[iDC] From Digital Natives to Digital Outcasts: Reflection 1

Sat Sep 3 13:49:50 UTC 2011

a quick note from another lurker.

I meant to intro myself - but stuff keeps coming up - I will do a proper
intro later.

But I did want to say that I actually dont see Nishant as "resisting"
colonial definitions per se but as privileging context.

and I do agree with John about the issue of technology - its design and
defined "proper" use - based in socio-politically and ideologically situated
policy that gets universalized as global values and practices - yet all this
is far more layered and complex than we have been able to describe in
scholarly work so far - we need lots of close examinations from various
local contexts to see how these play out and how the global hides in local
practice...

Megan - I so wish I could be there for the panel you are facilitating - but
no doubt the list will throw up more discussions....

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Megan Boler <megan.boler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Nishant,
>
> I find your Reflection provocaive and productive for many reasons, two of
> which I will mention here as prelude to one of my roles at the upcoming
> Conference.
>
> 1. Your description of the "everyday digital natives" as those who (in
> contrast to the outcasts?) are "users of technologies who have a stake in
> social transformation and political participation" offers helpful
> alternatives to the vacuous and non-vernacular terms such as 'civically
> engaged youth,' so often used in disciplines ranging from media education,
> media literacy, political science, sociology, youth studies, social movement
> studies, and/or media studies to understand youth, social media, and “civic
> engagement”.
>
> Whether we’re talking about everyday social media practices of “youth” or
> “students,” or those engaged in the Arab Spring revolutions, or more
> recently those protesting economic and cultural disenfrachisement in the UK,
> many of us remain confounded: How best to describe and understand, much less
> theorize the practices and/or subjectivities, of those using digital
> technologies and social media for purposes of “social transformation and
> political participation”?
>
> Though a graduate of the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness program
> and mentored by Donna Haraway, I have found myself turning to mixed-methods
> studies (semi-structured interviews, etc) since 2003 in order to better
> understand the social and political implications of these everyday media
> users/practitioners/activists/producers/prosumers.
>
> My research continues to reveal the inadequacy of traditional vocabulary
> and conceptions of politics, ‘democracy,’ political ‘engagement’ or
> ‘apathy’—such concepts no longer accurately capture the sensibility and
> approaches of what some scholars are calling “alteractivism” (overall a
> conundrum you describe with great nuance!) During my first 3-year funded
> study (2005-08) “Rethinking Media Democracy and Citizenship after 9/11” we
> studied the motivations of those engaged in digital dissent in North America
> after September 11.  Even these diverse users contesting the power of
> corporate-owned media through indy media practices, rarely describe
> themselves as 'activists' or even 'political.'
>
> I am now commencing a three-year funded study “Social Media in the Hands of
> Young Citizens: Evolving forms of participatory democracy.”  We are
> beginning this work by asking and exploring how those who have a “stake in
> social transformation and political participation” describe and express in
> their **own** terms, their practices, identities, networks, motivations,
> etc.
>
> 2. Another of your points offers a segue to issues of “difference” and
> pedagogy I see as crucial to our conversations across Mobility Shifts. You
> note: "The research questioned the age based, geo-politically marked,
> gendered notion of the digital native that seems to make oblivious the
> traditional axes of discrimination, exclusion and violence." Throughout the
> past months of IDC's conversations surrounding education, learning and
> technologies, I have felt uncomfortable with the relatively rare attention
> to 'difference,' and the (relative) absence of nuanced consideration of who
> are the different 'learners' whom we study, theorize, offer technologies,
> etc.  "They" are not homogeneous, of course.  And given how challenging it
> is to attend to difference in 'traditional' embodied learning environments,
> how do the kinds of techno-digital-media practices which are the focus of
> Mobility Shifts, present *new* challenges in terms of how we understand the
> needs and values, educational aims and desires and lives of these
> 'learners’?  The learner (the everyday digital native and the digital
