[Air-L] Survey : Digital Natives with a Cause?

[Vishal Makhija]

Hello,

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

I am resending this mail as I guess the earlier one did not have the
required hyper-links. Apologies for the inconvenience caused, if any.

Founded in 2008, The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS -
http://www.cis-india.org/) is a Bangalore-based independent, non-profit,
research organisation which is involved in research on the emerging
field of the Internet and its relationship to the society. CIS brings
together scholars, academics, students, programmers and scientists to
engage in a large variety of Internet issues like governance, privacy
and freedom of expression, etc. 

CIS works in the areas of histories of the Internet, digital natives,
and a reader on the Wikipedia, enhancing higher education for the
downtrodden, and accessibility for the disabled, openness, telecom and
Internet governance. CIS runs different academic and research programmes
and is receptive to new ideas and collaborations, projects and campaigns
from the public. 

CIS, in collaboration with Hivos' Knowledge Programme
(http://www.hivos.net/), launched a project, Digital Natives with a
Cause? (http://www.cis-india.org/research/dn/dnrep) in 2008. As younger
generations growing up in emerging information societies learn to engage
with their geo-political and socio-cultural environments, a form of
technology-mediated identity, popularly dubbed as the Digital Native,
has been the discussion of a growing public and intellectual debate.
These digital natives are transforming the ways in which they understand
themselves as well as the world around them while engaging with Internet
and digital technologies. Young users of technology are moving towards a
reconfiguration of the world, where questions of identity, political
participation, social transformation, cultural production, education,
and livelihood are being restructured. The Digital Natives Research
Programme focuses on producing new knowledge frameworks, vocabularies
and lexicons to understand, investigate and support these new citizens
or netizens rather who shall be the agents of change in the future.
After the initial research (click here for a free download
http://www.cis-india.org/publications/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf/view), CIS
will gather responses from young users of technology to help us
understand, document and support different practices aimed at social
transformation and political participation more efficiently.

We believe that the world we live in is changing rapidly and the rise of
Internet technologies has a lot to do with it. As young users of
technology (as opposed to young users who use technology) adopt, adapt
and use these new technologised tools to interact with their
environment, new ways of effecting change emerge. This survey is an
attempt to capture some of the information which gives us an insight
into who the people are using these technologies, the ways in which they
use them and what their perceptions and experiences are.

The survey will not take more than seven minutes of your precious time
and it will help us get a better sense of the way things are. Please
click here (http://bit.ly/9tbO9v) to start the survey. We would also
appreciate if you could share the link to the survey with your friends
and relatives via your blog, tweets or other social networking pages.
Your help would go a long way in enabling us to find out how the youth
of today are shaping the society and influencing the political/social
scenario around them. Please note that the data collected as part of the
survey would be anonymous and not used for any commercial purposes. We
would also acknowledge your help in preparing the final report. 

In case you need any further information or clarifications, please feel
free to call us at +91 - 080 - 25350955 or write to us at
nishant at cis-india.org

With best compliments,

Vishal