• Global Voices Online » Somalia: Introducing a network of Somali journalists and bloggers
  (tags: Somalia blog citmedia journalism)
• Somali Media Centre – A global network of Somali journalists and bloggers
  (tags: Somalia blog citmedia journalism)
• Don't leave us, an Afghan radio programmer tells U.S. audiences — latimes.com
  (tags: Afghanistan Internews radio)

• Digital Media in Conflict-Prone Societies – The Ushahidi Blog
  (tags: blog conflict CIMA ushahidi)
• http://breakingborders.de/
  (tags: FOE GV advocacy Google)
• Global Voices Online » Introducing Threatened Voices
  (tags: FOE GV advocacy)

• BBC World Service – Documentaries – New media in Kashmir
  (tags: Kashmir digital media conflict BBC)

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 21^st 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.

• Global Voices Online » Gabon’s bloggers struggle to take hold
  Great story about an election that received little coverage in the Anglophone media. Interesting to compare to more high-profile elections.
  (tags: blog CPJ elections)

• MediaShift Idea Lab . The New Era of Media Development, Part 1 | PBS
  David Sasaki's Idea Lab post on the Salzburg Global Seminar event: "Seeding Tomorrow's Media: Strategies for More Effective Engagement and Investment"
  (tags: blogs mediaorg mediastudies)
• Blogs | Strengthening Independent Media
  Blog posts capturing the conversation at Salzburg Global Seminar's event "Governance, Media, and Development: Aligning Strategies to Maximize Results
  (tags: mediaorg mediadonor blog)

• Cellphones – Third World and Developing Nations – Poverty – Technology – New York Times
  (tags: ICT4D)
• [Today] Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection? | Berkman Center
• Global Voices Online » The Future of ICT for Development
  John Liebhardt, Aparna Ray, Ethan Zuckerman, Jen Brea cover an IDRC/Berkman conference on ICT for development, and beyond, on Global Voices
  (tags: GV Berkman ICT4D)

• Colleagues Remember Sultan Munadi – At War Blog – NYTimes.com
  (tags: Afghanistan journalism conflict)

• Issue 1 – Wiring the Second World – Robert Saunders – The Russian Cyberspace Journal
  (tags: Russia internet geopolitics)
• СОВА / SOVA. Национализм и ксенофобия / Nationalism and xenophobia: скинхеды, язык вражды, этнические конфликты, антисемитизм, расизм, экстремизм, радикализм, фашизм, скинхэды, скины, толерантность // Язык вражды в российских СМИ
  Language of hate in FSU mass-media
  (tags: Russia xenophobia data)
• ABOUT US : Far From Moscow
  (tags: Russia music scholarship)
• Afghan Reporter Recalled as a Man of Many Abilities – NYTimes.com
  (tags: Afghanistan journalism conflict)