-
"Google has undertaken a bet-the-farm confrontational communications approach in China. They will not have made this decision lightly. Dressed up in the polite language above is what is essentially an ultimatum: Allow us to present uncensored search results to our Chinese users or we'll walk."
-
"Google's decision was tough and is going to have a great deal of of difficult fallout. Still, based on what I know, I think Google has done the right thing. They are sending a very public message – which people in China are hearing – that the Chinese government's approach to Internet regulation is unacceptable and poisonous."
-
"last night Google announced it would lift the censorship, the Chinese internet users flooded to the website to search for all the sensitive terms they never had a chance to access. In twitters, forums, discussion boards, we witness an explosion of talks about Google and its possible departure, or exile, from China."
We’re getting first takes on citizen media response on Haiti. Blogs, photos, video, Twitter, mapping platforms, beginnings of collaboration between citizen initiatives, development organizations, and mass media. Today’s going to be a busy day.
I’ve been adding links to this post throughout the day. Noticing, due to the lack of access to telephony and internet, a relative paucity of sources. That will change quickly as the relief effort gears up. I hope that we see efforts to include and amplify Haitian voices and perspectives as the relief machinery kicks into gear. Please send links if you know ‘em. Categorizing:
Links from citizen media blogs and platforms:
Global Voices special coverage page Haiti earthquake 2010, and selected posts:
- In the aftermath of earthquake, eyewitness tweets from Haiti.
- Haiti: earthquake!
- Diaspora Mobilize to Help Haiti in Earthquake Aftermath.
- Haiti: Experiences of the Earthquake.
Ushahidi platform setup on Haiti at haiti/ushahidi.com. An Ushahidi blog post details other tracking information mapping and tracking efforts and platforms, including OpenStreetMap, GeoCommons, Sahana, and InSTEDD.
Haitifeed.com, a Haiti-based blog, providing a range of content.
Dan Kennedy roundup at his blog Media Nation: Citizen media and the earthquake in Haiti.
Reuters Alertnet Haiti earthquake liveblog.
NYT”s The Lede: Wednesday: Updates on Haiti’s Earthquake.
Twitter:
Curated Twitter feed from Georgia Popplewell focusing on content from inside Haiti.
Another curated feed from Jillian York, with content from Haiti and relief agencies.
Miami Herald Tweets from and about Haiti after the earthquake.
Wikipedia: 2010 Haiti earthquake page.
Links in French:
Live audio stream in French/Creole.
Radio Metropole reports, including citizen perspectives, and a list of damaged buildings.
Other:
Haitian Times, online news source
A useful BBC story and video: Earthquake devastation emerges in Haiti.
Listindiario.com, from Santo Domingo in DR across the border, in Spanish.
USGeological Survey podcast, for the science behind the quake.
UN ReliefWeb, general information and latest updates.
I remember the first time I found Global Voices. In 2004 I had been living in the former Soviet Union and was about to move to Bangkok. For the past few years I’d been working with local TV and radio stations in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and it was a big shift to focus on Southeast and East Asia. I needed a crash course in Asian current affairs. In the course of my research I came across a curious project called the North Korea Zone that aggregated and distilled information about North Korea, and functioned as a platform for conversation about that coverage. I was drawn to the site because it helped me to grasp a complicated international story quickly, and because it treated news coverage less as a product and more as a process.
Sadly, NKZone didn’t last long, but while it did, I was a fan. And when Rebecca MacKinnon, its author, helped launch Global Voices together with Ethan Zuckerman in the end of 2004, I followed from afar. At the time my work was all about helping local communities in Asia to gain access to media production, and to learn the skills necessary to build and run media outlets. As Global Voices emerged, I noticed that it had a similar ethos, but that it was able to link people without media institutions mediating their perspectives. As with NKZone, it became a go-to site to ground-truth my understanding of countries and news stories.
Afghan theatre returns after the Taliban, Kabul, 2002. © Ivan Sigal
As I followed GV in its first years, something else happened: blogs went from being a peripheral Internet phenomenon to key tools to democratize media production and distribution. Internet access in the developing world also expanded enough have a mass impact on information flows. If media development had been all about creating media institutions and training professional staff to run them, suddenly, it was also about encouraging mass use of simple, nearly free tools to increase conversation, and disseminate all kinds of perspectives.
Global Voices was uniquely situated to take advantage of that shift. As a community made up primarily of volunteers, it could tap into diverse enthusiasms and ideas. It didn’t need to be guided by a complicated strategy, but simply to set out a few basic principles for action, as captured in its manifesto, and allow people to experiment, and play, in its space.
