Nishant,<br><br>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...<br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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."<br><br>But again, have <i>you</i> "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.<br>
<br>-<br><br>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<i> </i>practical<i> </i>philosophy of a sustainable relationship-based ethical village economy independent of top-down colonial imperatives (<i>swadeshi) </i>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Regards,<br>John Sobol<br>-<br><a href="http://www.youareyourmedia.com">www.youareyourmedia.com</a><br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Nishant Shah <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:itsnishant@gmail.com">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;">
<p class="MsoNormal">Dear All,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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<span> </span>- 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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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 20<sup>th</sup> 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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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),<span> </span>the imaginations of
justice, equity, discrimination and rights that it offers is often different
from our earlier conceptions in the analogue world. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Warmly</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nishant</p>
<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>
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