Futures of Learning

Photo entitled Bateria Campeã, Published under a CC license by André Cherri

On February 20, 2009 millions of Brazilians began gathering throughout the country to celebrate carnaval, a four-day event that occurs each year in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday [fn1]. Known throughout the world for its colorful costumes, energetic music and dance competitions, Brazilians took to the streets of the nation’s mega centers of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador as well as the smaller towns and cities which constitute much of Brazil’s interior. As the festivities commenced, images of outrageous and humorous costumes and scenes from school and street parades began making their way from the mobile phones and digital cameras of Brazilians (and foreign tourists) to Flickr, Fotolog and Orkut profiles (for examples, see Góes 2008). The viral spread of Brazilian carnaval within and outside of Brazil reflects the ease with which Brazilians have merged one of the most important cultural festivals with new media. In this introduction, I will provide a short overview of the new media landscape in Brazil, with particular attention to the social, economic, policy and telecommunications infrastructures that shape everyday practice.

Imagining and Enacting Free Culture
With the most internet users, cable TV subscribers and cell phones in Latin America, even an initial foray into Brazil’s new media landscape reveals how important national policies have become in the lives of Brazilians. What some supporters and critics have termed a leftist, techno-utopian approach to national development, the Brazilian government deregulated its telecommunications sector and encourages full competition in all areas. It also continues to be at the forefront of debates surrounding copyright and intellectual property in realms ranging from music and pharmaceuticals to the taxation on imported goods and proprietary software (McCann 2008).  Under the leadership of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has been particularly receptive to a range of ‘edge’ practices, such as Open Source, Creative Commons and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. A testament to the country’s bold approach to the ownership and use of culture, media and technology, Brazil was first country in the world to require open source products from the research institutes and organizations who received government funding for the purposes of software development (Benson 2005, McCann 2008).

The value attributed to open source platforms and other dimensions of “free culture” are closely intertwined with the government’s desire to address the nation’s vast inequities. According to the Department for International Development (United Kingdom), Brazil represents one of the most unequal countries in the world. Ten per cent of the population possess around 48 per cent of Brazil’s national income, and 20 per cent of the poorest members of Brazilian society only have access to 2.5 per cent of the national income. In other words, over 40 million Brazilians live on less than $US 2 per day (DfID suggests that 20 million are living on less than $US 1 per day, see DfID’s Development Challenge Document, DfID 2008). The contours of inequality in Brazil correspond with a complex configuration of race, gender, class and geography. The vast majority of Brazilians are of mixed heritage; this mixture, or creolization, includes descendants of Portuguese colonialists, former Africans slaves and indigenous Amerindians. In addition, Brazil possesses the largest communities of Italian and Japanese living outside of Italy and Japan, respectively. There is also a substantial population of immigrants from Germany and the Middle East. While events such as carnaval celebrate the nation’s rich cultural diversity, the Brazilian populations living in the North – Brazilians of (largely) African descent in the Northeast regions such as Bahia, and Amerindians in the isolated Northwestern regions – continue to live in some of the poorest conditions in the country; living conditions tend to improve in the southern regions of the country. In addition to the ethnic and regional inequities, class plays an important role in the geography of poverty in Brazil. According to the World Bank, there were 192 million people living in Brazil in 2006. Approximately 85 per cent of this population lives in an urban center, the most populous being São Paulo (around 11 million) and Rio de Janeiro (just over 7 million). Salvador, Brasília (the national capital), Fortaleza and Belo Horizonte all have populations between 2 and 3 million (Holston 1989). As centers for finance, petrol, service and culture, many of the nation’s wealthiest citizens who live in guarded compounds and high-rise apartment buildings in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Yet, a significant portion of the population also live in favelas, informal settlements or slums on the hills and outskirts of town that, while roughly proximate to the availability of work and other resources, are characterized by cramped, crowded living conditions and are not formally recognized by the Brazilian state (See Holston and Caldiera 2005, Holston 2008). Without the income to access private schooling and other outlets, many occupants and their families live in favelas for generations.