After years of benefiting from the enthusiasms and writing of GVers, 18 months ago I had the pleasure to become part of the community. I joined just as GV began a new phase of existence, leaving its original home at the Berkman Center and becoming an independent nonprofit organization. It’s been my job in that time to help GV to continue, and to preserve the spirit and energy of the project even as we’re faced with the reality of funding needs, increasing global presence, and the pressure that funding brings to articulate both a vision and a strategy. I’ve quickly learned that at GV, leadership is primarily expressed by listening, and by ensuring that the way we work is indicative of the kind of media we’d like to have – transparent, enthusiastic, open, considerate, and joyful.
In the past five years, GV has grown tremendously. It’s now a community with some 350 authors, editors, and translators all working together to prove the premise of GV that we can write the media we want into existence. In the last year alone, we’ve produced unique and vital coverage on stories from Gaza, Madagascar, Fiji, Iran, Guinea, Honduras, and Cuba. We now translate GV into 18 active languages, with another 10 in beta. Collectively, the GV family of sites has an average of 500,000 unique visitors per month. This year, we’ve also launched innovative new projects that explore the boundaries of citizen media, such as our Translation Exchange research initiative, our online freedom of expression advocacy platform, Threatened Voices, our Russian blogosphere project, RuNet Echo, our new collaborative research project, the Transparency and Technology Network, and finally, our new online freedom of expression award, Breaking Borders, in collaboration with Google.
GV is strong on participation, community, and new ideas, but it needs your help to continue. With the marking of our 5th anniversary, we both celebrate our origins and look forward to a future of innovations, new initiatives, and a strong, vital community that continues to grow size and diversity.
Our future may include a user community, original content in multiple languages, and initiatives that take advantage of emerging tools of media production. We’re certain to continue to tell the story of citizen media, as it morphs from blogs, to micro-blogging, to social media, to mapping, to collaborative, multi-user production.
We’re excited by all the things we don’t know, and we’re looking forward to helping to create the future of citizen media. We also want you to join us, whether as an author or translator, collaborator, financial supporter, or active reader.
The paper, “Digital Media in Conflict-Prone Societies” that is the outcome of the work that originally motivated this blog has been published by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA). I originally wrote the paper while a fellow at USIP, and now, more than a year later, it’s in print. Hopefully it’s still timely.
It seems that in the past year a lot of the issues discussed in the paper have reached more mainstream awareness. Conflicts in Georgia, Gaza, and Madagascar, civil unrest in Moldova, Iran, Fiji, China, and Guinea, and a terror attack in Mumbai have all played out in public spaces. Citizen media played important roles in each one of them, to organize opposition, to amplify alternative viewpoints, to report and record violence, and to track and identify opponents. Governments have responded by slowing or shutting internet and cell phone use (Iran, China). DDOS attacks and censorship have also been prominent (Georgia, Iran, China, Gaza) when governments and/or non-state supporters of parties to conflict have participated in shutting down opposing websites and cellular networks. Finally, activists and media have designed projects that support a greater flow of information, or attempt to map and parse information for accuracy and coherence (Madagascar, Mumbai, Gaza, Iran).
A short description, from CIMA, follows:
Throughout history, war has affected media, with conflict often creating an information void. In the 21st century, media has begun to affect war more than ever before. Digital media technologies – particularly participatory, networked tools – have increased communication and information dissemination in conflict settings, affecting all sides and involving new producers of news coverage. These new tools can be used to foment violence or to foster peace, and it is possible to build communication systems that encourage dialogue and nonviolent political solutions. The international media development community must adapt its conflict-zone programs to fit a new media environment, designing projects that encompass digital media applications that encourage more open communities and states, provide venues for dialogue, and reduce control of information.
We’ll be discussing the paper at CIMA October 27, together with Erik Hersman of Ushahidi. We’ll also consider a new generation of innovative digital media projects that focus on producing accurate information in conflict, often in the developing world, as local communities build digital media tools and applications for their own needs.
