Global Voices…
by Imran Ali
Last month - I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.
Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.
Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!
Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…
- Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
- Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
- As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
- SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content - from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
- Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.
Though such insights aren’t unique - we’ve covered them previously - they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users - the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman's full presentation at his blog ]