New Media, Technology and Digital Inclusion
The Brazilian government’s support of culture, education, new media and technology reflects the broader concern with social justice and the potential of new media and technology to bridge the social and digital divides prevalent throughout Brazilian society. Alongside investing in the training of Brazil’s middle and elite classes in national universities to work in biomedical, technology and petrol centers, the government has strongly supported efforts towards digital inclusion among the poorest segments of society. In 2006, the Brazilian government instigated a national computer-for-all program designed to make available minimum configuration desktop and notebook models with free/open-source software. Many of Brazil’s working poor were enticed by this relatively affordable program for a computer that could be paid in 24 installments of 50 to 60 Reais, or less than $US 20 per month. Whereas in 2005 only 16 per cent of Brazil’s population owned a computer (ITU 2008), by 2006 2.2 million Brazilians, primarily from the middle and lower-middle classes, acquired their first computer. According to the 2nd Survey on the Use of Information Technology and Communications in Brazil conducted by the Center for Information and Management of Ponto BR (a non-profit organization established to implement the decisions of the Internet Managing Committee) close to 20 per cent of the population own a computer at home (Lopes 2006).

Like computer ownership, the number of households with internet access via modem and landlines lingered at 14.5 per cent in 2006 (Lopes 2006); broadband internet access was even scarcer at 3.54 per cent (ITU 2008). In 2007, 20.54 inhabitants per hundred had fixed phone lines (ITU 2008); the price basket for mobile telephone service cost about $US 26.20/month, while it is about $US 15.60 for a residential fixed line and $US 10.10 for internet services (Cellular-News 2008). According to the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology, general access to the internet expanded by 39 per cent in 2006, thanks to an increase in the number of digital inclusion points (DIPs). DIPs are public places, set up by institutions ranging from the Brazilian government to private companies to NGOs, where people can access computers and the internet. In the São Paulo metropolitan area alone, over 21 million inhabitants have access to 4000 DIPs. In addition to increasing the accessibility to computers and DIPs, the country’s top three fixed-line telephone companies - Telefónica of Spain; Tele Norte Leste Participações, or Telemar; and Brasil Telecom - agreed to provide a dial-up Internet connection to participants for 7.50 Reais, or less than $US 3, a rate which, according to Benson (2005), could enable approximately 15 hours of surfing online. As I will discuss in greater detail in Friday’s post on New Media Production, the provisioning of access to computers, technology and information through telecenters, home computers and discounted rates on internet access represents an important route for digital inclusion and democratization.

Mobile phones have also opened up opportunities for digital inclusion. As of September 2008, 90.64 per cent of the population was covered by mobile signal and the mobile phone penetration rate was 73.2 per cent as of September 2008, which translates into 140.79 mobile phone subscribers. 81.1 per cent of subscribers take advantage of pre-paid services. Vivo, a company controlled by Portugal Telecom and Telefónica (one of the three largest telecom conglomerates in the world), accounts for 42.28 million mobile connections, followed by Claro and TIM with each about 35 million connections. GSM is most dominant technological standard, accounting for about 86.6 percent of mobile connections. Vivo is the sole CDMA provider and the 3G market is dominated by Motorola, Nokia and LG (Cellular-News 2008). While it is unlikely that the most disenfranchished Brazilians have gained full access to the expensive phones and plans associated with mobile internet, next week I will outline in the blog post on mobile phones the extent to which mobile phones have become transformational devices in facilitating connectivity as well as avenues for employment for poor residents living in favelas and other, more isolated areas where, before the arrival of the mobile phone, people lived without access to permanent or reliable forms of communication.

The Possibilities of New Media
While inequality continues to influence, and be reproduced through, the uptake of new media and technology in Brazil, there are also tremendous possibilities being piqued by the integration of mobile phones, computers, video games and the internet at all levels of Brazilian society as well as practices which challenge our conceptions of what is possible in and through new media. A testament to the innovation and potential of Brazil, Brazil is the first of four countries who Goldman Sachs termed “BRIC” countries (“Brazil”, “Russia”, “India” and “China”), or “emerging economies” that have the potential to become economic powerhouses by 2050. In Brazil’s case, the rich and varied natural resources present in the form of petrol and plants in the Amazon as well as an established financial and service culture are viewed as part of the infrastructure for this growth. With an official literacy rate of 93.2 per cent among youth (and 89 per cent overall literacy, see World Bank 2008)[ii], Brazil also possesses one of the fastest growing youth segments throughout the world. Since 1980 the youth population has grown by 22 per cent; 47 per cent of Brazil’s current population is under the age of 25 (Geraci and Chen 2007, using figures from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population division). Like other countries with large youth demographic (under the age of 25), unemployment remains a key issue. 18.1 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed and close to 23 per cent of Brazilian women in this age group are unemployed (United Nations Millenium Development Indicators 2008). Many of the Brazilian government’s social justice agendas are designed to enhance and support the infrastructure and the training of its’ diverse and polarized population.

