[iDC] Decoding Digital Outcasts: Reflection 2

Sun Sep 4 14:03:27 UTC 2011

John - I see no reason to erupt in flames - the dialogue is what makes the
discussion interesting.

Hopefully we can continue this as a dialogue. You do make some good points
and I am sure I will eventually have a longer post as I watch this
discussion.

thanks,
r

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:50 PM, John Sobol <soboltalk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nishant,
>
> as provocative as my last post was it does not seem to have caused this
> list - or anyone's computer - to erupt in flames, so I will take the liberty
> of responding once again, this time to your 2nd reflection. I suspect that
> this one may not escape as unscarred. Still, truth will out, as they say. Or
> at least I hope it will. So...
>
> Literate culture, especially as practiced within academia, engages in
> discourse only with itself. One result is that discourses that are not
> validated by literate epistemology are ignored or downgraded. This happens
> despite the belief by post-modernist professors that they are doing the
> opposite, i.e. accommodating difference. Whereas in fact what literate
> culture has always done is exclude non-literate ways of knowing, not least
> when it is critically theorizing them right out of existence. And this
> explains how it is possible that you can say things like "It is assumed that
> there are only a few kinds of digitalities that exist in the world. " and
> "Because everybody seems to be using the same kind of platforms and gadgets
> across the world, we presume that they must be doing the same kind of
> things." Whereas both these statements appear to me to be profoundly and
> obviously untrue. Certainly, of the thousands of conversations I have had
> about the web with street kids, CEOs, mayors, my mom, my kids, my
> neighbours, my clients, journalists, business consultants, community
> activists, authors, musicians, programmers and more over the past 15 years,
> not ONE of them has ever said anything remotely like this. On the contrary,
> the widespread opinion has been that there are a great many ways of being
> digital and that there are so many new possibilities and gadgets and tools
> that the range of possible behaviours online is overwhelmingly open-ended
> and constantly evolving.
>
> In my opinion, the only place these statements are 'true' is in the
> academic literate discourses you use as your reference point (for
> vocabulary, authority, validation, financing, etc.), where the extreme
> normalizing pressures of the hyperliterate academic epistemology have
> reduced all of this diversity to the narrow portrait you have offered, which
> is a strawman that can then be carefully deposed by advancing the Digital
> Outcast persona to achieve incremental theoretical results that change
> absolutely nothing in the real world. And this is not being done
> maliciously, I know that. Any more than this commentary of mine is
> malicious. On the contrary, we both have the best of intentions I am sure.
> Nonetheless, battling this strawman is in my opinion ineffective and
> unproductive.
>
> You say "However, the digital outcast refuses to be accounted by either of
> these positions. It is neither a success story of somebody who has
> actualised the transformative potentials of technology, nor is it somebody
> who just needs to be included in the narrative of technologised
> development."
>
> But again, have *you* "actualized the transformative potential of
> technology?" Have I? Has my mom? I don't think these words mean anything
> definitive at all. This sort of language founders very quickly on the rocks
> of practice.
>
> -
>
> Your discussion about the politics of media in India, obviously much more
> informed than any analysis of mine could be, is very much of interest to me.
> In my new book I write about the current relevance of Gandhi's* *practical
> * *philosophy of a sustainable relationship-based ethical village economy
> independent of top-down colonial imperatives (*swadeshi) *in terms of its
> power to inform the development of a sustainable and ethical global village
> economy today. I believe that the points you are making about the past
> usefulness of broadcast media to support Indian state authority and the
> emerging usefulness of digital networks to create peer-to-peer social
> alternatives is both very accurate and very directly supports my contention
> that the true colonizer has been literate culture, of which monological
> electronic media like books, radio and TV are all a part, and that the
> Indian challenge today is to resist the further predatory depradations of
> literate culture while building productive alliances between oral and
> digital natives in pursuit of an independent and sustainable future.
>
> Please forgive me if my comments are seen as aggressive or disrespectful.
> They are not meant to be. But I believe that there is too much at stake
> today to spend our time debating literate minutiae. The world is dying
> before our very eyes and there is a lot of work to be done if we are to save
> it - and ourselves along the way. What matters, in my opinion, is building
> practical bridges between oral and digital dialogical cultures that share
> common values. For what it's worth, that is what my book is about.
>
> Regards,
> John Sobol
> -
> www.youareyourmedia.com
>
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Nishant Shah <itsnishant at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> Thank you very much for the responses and questions that have already come
>> my way – some on the list and some over personal email. They help me frame
>> my own thoughts better and I hope that this second set of reflections will
>> elaborate on some of the key things at stake in this effort at charting the
>> shift from the Digital Native to a Digital Outcast. I have already replied
>> in some detail to a few of the questions around those and I am getting my
>> way through the other responses, but I want to now take the time to add to
>> my own understanding of these terms and more specifically, focus on what
>> labour I am making those terms perform and to what effect. I also know that
>> these reflections come back-to-back and presume a linearity of thought,
>> which might not necessarily be fruitful. Please feel free to juggle through
>> the reflections (and add tangents, if you will) and jump into the
>> conversation as desired.
>>
>>
>> So to get back to the notion of the Digital Outcast. I had proposed
>> earlier that the Digital Outcast was helpful to us, within the “Digital
>> Natives with a Cause?” project because it escaped some of the dead-lock
>> debates in the field that revolve around age, access and infrastructure.
>> However, the Digital Outcast is not ‘outside’ of the scope of ‘Digital
