international development policies often misses out on the grassroot level practices and perspectives that emerge from young people’s everyday practice. Isaacs also looks at how the Digital Native discourse neglects digital outcasts by reducing the intimate and affective relationships of the technology users with technology, to questions of access and affordability. Her urgent suggestion of looking at digital transformations finds resonance with Kerryn McKay’s analysis of the space of personal expression and mobilisation online. Mckay looks at the human side of the information economy, exploring how people find spaces of personal narration and expression online. Looking at a particular Twitter user who was tweeting as a diasporic Egyptian in South Africa, McKay explores the processes by which the contexts of personal histories and legacies frame the political ambitions and aspirations of digital natives. An interview with Seema Nair also shows how in the developing countries in South Asia, there is a need to move away from the larger Information and Communication Technologies For Change (ICT4D) based infrastructural rhetoric and concentrate on building critical and digital literacy for the users of these new technologies. Nair takes us through different case studies, drawing upon her own experiences within the field, to show how mere access does not make one a digital native. She looks at the digital native as essentially subverting existing imaginations of power-technology-identity. She proposes to use it as a name that is able to question the status quo and build new articulations of power.
produces the material contexts within which digital natives operate, navigating between the digital and the physical seamlessly as they go about their everyday tasks, reminding us that the digital native is one of the many identities that they wear. Parmesh Shahani’s reflections from within a corporate space extrapolate what is visible in these two contributions – that the corporate has a role to play in defining and shaping digital native identities. However, there is more to the corporate involvement in this process than market politics. Shahani looks at the potential of corporate engagement in processes of change, to give a new perspective that looks beyond the demonised conditions of censorship and market expansion that are generally attributed to them. The To Be book begins the journey of critical engagement with digital natives and their causes, opening up new avenues for discussion, debates and questioning of the dominant discourses on digital natives within certain parts of the world. It draws together seven innovative and informed perspectives that offer new ways of thinking about the digital native identity. Through case studies, analyses, research frameworks, reflections and documentation, they not only emphasise how digital natives become digital but also show how digital natives, even though they might be using same tools and technologies, are varied in their interaction, engagement and relationship with these technologies that support their causes.
Adding to this equation of digital native identities as located within the triangulation of State, Public and Rights, is Nilofar Shamin Ansher, who questions the physical-virtual protocols installed in the imagination of who is a digital native. She produces an ethnography of the self, as she constructs a cyber-twin using an Artificial Intelligence platform, that gives us insights into the dynamics of digital identities and relationships. Her essay provocatively looks at the control, containment and regulation that are imposed by the sheer design and structured reality of digital platforms and tools. In sharp contrast is a photo-essay by Leandra (Cole) Flor, who
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