Over the next three weeks I will be focusing upon Brazilian’s use of new media by attending to the dynamic relationship between practice and the technological, bureaucratic and social infrastructures that shape everyday usage, drawing connections between Brazilian’s new media practices and the spirit of play, creativity and resistance characteristic of carnaval and other dimensions of Brazil’s new media culture. I will begin on Wednesday with a discussion of internet practices. The following week will discuss new media production online and in educational contexts and gaming. During the final week I will focus upon the mobile telephony landscape in Brazil. As with the blogs on India, Korea and China, I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Endnotes:
i. “Carnaval” is the Portuguese spelling of Carnival.
ii. The gross primary, secondary and tertiary school enrollment hovers between 88 to 90 per cent (World Bank 2008).

References:

Benson, Todd (2005) Brazil: Free Software’s Biggest and Best Friend. New York Times 29 May 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/technology/29computer.html, Accessed January 20, 2009.

Cellular-News. 2008. Brazil 2008 Customer Numbers. Cellular-News October 22, 2008. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/34268.php, Accessed December 5, 2008.

United Nations Millenium Development Indicators, July 2008 Data. http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx, Accessed January 20, 2009.

Geraci, John and Lisa Chen (2007) Meet the Global Net Generation. Paper from the New Paradigm Learning Corporation.
http://www.newtmn.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/meet_the_global_net_generation.pdf, Accessed February 5, 2009.

Góes, Paula. 2008. The Greatest Street Party on Earth: The Brazilian Carnival Global Voices February 28, 2009, http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/02/28/the-greatest-street-party-on-earth-the-brazilian-carnival/, Accessed March 1, 2009

Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Holston, James and Teresa P. R. Caldeira. 2005. State and urban space in Brazil: from modernist planning to democratic interventions. In Global Anthropology: Technology, Governmentality, Ethics, 393-416. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, editors. London: Blackwell.

International Telecommunications Union. 2008. ICT Indicator Database http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/DisplayCountry.aspx?countryId=27, Accessed March 5, 2009.

McCann, Bryan. 2008. The Throes of Democracy: Brazil Since 1989. London: Zed Books.

World Bank. 2008. World Bank Data and Statistics. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:20535285~menu
PK:1192694~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:239419,00.html, Accessed February 27, 2009.

While undertaking research for my blog posts, I came across Ingene, which calls itself the “first-ever Indian youth trend research blog” (http://ingene.blogspot.com/2008/08/indian-youth-lifestyle.html). Here is how the researchers in Ingene categorized Indian youth:

“with the first ever non-socialistic generation’s thriving aspiration & new found money power combined with steadily growing GDP, bubbling IT industry and increasing list of confident young entrepreneurs, the scenario appears very lucrative for the global and local retailers to target the “Youngisthan” (young-India). But, the secret remains in the understanding of the finer AIOs of this generation. The Indian youth segment roughly estimates close to 250million (between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five) and can be broadly divided into three categories: the Bharatiyas, the Indians & the Inglodians (copyright Kaustav SG 2008). The Bharatiyas estimating 67% of the young population lives in the rural areas with least influence of globalization, high traditional values. They are least economically privileged, most family oriented Bollywood influenced generation. The Indians constitute 31.5% and have moderate global influence. They are well aware of the global trends but rooted to the Indian family values, customs and ethos. The Inglodians are basically the creamy layers and marginal (1.5% or roughly three million) in number though they are strongly growing (70% growth rate). Inglodians are affluent and consume most of the trendy & luxury items. They are internet savvy & the believers of global-village (a place where there is no difference between east & west, developing & developed countries etc.), highly influenced by the western music, food, fashion & culture yet Indian at heart” (http://ingene.blogspot.com/2008/08/indian-youth-lifestyle.html).

