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The low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments. Did the government prioritise familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices over the promise of quality mass education generated by low-cost devices?

We explore here public and private initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in India since the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, we document Ministry of Human Resource Development's project to develop an affordable tablet computer, named 'Aakash,' as a personal access device for digital courses and online learning materials. We approach this case study in relation to several educational technologies that preceded it, and with a wider interest in mapping a contemporary transition from satellite-based mass education to Internet-based mass education. We argue that this process cannot be easily seen as a transition from unilateral broadcasting to more democratic multi-casting model of communication and learning. Specifically, we study the manufacturing process of Aakash and the public debates around it, to comment on the nature of state power in India, as revealed in its attempts to imagine and develop a digital personal device to deliver mass education.

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.