Digital Technologies and Women: A Reflection from World Social Science Forum 2013 at Montreal Canada

Hi,
Digital technologies are enormously powerful, for connecting people and information to one another and for effecting social change. The very same technologies have been used to orchestrate women issues and development.

In October 2013 when I attended the World Social Science Forum as a paper presenter on Digital Technologies, I decided to test my skills as a journalist. Below is a link for the interview I conducted:

More inform:

In January 2013 I participated in ‘CALL FOR PAPERS’ carried out by International Social Science Council’s 2nd World Social Science Forum (WSSF). With the theme and focus “Social Transformations and the Digital Age.”

My paper on ICT and sexuality entitled:
‘The Cosmopedia Generation: A Critical Analysis of the Online Sexual Activities in Kenya’ was accepted by the WSSF team. Here in summary, I analyzed Kenyan online users on their engagement in online sexual activities such as sexting, pornography, dating cites, you tube nude pictures, sexual charts, exchanging of nude photos via emails etc. I also analyzed the effects of these OSA to the users. The findings were intriguing as a higher number of respondents acknowledged to have engaged in three or more of these activities and the effects ranged from addiction, masturbation and the growing disinterest in offline relationships.

I was fully funded to present the paper in Montreal Canada between 12th -16th October 2013. I was also appointed to moderate one session.

In addition to this, I decided to interview 6 participants on ‘Digital technologies and women’. I remember so well during the opening ceremony, I was wearing two tags; the one for WSSF and World Pulse Press tag. After spotting key people to interview, I approached one by one confidently, introduced myself and the media I am affiliated to-WP, all of them seemed not to have heard about WP apart from a gentleman from Cameroon. This gave me an opportunity to explain to them about WP and even gave them a link. In fact some googled to confirm whether we truly exist and when they saw WP website they were overwhelmed, I saw appreciation on my interviewees’ faces. They were so eager to be interviewed. I interviewed them using my iPad and all of them were positive about it, even though at some point I was feeling my equipments were not up-to standard, I pushed this feeling away and carried on with interviews successfully.

This was a very eventful period for me. I felt so nice as a journalist. Some kept whispering to one another ‘The press is here’. I felt very proud of WP. I also met scholars on digital technologies and learnt a lot from them. One of the participants is ready to collaborate with me so that we scale up this paper that I presented, talks are still under way. This was indeed a great time for me.

The next International Social Science Council, WORLD SOCIAL SCIENCE FORUM 2015
Will be held in Durban, South Africa, in July 2015. The theme will be

TRANSFORMING GLOBAL RELATIONS FOR A JUST WORLD

Be on the look out!

Cheers!