I am quoting this characterization at length because in spite of its obvious commercial slant, it speaks to a challenge of writing about new media practices among young Indians. This group encompasses several hundred million people, and is marked by geographical, socio-economic and gender differences. It is therefore impossible to study, or talk about, them as one group. Market segmentation exercises, however dubious they might be to academic researchers, are usually the first to studying and understanding (as well as commercially exploiting) these differences. In spite of their generalizations, they can provide a baseline for orientation purposes.

Taking into consideration the heterogeneity of Indian youth, there are three overarching themes that can be ascertained from my (popular and academic) literature review of their new media practices. Firstly, there is precisely the intersection of new media technologies with commercial interests that has been apparent in most of my blog entries. This corporate presence is visible in the existence of Microsoft Research India (MRI), which is producing numerous studies of especially poorer Indians’ technology consumption with an eye towards Microsoft’s interests; to the rapidly growing gaming and mobile markets that entice tech companies with the promise of millions of new customers, from the growing middle class to the bottom of the (economic) pyramid, and to corporate sponsorship of technology programs such as HP’s i-community and Adobe’s Youth Voices program. As a BRIC country, India is a powerful emerging economy, and technology production and consumption are important ingredients in the country’s economic growth. Academic literature on these dynamics, however, has been scarce (except the studies produced by MRI’s researchers), which might be due to a certain academic disdain for all things commercial.

Secondly, new media technologies are one of the areas in India where the old meets the new, and where the tensions around this encounter play out. Descriptions like “school kids on the street corners swarming around the mobilewallah pushing his cart and generator peddling the latest Nokia N Series amidst a backdrop of chickens, cows, temples, noise, dirt and traffic (http://www.mobileyouth.org/post/indian-mobile-youth-by-2012-one-in-5-of-worlds-mobile-youth-will-live-in-india-video/) are often capturing the scenes in journalistic and popular accounts. In the academic literature, especially the occurrence of critical incidences such as the Delhi Public School scandal (see Part 2), has led some Indian scholars to think about a moral panic emerging around new media technology consumption by the country’s young, especially when it comes to its potential to subvert or outright challenge traditional norms of gender, sexuality and family relations. Such public fears, and their materialization in government attempts to restrict or ban new technologies, are countered by claims about the inevitable advance of technological progress, claims that are usually made and broadcasted via the same new media technologies.

Thirdly, given the vast social inequities existing within India, the country has also been a laboratory for experiments with new technologies for development purposes. These can be found across all technology and media types – indeed, the convergence between different platforms is found in India as much as in other countries under study - and aim to harness the power and potentials of new technologies to improve economic situations, education, health and government services, among others. It is here where the majority of the academic literature is concentrated, which is often based on case studies and aimed at scholar-practitioners or development experts. Given the initial hype that surrounded ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development), it is not surprising that studies that critically examine the use of new technologies through situating this use in its socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, are also beginning to emerge in this area.

In general, research embedding technology consumption and production in young Indian’s everyday lives is one of the most promising avenues for future scholarship. Others are studies of localization, that is of the creative uses Indian youth make of new media technologies in appropriating them to their own life experiences and circumstances. Because the prosumption of new media technologies in India is so dynamic, its analysis can also yield important insights for advancing more theoretical studies of new media. If the present record is anything to go by, Indian scholars will participate in this scholarship in equal measures to non-Indians, and because the former publish in English, their analysis of the multifaceted and creative ways in which Indian youth engage with new media technologies is accessible to a broad audience.

Given the slowness of the academic publication mill, many interesting findings exist so far in conference papers and more informal publication venues, which thanks to these same technologies are just as, and sometimes even more public, than traditional peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. I hope that it has become obvious, from my overview of this literature as well as popular and journalistic sources of information, that new media practices in India constitute an exciting terrain for future insights into the ways these technologies articulate with all of our lives. Thank you for coming with me on this exploratory journey, and please stay tuned for its next destination, Brazil, presented by my colleague Heather Horst starting next Monday.

