Digging for Meaning

It happened a while back when we were going to Lothal on bikes early in the morning. Before going off, we were sitting at Chhota (canteen in MICA) for tea. I heard a rajasthani/kutchie folk song being played somewhere. It sounded interesting. It was coming off a cell phone of boy who worked at Chhota. (the guy in the pic) I asked him if it was radio and what channel. He said that it was mp3s. i was intrigued. i asked where he got it from. He replied 'internet pe milta hai na'.. He had downloaded the songs on a friend's cell phone, then from there he bluetoothed it to his cell. we were all :O then. Among the ten of us who were going to the trip, hardly half had bluetooth or GPRS enabled phones. :P Here I am. I write paper on digital natives. Am intereseted in media effects of new media. and I still havent used bluetooth (except for on laptop). :| It was a wonderful moment :D

Mobile Communication The media landscape has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one predominated by traditional mass communication formats to today’s more personalized network environment. Mobile communication plays a central role in this transition, with adoption rates that surpass even those of the Internet. The widespread diffusion and use of mobile telephony is iconic of a shift toward a new ‘ personal communication society’ , evidenced by several key areas of social change, including symbolic meaning of the technology, new forms of coordination and social networking, personalization of public spaces, and the mobile youth culture. The increasingly personal nature of communication technology in the desire for ‘perpetual contact’ would shape the device and its usage. The symbolic significance of mobile communication devices is part and parcel of the progression from a mass to a network toward a personal communication society. Personal communication technologies are dis...

The digital Ecosphere is made up of all the electronic gadgetry that helps people to stay connected to others, that helps them access and experience the media and content(entertainment, information) and that that helps them make life a bit easier in general due to digital intervention. So the improved refrigerator that communicates to your cell phone when the milk carton is empty is a part of digital ecosphere, however the traditional refrigerator is not. For our purpose here, we would assume the digital ecosphere to be made up of digital devices that have components of communication and content creation/delivery only. Every one has its own ecosphere defined by the individual usage. So, one might prefer watching TV, but someone else might use TIVO or computer to watch the same content. Thus the importance of various devices differ with users. Lets try to understand this through the concept of 'personal circuit'. personal circuits are unique and habitual behavior patterns of med...

This blog is already 7 posts and exactly 7 days old, and we haven't really set the ground yet. My bad! (another of the DN manifestation - usage of global lingo. check out urbandictionary ) Before going any further lets get to know who we are talking about when we refer 'digital natives' (DN). Is this a matter of age, as some sources define it by the generation born after 1985? Damn! According to this definition, i missed the bus by a year. Would Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons not be Digital Natives? Also, this would be widely variable across geographies, class etc depending upon the nature of digital ecosystem evolution and penetration. So, who are these digital natives? Like a native of a city/state, digital native shares the language, the culture, the habits/mores to a certain degree with fellow technology users. They have distinctive ways of working, learning and socializing. As Marc Prensky would describe it - they share ' the a...

Being a digital native , my first instinct before doing anything is to google up the query instead of thinking it through myself # . so here I am, having decided the structure of the white paper that is to be written and poised to write the entry in this blog that should elucidate the start of the discussion, but instead am writing an entry thats a chronicle of my trek through numerous blogs and other interesting outposts on web related to digital native discussion. lest you think that this post would hence be any less valuable, think again, there are some interesting links that I came across during my scavenging. not everything is directly related to the query at hand, but as is the non-linear nature of surfing (funny, I am presenting this post in text - a linear logic, to advocate digital nativity, whose hallmark feature is being non linear. well until we have a better alternative, lets stick to text for now.) I would share some other interesting stuff as well, in no particular ord...