ workshop in Taiwan looked at the politics, implications and processes of talking back and being political and the ‘My Bubble, My Voice and My Space’ workshop in Johannesburg looked at change, change processes and the role of Digital Natives in it.

For the Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon that will be held in The Hague, The Netherlands from 6 to 8 December 2010, Digital Natives from the workshops in Taipei and Johannesburg have provided us with their take on social change and political participation in the following position papers. They look at issues of: what does it mean to be a Digital Native? What is the relationship of people growing up with new technologies and change? What are the processes by which change is produced? Can you institutionalize Digital Natives with a Cause Activities? How do you make it sustainable in each context?

We hope you will find the Digital Natives with a Cause? position papers inspiring, thought-provoking and challenging.

Download the position papers here [PDF, 1173 KB]

For more details visit /digital-natives/blog/position-papers

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

In this first book of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Collection, we concentrate on what it means to be a Digital Native. Within popular scholarship and discourse, it is presumed that digital natives are born digital. Ranging from Mark Prensky’s original conception of the identity which marked all people born after 1980 as Digital Natives to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s more nuanced understanding of specific young people in certain parts of the world as ‘Born Digital’, there remains a presumption that the young peoples’ relationship with technology is automatic and natural. In particular, the idea of being ‘born digital’ signifies that there are people who, at a visceral, unlearned level, respond to digital technologies. This idea of being born digital hides the complex mechanics of infrastructure, access, affordability, learning, education, language, gender, etc. that play a significant role in determining who gets to become a digital native and how s/he achieves it. In this book, we explore what it means to be a digital native in emerging information societies. The different contributions in this book posit what it means to be a digital native in different parts of the world. However, none of the contribution accepts the name ‘Digital Native’ as a given. Instead, the different authors demonstrate how there can be no one singular definition of a Digital Native. In fact, they show how, contextualised, historical, socially embedded, politically nuanced understanding of people’s interaction with technology provide a better insight into how one becomes a digital native.

For more details visit /digital-natives/dnbook1

Digital Natives with a Cause? Report

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:04:51Z

For more details visit /digital-natives/publications/dn-report

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Paper

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:22:29Z

The Digital Natives with a Cause? research inquiry seeks to look at the potentials of social change and political participation through technology practices of people in emerging ICT contexts. In particular it aims to address knowledge gaps that exist in the scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital and Internet technologies in social transformation processes. A conference called Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon was jointly organised by CIS and Hivos in the Hague in December 2010. The Thinkathon aimed to reflect on these innovations in social transformation processes and its effects on development, and in particular to understand how new processes of social transformation can be supported and sustained, how they can inform our existing practices, and provide avenues of collaboration between Digital Natives and "Analogue Activists".

For more details visit /digital-natives/publications/position-paper