The convergence of consuming and producing digital media has been termed “prosuming” (Lim and Nekmat 2008). This practice has been democratized with the increasing availability of technology tools to (young) Indians from all socio-economic strata. While findings avenues for creative expression is at the heart of prosuming, the objectives differ depending on who is doing the prosuming. For more affluent Indian youth it is often tied to commercial ends that try to capitalize on the growing middle-class Indian youth market and its potential for technology and other companies. On the other hand, enabling poorer young Indians to produce digital media is seen as a way of giving them a voice to express their experiences and attitudes about their lives and neighborhoods. While academic research on the commercial use is entirely absent, its development counterpart has given rise to a body of literature that is primarily aimed at practitioners and is often published through development organizations, such as United Nations’ outlets.

Commercial Production

Exemplary of the use of digital media production for market and corporate ends is the Mobile Youth project, (http://www.mobileyouth.org), an international youth marketing and branding company that uses ethnographic research and street interviews as “the art behind youth marketing that is getting the real views of your customers” for paying clients such as Vodafone, Disney, MTV, Telefonica, Intel and the European Commission. The Indian section was shot by a young Indian named Amit in Bangalore in January 2009 and can be accessed on mobile youth’s utube channel (http://www.youtube.com/mobileyouth ) . Head shots of the half-dozen young men, almost always with scooters in the background, talking about their mobile phones, service providers and (dis)satisfaction with both, are interspersed with one-liners such as “By 2012, one in 5 of the world’s mobile owning youth will live in India, “There are more mobile owning Indian youth than people in the UK,” and “500 million Indian youth have yet to buy their first mobile phone.” These statements serve as a constant reminder of the size and potential of the Indian youth mobile, and by extension new media technology, market.

A slightly different example of the commercial application of digital media production is the company Electronic Youth Media (http://www.electronicyouthmedia.com/), which was started by two Indian teenagers last year. At the heart of the company is a ‘productive networking’ web site called youthportal, although the fact that it is still under construction does not bode well for the fate of the company. The site’s aim was to target ‘career-oriented’ Indian youth by providing them with features helping the “betterment of their future.” Once again, new media technologies are regarded by, and presented to, young Indians as a means to economic advancement and livelihood improvement. It is here where the commercial use of new media production intersect with more explicit developmental purposes.

Giving Voice

In the development area, digital media production projects are rarely pursued for their own ends, but are situated within a larger context, where they address questions of social, cultural and political relevance. One such program is Mapping the Neighborhood, an initiative of the Centre for Science Development and Media Studies and funded by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. The project uses a customized GIS software for hand-held computers that allows participating children to produce community maps, and in the process gather relevant information about the locality. These information in turn inform decision-making, planning and development purposes at the community level (Asthana 2006). The aim of the project is to combine non-formal, participatory learning with community engagement through the use of ICT. Schools participating in the project have also created their own websites.

Another way to foster children’s online participation is through e-literacy story books (Arora 2008). Arora’s analysis focuses on the books’ narratives and potential for participatory development. Relatedly, there are a number of media programs that aim to give children the opportunity to express themselves, often through more traditional media such as community newspapers, radio programs and theater productions (eg. Butterflies Alternate Media http://www.butterflieschildrights.org/media.asp). The Slum Jagattu Media group publishes a monthly magazine giving young people living in slums the opportunity to make their voices heard. Thanks to a grant from the Adobe Corporation’s Youth Voices program, the group has expanded into visual media, specifically documentary video. Participating students, ranging from 15 to 21 years of age, researched the history of slums in Bangalore as compared to the image of the city as an international destination(http://media.iearn.org/ayv/sites/SlumJagattuMediaGroup).

This project was part of a the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN), which is a “global network that enables teachers and youth to use the Internet and other technologies to collaborate on projects that enhance learning and make a difference in the world” (http://www.iearn.org/). The Adobe Youth Voices videos were screened as part of iEARN’s India national conference, which brought together 130 youth and their teachers in May 2008. IEARN is only one example of a growing number of global sites that use new media technologies to encourage young people to form virtual collaborations for a better world, (see also Taking it Global (http://www.tigweb.org/). These sites combine social networking and digital media production to mobilize young people around the world, and Indian youth are involved in all of these initiatives.

