From the Tahrir Square in Cairo to the Shahbag Square in Dhaka, the world, in recent times, has seen an explosion of digital culture in the organization of protests as well as in the dissemination of news. Citizen journalism has asserted itself in the social media space globally, even as the traditional media has been slow to wake up to the phenomenon. Now, gradually comprehending its social and political traction, the powers that be — the political and government establishments — too, are trying to join the social media bandwagon. At least one major media group has rededicated its prestigious “excellence in journalism” awards to social media this year. The CRG has decided to take advantage of this historic conjunction to debate and discuss the issue in a workshop/ media research lab format. The questions that face the workshop are critically important and not easy to resolve:

· How empowering, after all, is social media?

• Has it indeed democratized news?
• If yes, in what modes and forms has this democratization been attained?
• What is the fine line that distinguishes defamation/slander from the freedom of expression — a critically important concern for all democratic societies?
• Also, the ideological underpinning of social-media participation is not an exercise in unadulterated progressive activism. A critical understanding of this participation is required as much as a considered revaluation of the phrase “social media” itself is necessary.

The CRG will attempt to engage with these questions through the optic of humanitarian disasters and human rights violations and the need to protect the victims of these disasters and violations. The workshop will endeavour to sensitize social media activists to issues of rights and protection resulting from forced migration, and, in the process of the programme, establish connect between mainstream journalists working on forced migration issues and social media activists. The participation of social media activists will be the main source of information. The various ways in which social media has been active will be documented and thus made visible. This is because even our fragmentary knowledge tells us of the important ways in which social media has been active, for instance, in the Northeast of India in humanitarian crises like the Brahmaputra floods and human-rights violations One of the important sources of information will be the way incidents like the hunger-strike by Iron Sharmila in Manipur, or protests in Shahbag Square in Dhaka, or civil rights campaign in West Bengal based on the portal called “Sanhati” (there are other instances) have enthused decentralised news-making, gathering, reporting, circulating, analysing, and finally becoming factors in popular mobilisation in defence of the victims of human-rights violations or humanitarian crises like the Aila Cyclone, the Tsunami in Tamil Nadu and the Andamans.

Presently, there is hardly any interface of mainstream journalists, on the one hand, and social media activists and independent citizen journalists, on the other. At best what we get in mainstream media is mostly news of what celebrities (ministers, sportspersons, actors and actresses, etc.) have posted on Facebook or Twitter. In the mainstream media, there are again hardly instances of developing stories with inputs from bloggers, net-users, freelance photographers, and other citizen-journalists. These only feature, if they do at all, as “social reactions and responses”. Though CRG has in the past taken up programmes on the right to communication, it had not explored adequately the relation between communication and information in the field of forced migration. Other institutions working in this area have likewise not done enough. Even media training centres have not done enough on social media and its impact on ways of communicating as well as information gathering and distributing. As a result, the divide between mainstream journalists and citizen journalists remains marked.

Through the media workshop, with the digital revolution as its core concern, a practical training schedule, assignments, case studies (global as well national), and a relevant field visit, the possibilities and the potentialities of social media activism would be made visible. Likewise case studies of online media sites (such as BBC or Tehelka) utilising social media reportages and material archived in social media sites (such as Kafila, IHRO, Internal Displacement Monitoring Alert, and various Listservs dedicated to issues of displacement) will become sources of information. This would also tell us how the online archives of media sites are used not only by professional researchers but by scores of social media activities (as in online resource directories on Partition, Tsunami, Forced Migration Review, Refugee Resource Network, etc.) in their work of communication and opinion exchanges.

The workshop, as has been said in so many words, will be in the form of a media research lab insofar as the focus will be on interdisciplinary engagement with new media, digital culture and technology on issues of human rights violations and humanitarian disasters. The workshop will run parallel to the Eleventh Orientation Course on Forced Migration Studies to be held in Kolkata, India (8-14 December 2013).