>> Natives’. The intention was not to produce a new category that would
>> discount the digital native as an irrelevant category. Instead, I am using
>> the ‘Digital Outcast’ as a way of opening up who can become and claim to be
>> a digital native. Like in the earlier reflection, I want to posit a couple
>> of inflections that Digital Outcasts allow us, to account for a wider range
>> of digital natives than have been included in a majority of the discourse.
>>
>>
>> I want to begin by looking at a ‘construction’ argument. Digital natives
>> are constructed. They are not born digital, they become so. We didn’t have
>> digital natives with the emergence of digital technologies. We have at least
>> two generations of people who had learned to be ‘native’ to the digital
>> cultures before the term got currency. Why then, did it become necessary, at
>> the turn of the millennium to coin this particular phrase? In his response
>> to my earlier reflection, John Sobol has very succinctly asked, “If we have
>> digital cultures, why shouldn’t there be people who are native to it?” and
>> this is where I want to locate this ‘construction’ argument.
>>
>>
>> The digital cultures that we assume that these natives are digital to, are
>> often taken for granted. It is assumed that there are only a few kinds of
>> digitalities that exist in the world. This gets compounded by a series of
>> impulses: Because everybody seems to be using the same kind of platforms and
>> gadgets across the world, we presume that they must be doing the same kind
>> of things. Because the digital technologies seem so pervasive and outside of
>> everyday regulation (false perception, as almost everybody on the list will
>> agree), we also start imagining that the virtual realities are disconnected
>> from the physical contexts. Because there are a few hyper-visible stories of
>> digital superstars or villains, we believe that the rest are in similar
>> conditions of being saviours or criminals. These kinds of presumptions
>> actually form a prescriptive model of who a digital native is, what kind of
>> practices should a person perform to be a digital native, and where these
>> people are located.
>>
>>
>> In the process, it imitates a classic state-citizen structure where
>> parameters of belonging are clearly defined and it is only through those
>> parameters that people are allowed to be citizens or belong to the state.
>> The digitally disempowered or those who are recognised as not being ‘digital
>> natives’ are recognised as the constituencies that need to be included in
>> this digital fold, thus granting them access and empowerment. However, the
>> digital outcast refuses to be accounted by either of these positions. It is
>> neither a success story of somebody who has actualised the transformative
>> potentials of technology, nor is it somebody who just needs to be included
>> in the narrative of technologised development. The Digital Outcast offers a
>> way of reading against the grain, to people who exist in ironies,
>> hybridities, in hyphenated existences where they have been accounted for but
>> not given the resources required to actually engage with and strategically
>> deploy the technologies which they have been given an inclusive access to.
>> This ability of the digital outcast to be inside and outside, is why I
>> retain the formulation  - again, to posit it, not as a replacement
>> category, but as a kind of digital native who can offer critical
>> self-reflexivity about the politics of inclusion which is beyond mere
>> inclusion by access.
>>
>>
>> The second inflection is to do more with the specific project I am
>> currently involved with, that seeks to look at how imaginations of Social
>> Justice in India are informed by the emergence of digital and internet
>> technologies. I shall be presenting in greater detail on this at Mobility
>> Shifts, but I want to flag a few questions here which might be of interest
>> to think more about the Digital Outcast. I shall locate this specifically
>> within the Indian context and history (they are the legacies I am the most
>> familiar with) but I hope that there are resonances with other locations and
>> temporalities.
>>
>>
>> There has been a very clear correlation between the technological
>> apparatuses of governance and ideas of Social Justice. In India, for
>> example, Cinema, Radio, Television and the Telephone have all been used as
>> metaphors and networks through which justice, redress and rights were served
>> to the citizen on the behalf of the State. The broadcast model of governance
>> that seeks to constantly improve the message of the State (ideology,
>> benefits, subsidies et al) to the most remotely located Citizen, through a
>> medium that can transmit the message with minimal distortion and in a manner
>> that makes the State accessible to the citizen (and the citizen visible to
>> the State) has marked the second half of the 20th Century. This model
>> also frames politics as an articulation for justice, rights or redress from
>> the State through different mechanisms and apparatuses. Which means that our
>> modes of articulating any politics has the State at the centre of our
>> imagination and is the only arbitrator and dispenser of Justice.
>>
>>
>> With the P2P protocol of the digital technologies and the emergence of New
>> Social Rights (Right to information, right to knowledge, right to access
>> etc.), there is a new way in which rights are imagined. More interestingly,
>> the State is not imagined at the centre of these rights. The citizens’
>> abilities to bypass the state, in communicating with each other, and
>> mobilising resources (money, people, ideas) in order to demand their own
>> rights with a sense of entitlement that does not address the State at all,
>> gives us a new way thinking about rights and justice. The Digital Native,
>> which is still ensconced in a State-centred narrative of protection,
>> prevention and cure, easily gets subsumed under the older model. However,
>> the Digital Outcast offers a different way of reading the
>> State-Technology-Citizen structure. Because the digital outcast has been
>> produced (through a grammar of infrastructure and access) but not been
>> accounted for (because of a functional view of technology),  the
>> imaginations of justice, equity, discrimination and rights that it offers is
>> often different from our earlier conceptions in the analogue world.
>>
>>
>> I shall stop here, more as a teaser than an answer, to lead to my final
>> reflection tomorrow. However, I would really appreciate questions,
>> suggestions comments, completely unrelated tangents and discussions that
>> this reflection hopefully opens up as I continue expanding on and exploring
>> the Digital Native – Digital Outcast relationships.
>>
>>
>> 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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