> outcasts alike) represent diverse geographies, locations, identities,
> communities.  Of course, 'identity politics' are seen by many as a vestige
> of the past.  Even “queer” no longer does full justice to the fluidity of
> identity experienced by many; likewise, “digital native” even in its most
> inclusive sense (as your Reflection makes clear) cannot do justice to the
> complexity of new modalities of subjectivities, networked collectives, the
> blur of on- and offline practices...A huge topic of course, but all to say,
> Nishant, I am excited by what you offer to ground a conversation about
> difference within shifting mobilities.
>
> Regarding these key questions of  “difference” and pedagogies, Trebor
> invited me to facilitate a conversation during part of the Saturday Oct 15
> panel on *Progressive Digital Pedagogy*.  I am inspired to draw on your
> Reflection, Nishant, to help our consideration of the different learners
> assumed by the myriad cutting edge projects represented at Mobility Shifts.
> Trebor also suggested I attach my essay on “Hypes, hopes and actualities:
> new digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace” (published in New Media
> and Society and recently anthologized in The New Media and Cybercultures *
> Anthology*. Pramod K. Nayar (Editor)--please find it attached here as well
> as linked off my website: publications as a PDF).  In this essay (first
> presented in 1999) I address identities in web-based environments and the
> challenges faced in developing 'radical' pedagogies suitable for 'blended
> earning.'  I will be very curious how a decade of changes in technologies
> and practices render moot or alter the concerns raised in this essay about
> the risks of reinscribing traditional mind/body dualisms in many web-based
> environments.
>
> I am very excited about the F2F conversations in which we will all engage
> in October.
>
> Regards
>
> Megan Boler, Professor, University of Toronto
> www.meganboler.net
>
>
>  On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 6:34 AM, Nishant Shah <itsnishant at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>  Dear All,
>>
>>
>> I have been following up the discussions on the list with great interest,
>> even though my status so far has been ‘largely lurking’. I take this
>> opportunity to throw open some of the questions that I, at the Centre for
>> Internet and Society Bangalore (http://www.cis-india.org) have been
>> working through, especially in relation to this strange thing called a
>> ‘Digital Native’. In this first of the 3 reflections I am writing for the
>> group, I want to begin by charting the shift that marked our own
>> understanding of youth-technology relationships. I shall end today by
>> offering you a conceptual identity that I am trying to formulate right now
>> and hope that you will join me in adding to or questioning this idea.
>>
>>
>> Let me begin by talking about things that I am more familiar with –
>> Digital Natives. In the last 3 years, in a research collaboration with Hivos
>> (Netherlands), through a knowledge programme called “Digital Natives with a
>> Cause?” we have worked with young(ish) users of technologies who have a
>> stake in social transformation and political participation, in order to
>> understand the affective and effective relationships that users have with
>> the techno-political apparatus they are within. The research has been a huge
>> learning experience for us as the digital natives (no fixed definition, no
>> capitals) opened up ways in which they understand and engage with the
>> information ecologies they are embedded in.
>>
>>
>> Hence we conceptualised the idea of an everyday digital native - somebody
>> whose life has been significantly restructured by the presence of digital
>> and internet technologies - interested in effecting change in his/her
>> immediate environments. Especially with these users located in the Global
>> South (bits of Asia, Africa and Latin America), where ‘digitality’ is not to
>> be taken for granted and remains a privilege contained to a few,
>> conversations were as much about these technosavvy cybertots as they were
>> about those who remain flung to the fringes, tentatively on the borders of
>> the digital and the technological.
>>
>>
>> We quickly came to examine the imaginary of a digital native – the almost
>> Peter Pan like, always young, incessantly connected, globally networked
>> individual that navigates the intricate paths of information exchange and
>> knowledge production online – in order to see what were the common sets of
>> presumptions which were built into, often conflicting and contradictory
>> approaches and analyses premised on this particular identity. The research
>> questioned the age based, geo-politically marked, gendered notion of the
