Something really
big is starting to happen,” geek extraordinaire Ethan Zuckerman
told a meeting of international bloggers at Harvard’s Berkman
Center for Internet and Society in 2004. “What I’m really
curious about is whether we’ll find ourselves becoming a movement.”
Two years later, that was no longer in question, as Zuckerman’s
Global Voices (GV) — co-founded with former cnn correspondent
Rebecca McKinnon — held its second annual summit at Delhi’s
India Habitat Centre last week. The issue now, as participants agreed,
was not whether blogging is a movement, but how they are to take the
blogosphere’s trans-continental conversations forward, far enough
to dent the mainstream media’s predominantly Western coverage
of events. At one point during the conference, Bala Pitchandi from New
Jersey asked via webcast what GV’s long-term goals were. “Total
world domination,” replied Zuckerman, as laughter lit up the room.
The important role
that bloggers could play within and without the newsroom became clear
for the first time in 2003, when an architect in Iraq who called himself
Salam Pax started blogging the Second Gulf War. Ever since, the international
media has often turned to bloggers in conflict zones to bring local
perspective to their coverage. For GV, this has been central to its
project — prominent bloggers from around the globe are roped in
as regional editors who would write posts linking to blogs, explaining
the context they were written in, thus making local issues accessible
to a global audience. “The nature of conversation in the blogosphere
tends to be insular,” says Neha Viswanathan, GV’s South
Asia editor. “Bloggers in a country tend to speak only to each
other. We add the context to posts and offer them to a global audience.”
The aim is to provide
media spaces that bypass State controls to get
citizens across the world to speak for themselves |
However, GV is more
than a bloggers’ community. With free speech at the core of its
manifesto, it aims to provide media alternatives that bypass government
controls to get citizens across the world to speak for themselves. Contrasted
with mainstream media practice, GV’s approach to information sharing,
for instance, encourages people to ask why a particular story is not
picked up by its editors. When questions were raised, at the summit
in Delhi, about biases and information imbalances within GV’s
coverage, Trinidadian blogger Georgia Popplewell, a GV co-managing editor,
gave the example of a Cuban who wrote in to say GV wasn’t covering
his country well. To correct the shortcoming, Popplewell hired that
blogger as Cuba editor.
The stories GV
covers come overwhelmingly from the developing world, ignoring almost
all of Western Europe and North America. (GV has been anxious to not
be seen as an American site — which is partly the reason for its
registering in the Netherlands.) For journalists, it is a mine of contacts
and story ideas; mainstream media too often turns to it for help with
on-the-ground reportage. During April’s revolution in Nepal, bbc
World picked up GV’s Nepal contributor, Parmendra, for a chat.
Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and the Mumbai train blasts were two
big events on which GV provided dedicated feeds to Reuters, one of its
sponsors. Along with foundations like MacArthur and the Dutch NGO Hivos,
Reuters also funds GV because it realises that the proliferation of
individual voices on the Internet has influenced the way information
is exchanged.
However, despite
its democratic emphasis, issues of access persist — in every country,
computer usage remains confined to the elite. How do we hear what farmers
in India or street kids in Vietnam have to say? Further, while English
is the dominant medium on the Web, it is not what most of the world
talks in. GV is trying to expand its linguistic frontiers — it
already has a Chinese version, and there are a handful of editors who
read posts in other languages and discuss them in English. Oddly, however,
when the issue came up at the conference, of all the Indians in the
room, not one was willing to be a GV Hindi editor.
There was also some
brainstorming during the summit on using software like tor to bypass
Internet censorship and what GV could do for bloggers who find themselves
under government suppression. “In Arabian blogospheres, human
rights, free speech and democracy are topics of constant discussion,”
says Amira Al Hussaini, Middle East and North Africa editor. “With
strong media censorship, online self-publishing becomes an important
outlet”.
“The world
is talking,” goes GV’s tagline, “Are you listening?”
For the innumerable conversations that GV fosters every day, Zuckerman
could as well say: the world is listening, are you talking?
