'Digital technology is restructuring human relations'

The Inquirer

While apologists assert such mass gathering of protesters in Tahrir Square (Egypt) would not have been possible without social networking platforms, detractors point to revolutions of the past that have succeeded without a Facebook or Twitter.

Amidst conflicting views on the subject, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore and Hivos in The Hague –two NGOs studying technology’s impact on ordinary citizens across the world—have published a book ‘Digital AlterNatives with a cause?,’ a result of research enquiry that ventured to “uncover the ways in which young people in the emerging ICT context make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments.” Nishant Shah, CIS’ director for research, who co-edited the book, spoke to L Subramani of Deccan Herald on the book’s findings and the indications it gives on the real role of technology in today’s revolutions.

Excerpts:

Tell us something about the research?

The effort began in 2010-11 with three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, which brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

They were part of the exploration of 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 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 digitan 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, etc.

We talk about technology-induced revolutions in spite of the fact that human civilisation has seen many like that in the past...

There have been many revolutions, resistances and protests that have marked human civilisation. Most of them were accompanied by rise of new technologies. The French Revolution, for example, was orchestrated through the print and industrial technologies.

Yet, with the digital, there seems to be extra attention that is paid to the role that technologies play. One thing we have learned from the research across Asia, Africa and Latin America for the book is that this emphasis on technology is trying to mark a particular shift in social movements and change which we have taken for granted. In all of the other revolutions certain power clusters spoke on behalf of the society in order to demand for rights of the people. However, with the digital and the internet revolutions, there is no such one actor who is controlling it.

In the wake of Akash (tablet PC) and the spurt of smartphones, do you think we have enough devices to the extent that people are now empowered to enforce social changes?

The Digital Divide is here to stay. There is always going to be a last mile that cannot be breached, thus producing certain people who will never be able to actualise their potentials as digital participants. Hence it has not been very helpful to continue thinking of the digital divide as it has emerged in the ICT4D based approaches. Digital participants are people who have learned to question the status quo of their everyday practices.

Which is why, when we see the participants from the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare campaigns, we need to realise that not everybody was a digital technology user. And every person was able to conceive of self as agent of change.

Even the original developers of Facebook and Twitter would not have thought of the way they would be used by various people.

I am sure that the original developers must have been left aghast when they realised that these platforms were being used to fight governments, because it seriously compromises their market expansion if the states turn hostile.

However, most technologies, when they reach mass markets, are rarely used for their original intention. Just a cursory look into the history of the Internet will tell us that the original intention of the internet technology was to support warfare and defence strategies. Ditto with Satellites and deep space exploration. Or radiation. Or fossil fuels. At the end of the day, technologies are tools — techniques of making human life easier.

Which are your picks in terms of the best results/outcomes from the book?

The digital is emerging as a central part of our everyday life. It is restructuring human relations, social organisation, structures of governance and modes of life.

And yet, nobody goes around wearing a digital identity. We do not, for instance, conceive of people who fall in love online as digital lovers. Parents who interact with their children long distance on Skype are not digital parents. It is time to realise that these digital natives have other simultaneous identities — they are students, workers, teachers, researchers, parents, friends etc.

The digital does not have to undermine or supersede any of these categories. Instead, the digital changes, amplifies and restructures these identities and in the process offers new ways of looking at who we are and how we connect to the world around us.