Perhaps the best-known digital media production program is called cybermohalla and was established in 2001 as the result of a collaboration between Sarai, the new media initiative of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, one of India’s leading research institutes, in Delhi, and Akur, an NGO in Delhi (Lim and Nekmat 2008, Asthana 2006). Cybermohalla (hindi for cyberneighborhood) is a network of three locality labs in informal and resettlement colonies in Delhi, which over the past seven years have brought together close to 450 male and female participants, mostly dropouts, between the ages of 15 and 25. These young people work with a variety of traditional and multimedia tools to develop, capture and communicate their perspectives about the locales in which they live, which serve as metaphors for “publicness” (Asthana 2006: 48, Lim and Nekmat 2008). The young people chronicle their lives in the neighborhoods in blogs (for example http://nangla.freeflux.net/blog/). There are also three books collecting conversations, blog entries, an animation CD and post cards. The cybermohalla website has a section called Tech Conversations, where young people reflect on their encounters with technology and how it shapes their relationship with the neighborhood around them (http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/commoning/tech-manuals). Participants also make videos using digital cameras and mobile phones, animation and animated stories using GIMP (a GNU Image manipulation program), and recordings of conversations and sounds.

Cybermohalla has been analyzed as the emergence of a cyber-public imagined community within the Indian cultural context (Nayar 2008) and as a way to teach media literacy skills through raising cultural competencies (Lim and Nekmat 2008). More broadly, it has been used to sketch a theory of new media that addresses the potential of digital technologies as “a staging space for activism and protests,” not only represented in a “de-materialized realm of free floating information” but in a very immediate and material context (Asthana 2007). While the spaces for dialogue that have been created for the young, disenfranchised Cybermohalla participants are thought to create a forum for collective action (Asthana 2006), this potential seems to be subverted by the ways in which these participants have been cordoned off from their wider society. Apparently, outsiders have been denied access to the labs because they would disrupt their creative energy (Lovink 2006), and even the larger Sarai community has not been included into the dialogue of the cybermohalla youth.

The use of digital media production as a way of giving voice to disenfrachised people can be seen most directly in the Finding a Voice: Making Technological Change Socially Effective and Culturally Empowering project by Jo Tacci and her colleagues from Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Finding a Voice examined, through the use of ethnographic action research and participatory content creation, “how creative engagement with ICT can be both effective and empowering for positive social change” in marginalized communities across Asia (http://www.findingavoice.org/). The project was funded in part by UNESCO and the UNDP and had five sites in India, ranging from public computer centers in Kerala to a TV station in Andhra Pradesh to the Gender Resource Center in Delhi and two community radio stations in Uttarakhand. The publications resulting from the project have been mainly aimed at practitioners, policy strategists and decision makers (Tacci and Kiran 2008, Watkins and Tacci 2008, Skuse et al 2007). This attention to the empowerment potential of new media production is the focus of most academic publications analyzing its use towards development ends, and can partly be explained by many of these project being funded by government and development organizations, with an eye toward achieving concrete social ends. However, emerging explorations of their potential to inform the academic discourse of new media studies provides promising examples for further research and analysis (Nayar 2008, Asthana 2007).

References Cited:

Arora, P. (2008). Instant Messaging Shiva, Flying Taxis, Bil Klinton and More: Children’s Narratives from Rural India. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (1), 69-86.

Asthana, S. (2006). Youth Media: A research study on 12 initiatives from around the developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. New York: UNESCO. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001492/149279e.pdf

Asthana, S. (2007). Sketching a Theory of New Media: The Case of Cybermohalla from India. Paper presented at MiT5 conference.

Lim, S. and E. Nekmat. (2008). Learning through Prosuming: Lessons from Media Literacy Programs in Asia.” Science, Technology and Society, 13(2), 259-278.

Lovink, G. (2006), Revisiting Sarai: Five Years of New Media Culture in India.” Sarai Waag Exchange Platform. Available at http://waahsarai.waag.org/?p+71

Nayar, P. (2008). New Media, Digitextuality and Public Space: Reading Cyber-mohalla. Postcolonial Text 4(1). Available at http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/786/521

Skuse, A. et al (2007) “Poverty and Digital Inclusion: Preliminary Findings of Finding a Voice.” New Delhi: UNESCO.

Tacci, J. and MS. Kiran (eds.) (2008) Finding a Voice: Themes and Discussion. New Delhi: UNESCO.

Watkins, S. and J. Tacci (eds) (2008) Participatory Content Creation for Development: Principles and Practices. New Delhi: UNESCO.