Nishant Shah Knihy

More important than flagging things “really fake” is to understand why they are dismissed as fake The new truth is the one that circulates: digital truth emerges from lists, databases, archives, and conditions of storage. Multiple truths may be activated through search, link, and retrieve queries. Alexandra Juhasz, Ganaele Langlois, and Nishant Shah respond by taking up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing. Their feminist digital methods allow considerations of internet things through alternative networked internet time: slowing down to see, honor, and engage with our past; invoking indeterminacy as a human capacity that lets multiple truths commingle on a page or in a body; and saving the truths of ourselves and our others differently from the corporate internet’s perpetual viral movement. Writing across their own shared truisms, actors, and touchstones, the authors propose creative tactics, theoretical overtures, and experimental escape routes built to a human scale as ways to regain our capacities to know and tell truths about ourselves.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr-two scholars deeply embedded in the HIV response-present the history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations.

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. This reader crowd-sources critical tools, concepts, analyses, and annotations, self-identified by a network of change makers in Asia as important in their own practices within their own contexts.