Burning Bridge has been in hibernation the past few months, breathing only on a delicious links respirator, as I wend my way through more pressing obligations. On a recent trip to Austria, however, on my way to the Salzburg Global Seminar, I went walking in the Hohe Tauern National Park with Oso and Rob:
Photo of map of our route up the Grossglockner
Climbing the shoulder of the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain (feet on rock and snow, breathing actual air on an undeniably real cliff face),
easier than blogging?
we began discussing our approach to work, and craft. This was spurred in large part by Oso’s pending presentation for a talk in Budapest at Internet Hungary, which you can now find here. Oso’s concern is the continuation of craft in industrial economies, and whether in the realm of digital work, we can legitimately encumber certain kinds of activity with the name “digital craftmanship.” Without bowing to the pressure to create more neologisms (slacktivists beware!), the term seems to be gathering momentum. Oso longs for:
products that are produced slowly over time. For digital goods that are both beautiful and beautifully made
He then identifies a number of digital projects that roughly fit this definition of craft, focusing on the creation of digital tools such as phone/web 2.0 applications, websites, multimedia productions, data visualization, and website design tools.
Obviously there are clear access, education, and class issues inherent in any conversation about craft economies. Those issues obtain for digital craft as well, so I’m going to lay them aside for the moment. I’m interested initially in the question of whether digital craft is in some way fundamentally different from other kinds of craft, whether it is simply another iteration of the same question, and what it means to move from the digital to the physical.
My first impulse is to think that the claim of difference is overstated. Oso writes:
Seth Godin has found that of the top 100 companies worldwide only 32 of them produce actual physical things. Material culture and materialism are transitioning into digital culture and what might become ‘digitalism’, which has a different set of rules and values.
However, every one of those companies is deeply involved in industrial processes, whether they own and produce material goods, or pay for services managed by others. Our digital culture is also rooted in industry, with associated mineral resource exploitation and global trade implications, as any coltan miner can tell you. Those companies’ profits may come from value-added activities (information access, marketing, etc.), but the industrial economy has clearly not gone away.
So digital craft? In economic terms, it looks a lot like other expressions of craft – eddies of money, resources, and time that might make our lives better and more interesting at a personal level, but is deeply problematic as a fundamental challenge to mass economies that produce abundant and cheap products (inexpensive mass products are not necessarily of poor quality).
I spend a lot of time in chemical darkrooms these days, and at the same time spend time with people who have mostly left behind chemical photography, and are turning out high-end, digital photography prints, such as Frank Day. Frank involves craft in much of what he does, whether it’s building up a road bike, knocking together a table, making large-format chemical prints out of 8×10 field camera negatives, or lately, making large digital prints on massive ink-jet printers. Watching him, I’m tempted to say that craft is an attitude of how to relate to the world, and that the artful use of tools, whether digital or physical, is a manifestation of that attitude.
Berlin diptych, ripped from his website. I can put it back if you want, Frank
However, watching digital and chemical processes of craft, I do think there’s a difference in approach. At least with photography, this is manifest in how one deals with materials. Chemical processes allow the user to experiment with the material qualities of the thing. Temperature, dilution, combination, reaction; all physically change the outcome of the image in a darkroom. The creation of a digital print, however, is a painstaking and exacting process of matching the code for color correction for each brand of paper with each printer’s software. Without the correct formula, the image is useless. It’s possible to hack the color correction code, and produce something other than intended by the manufacturers, but this is a turning away from the processes at hand, rather than using what’s inherent in them. In other words, a creative process that seeks to counter the intentions of the material – hacking as craft.
This brings us straight to the DIY world – and here I’ll let Beth Kolko speak in this talk, titled “User, Hacker, Builder, Thief – Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age.”
The not very slow but definitely steady flow of computer technology into far corners of everyday life has changed fundamental cultural processes and affected how people work, learn, and play. It’s also provided lots of cool stuff to buy. But by some measures there has also been a somewhat fundamental failure of imagination in envisioning what hardware, software and services can look like which has resulted in users from outside targeted demographics adapting technology in unexpected and creative ways. This talk is about diversity of design, the cult of expertise, why hackers are the good guys and lays out the argument that theories of subjectivity and axe grinders can be part of the same conversation. Encouraging users to become hackers, builders, and thieves may be the best way to ensure creative and diverse design.
Here the world of art is also instructive. See, for instance, Camille Utterback’s interactive art. Utterback describes her work as “an attempt to bridge the conceptual and the corporeal.” Among other things, she builds interactive video installations for which she writes her own code. Her projects seek to make visible the link between the abstraction of code and the world’s materiality, for the purpose of contemplation. Her work is not craft – the creation of a thing of utility that best embodies its purpose – but it does open a window into how we perceive craft, and how digital expressions of it relate to the physical world.
-
Great story about an election that received little coverage in the Anglophone media. Interesting to compare to more high-profile elections.
