David Sasaki joins the conversation, which is great – it was starting to feel a little bit like a mens singles tennis match between me and Patrick. Now it’s mens doubles, or something. David starts with a strong serve, although his accusation that
Both men seem to have the academic tendency to speak in aphorisms
seems a little unfair – the heuristics post he’s referring to was simply me reminding myself that I’m not the great oracle on these issues, and that I should get ready to be wrong.1
If I understand Paul correctly, his two main criticisms of Global Voices are that 1.) it doesn’t matter if you highlight moderate voices discussing the news of their countries because it is the extreme voices who will always make the headlines and 2.) during times of conflict and emergency, focusing on participatory websites rather than humanitarian institutions will lead to lots of conversation, but less action.
No. I’m not criticising Global Voices per se, and definitely not on those particular grounds. I think Global Voices is amongst the best that the Web has to offer. What I worry about is making claims about the impact of projects that go beyond a) what the evidence shows to be true and b) what those projects can realistically expect to achieve. Global Voices meets its stated aims convincingly, but what worries me is when people start talking about Global Voices – or blogs in general – as something which they’re not. As David notes,
We often portray Global Voices as the zeitgeist of what the ignored world is discussing when in fact we are an amazing international community of individuals with large online networks and particular interests.
David’s honesty is admirable, and I think that honesty reflects one of the strengths of Global Voices in general. What I was taking issue with more was Patrick’s statement that
Global Voices is a far more effective local information and response network than FAST ever was.
I simply disagree with this.2 Global Voices is not a response network in any substantive sense, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a more effective information network either. I agree that there ought to be more attention paid to blogs as a source of information, but the strength of GV is precisely that it is not programmatic. The bloggers involved have not set themselves objectives to provide early warning information, or document human rights abuses – they are just private citizens who are writing about issues that are important to them. The situation is slightly different with Ushaidi, of course, which was conceived and developed specifically in response to the post-electoral crisis in Kenya. In the words of Ory Okolloh,
Ushahidi was mainly intended to be a mapping tool and a repository of information about the post-election crisis as seen from the view point of people on the ground. We were trying to capture information that was not mainly being reported in the mainstream (there was a lot of self-censorship in the media) and also provide a timeline for information for both mainstream and citizen reported events. In the case of real time mapping Ushahidi could be used to track where the violence or the peace efforts were taking place. We hope to be able to provide those people who are “addressing the real needs to real people” with information that might help their efforts and to be part of the “testimony” as it were of what happened.
Now that’s a series of specific objectives that can – and should – be measured in order to judge the impact of the project. However if you look at the underlying requirement for all of those objectives to be met, it seems to me that the basic requirement is a systematic data collection system – which is exactly what Ushahidi did not have. It’s entirely possible to run a Ushahidi instance with a more systematic foundation – but then it stops being the Web 2.0 poster child that everybody wants it to be, and becomes a visualisation tool for a standard human rights monitoring system.
Now I don’t have a problem with that – it’s not as if we’re over-supplied with really great data visualisation in the human rights field – but that’s not why people got excited about it. People got excited about it because it’s a Revolutionary New Way Of Doing Things Just Like Clay Shirky Says, and I’m asking what I hope is a valid question: it may be a revolutionary new way of doing things, but is it a better way of doing things? Maybe it is – in which case, show me.
I think this tension is at the heart of most of these initiatives. Patrick unwittingly gave away one of the reasons why he thinks bloggers are better than the established systems, and it goes right to the heart of this tension.
Unlike the local information networks at FAST and conventional conflict early warning systems, they are not paid informants.
This belief is part of the cult of the amateur that I think the internet has reinforced, but it is not inherently better to do something for free than it is to do it for pay. Personally I think that as soon as they stop acting as bloggers and start acting as human rights monitors, they will cease to be good bloggers – and they probably won’t be very good human rights monitors either. I also think that the strengths of citizen journalism – the amateur spirit, the personal perspectives, the improvised approach – are in this context potential weaknesses. Joshua at Registan almost nails one of the key problems for Global Voices when he says that
too many internationals, including me, are far more alike each other than they are to their home countries.
Even though many of them are from the regions or countries that they cover, the Global Voices bloggers – in certain important ways – are more like each other than they are like the people in their home countries. In particular, they share “democratic values” just as Patrick describes, and a positive, can-do attitude that impresses people.3 Yet those democratic values may be the very thing that makes them less representative, and that raises an interesting dilemma for David and the others who are interested in Rising Voices.
In relation to Ushahidi, I wrote
The virtual world isn’t resistant to real-world pressures, and it doesn’t necessarily overcome social divisions – hence the problems with the [Mashada] bulletin board. These pressures can be managed, but it’s no easy thing – but would Ushaidi be any less resistant to hijacking by people intent on promoting social divisions?
I suppose that’s my question, in the context of David’s job – what defense mechanisms do we have against the real world?
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