Hello Nishant,<br><br>thanks for your thought-provoking post.<br><br>I understand your desire not to replicate traditional colonial biases - in thought or in action - as you connect non-western youth to digital tools and networks. And I understand that by creating this identity of Digital Outcast you are trying to flip that script. My own analysis is somewhat different, but suggests that on one level you may have succeeded to a much greater degree than you realize.<br>
<br>It is curious to me that it has become so widely accepted that the Digital Native is a myth. You too describe the Digital Native as 'imaginary' yet you describe that imaginary person as an "<font size="2">incessantly connected, globally
networked individual that navigates the intricate paths of information exchange
and knowledge production online</font>". How is this kind of person imaginary? And if there is such a thing as Digital Culture, which there is, why should some people not be native to it?<br><br>In my opinion the Myth of the Digital Native is itself a myth, propagated primarily by those with a vested interest in colonizing digital natives. Specifically, members of literate cultures deny the existence of a digital epistemology or digital psychodynamics the same way they have marginalized and expunged oral ways of knowing and being from the literate architectures of power and knowledge. In other words, in my opinion, not only do Digital Natives exist, but all Digital Natives are all essentially Digital Outcasts. For they represent and participate in an emergent culture that directly challenges many of the fundamental social values of the literate culture that currently rules our world.<br>
<br>Thus if you want to avoid replicating colonial thinking, the first step is to realize that the defining feature of colonial culture is not its Europeanness, or its whiteness, or its maleness or its heterosexuality or its expansionism or its cruelty but its <i>technology</i>, and specifically its communication technology. India was not primarily colonized by Britain but by literate culture, and if you want to use digital tools to counter that colonial legacy and empower youth - in India or anywhere else in the world - then the goal should be to build bridges between digitalists of all ages everywhere, rather than to create unnecessary new distinctions between them.<br>
<br>I have written extensively about many of these ideas in my new book, <i>You Are Your Media</i>. More here: <a href="http://www.youareyourmedia.com">www.youareyourmedia.com</a> <br><br>Regards,<br>John Sobol<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 6:34 AM, Nishant Shah <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:itsnishant@gmail.com" target="_blank">itsnishant@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Dear All,</font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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 (<a href="http://www.cis-india.org/" target="_blank">http://www.cis-india.org</a>)
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.</font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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. <br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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. </font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><b>First</b>, 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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><b>Second,</b> 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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><b>Third,</b> 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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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’. <br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">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.</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4"><br></font></p><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Warmly</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><p style="font-family: garamond,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Nishant</font></p><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4">
</font><font style="font-family: garamond,serif;" size="4"><br clear="all"><font color="#888888"><br>-- <br>Nishant Shah<br>Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( <a href="http://www.cis-india.org" target="_blank">www.cis-india.org</a> )<br>
Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09<br># 00-91-9740074884<br><a href="http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah</a><br><a href="http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah" target="_blank">http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah</a><br>
<br></font></font>
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