>> digital native that seems to make oblivious the traditional axes of
>> discrimination, exclusion and violence. There was a call to start thinking
>> of the binary other of the digital native – most debates would call these
>> digital immigrants or settlers; or in another context (ICT4D) these would be
>> called the have-nots or the digitally disempowered. In both these
>> formulations, we found easy solutions provided within popular discourse:
>> Solutions which thought of greater infrastructure and access as an answer.
>>
>>
>> However, in order to actually understand the digital natives’ problems
>> within the digitally amplified and networked systems within which we imagine
>> they exist, we searched for a Digital AlterNative and eventually started
>> working with the idea of a Digital Outcast (Shafika Isaacs) or the Digital
>> HaveLess (Jack Qui). This particular idea of the digital outcast – somebody
>> who is within the pervasive technology paradigms but not necessarily the
>> mainstream prosumer of the Web 2.0 revolutions – was fruitful to escape the
>> dominant battle-lines within Digital Natives discourse.
>>
>>
>> *First*, it allowed us let go of the age-based idea of a digital native,
>> discarding the idea of being born a digital native and instead focusing on
>> processes of becoming a digital native. We stopped talking about natives,
>> immigrants and settlers and instead looked at this particular identity that
>> is within the digital circuits, imagined as its recipient beneficiary and
>> yet persuasively kept at the borders.
>>
>>
>> *Second,* we shifted the conversation about the digital divide – the
>> dissonant gap between the haves and have-nots of internet technologies –
>> from questions of infrastructure and access (which appear as the standard
>> solutions to these questions) to a more nuanced discussion of literacy and
>> acumen. The digital outcast is not somebody who doesn’t have access to the
>> technologies; s/he is somebody who, after the access has been granted, fails
>> to actualise the transformative potentials of technologies for the self or
>> for others.
>>
>>
>> *Third,* it enabled us to short-circuit the idea of digital users as
>> contained in a technosocial bubble, adrift in alternative realities.
>> Instead, we focused them within a larger politics of inclusion, rights and
>> engagement. Looking at other regional specificities of marginalisation,
>> exclusion and discrimination, in their geopolitical and socio-cultural
>> locations helps understand the ways in which digital and internet
>> technologies enmesh themselves in the local.
>>
>>
>> The Digital Outcast, then, became a way by which the outsider insider of
>> the digital worlds can contest the popular perceptions and discourse around
>> digital native identities and practices. The Digital Outcast is not simply
>> the have-not who shall be included in the system once we have enough
>> infrastructure to breach the last mile. The Digital Outcast was not merely a
>> disenfranchised or disempowered because of lack of access to digital and
>> technological resources. The Digital Outcast, in many ways, resounded Hannah
>> Arendt’s formulation of the ‘Stateless’ as somebody who is the beneficiary
>> of the Rights bestowed by the State but does not know how to exercise
>> his/her ‘right to having rights’.
>>
>>
>> The Digital Outcast began to shape our understanding of how these bodies
>> at the fringes, even though they are the intended beneficiaries of the
>> digital development plans, often stay on the fringes of our imagination when
>> we conceive of the digital divide or the digital native.
>>
>>
>> I offer to you the Digital Outcast as a non-actualised but realised
>> identity, which has been created, accounted for, and resolved by
>> technological apparatuses, and thus rendered a-political and impotent in the
>> discourses of digital learning and politics. I am going to stop here today
>> and tomorrow look at some specific imaginations of technology mediated
>> rights, justice and learning vis-à-vis digital natives/outcasts in India,
>> specifically locating them within the higher education systems of university
>> based learning. In the meantime, it would be really helpful if you can help
>> me think through this idea of the Digital Outcast and what would be its
>> implications on your practice and thought.
>>
>>
>> Warmly
>>
>> Nishant
>>
>>
>> --
>> Nishant Shah
>> Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org)
>> Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
>> # 00-91-9740074884
>> http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
>> http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Megan Boler
> Professor
> OISE/University of Toronto
> www.meganboler.net
>
>
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