Listening to Global Voices: Introduction

Colleagues Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman said during Friday morning’s introduction to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 that they felt like proud parents.

“But since she lives in Hong Kong and I live in the United States, I guess that makes us separated parents,” Zuckerman quipped.

When the two started Global Voices in 2004, they thought they were creating a single website geared to aggregating content from around the global blogosphere. Four years later, they are speaking to about 150 people in Budapest about Global Voices.com, Global Voices Advocacy, and the nearly dozen languages into which the content they aggregate and host is translated.

It’s even translated into Malagasy.

“And if you want to know where that’s spoken, it’s Madagascar,” Zuckerman helped.

MacKinnon, whose background lies in traditional journalism - the American has worked around Asia as a correspondent - in her introduction presented a brief overview of Global Voices’ history.

When she and Zuckerman worked at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, they became interested in the lack of diversity of international coverage in English-language media - the global attention flows, MacKinnon said.

So they gathered a few bloggers in 2004 - four of whom are present in Budapest - to talk about enabling the connection of the dots of the global blogosphere - particularly those dots lying outside of Western Europe and the United States.

They started an aggregation site of blogs from around the world, providing digests of what folks were talking about online. For this burgeoning task, they quickly realised they needed bloggers from different regions to start covering the blogosphere in their regions.

They employed David Sasaki to cover the Latin American blogosphere in 2005. The first Global Voices citizen media summit was held that year in London.

But it was at the following year’s summit in Delhi at which the organisation began to grow interested into becoming a multi-pronged attack on censorship.

“There are many people around the world who want to talk, but powerful people are preventing them from doing so,” MacKinnon said.
Further, trying to prompt the addition of non-elites, the educated middle and upper classes of society, to the blogosphere. This discussion led to the addition of Rising Voices and Global Voices Advocacy.

Zuckerman introduced the director of Global Voices Advocacy, Sami Ben Gharbia. One of the foremost digital rights activists, Gharbia is a Tunisian expatriate who now resides in the Netherlands.
Tunisia is one of many countries on Gharbia’s Acces Denied map in which the state often blocks social media, or Web 2.0, sites.

“We’re at a very interesting moment in time,” Zuckerman said. In some places, he said, “There is more ability to speak online than offline. There are more countries who censor offline media - print media, broadcast, television - than filter online media.

But that’s changing. People are catching up. Governments are finding ways to filter and censor online media.”

Gharbia presented government censorship of online media as a game of cat and mice.

He played snippets of activist videos published on YouTube from Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. Government reaction to all of the videos included censorship - but eventual attention to the problems raised in the videos.

His example from Morocco, by a YouTuber called “target sniper” showed police taking bribes at a border. The video was shot by a person hiding somewhere in terrain above the checkpoint. The videos inspired several people in Morocco to shoot similar videos. In the end, the government addressed the issue - shooting their own films and addressing corrupt colleagues.

He also showed the well-circulated YouTube videos of bloggers being tortured by police in Egypt.

YouTube videos from Tunisia - moving images captured on a mobile phone, showed a large protest at which two Tunisian citizens were shot by police. The mainstream media had ignored the protest and the government initially denied that it took place - and that Tunisian police shot and killed citizens.
T
he very circulation of the videos is interesting as both YouTube and Dailymotion are blocked in Tunisia.

“It’s only thanks to those videos and thanks the audience between YouTubers and bloggers that Tunisia was forced to talk about the events,” Gharbia said. “And acknowledge there were two people killed by the police.”
Gharbia presented the social web as a series of turning cogs distributing content virally - making it difficult for governments to erase all traces of content to which it is opposed.

“You have only to send an e-mail to your Blogspot account and it will start the whole machine,” he said.

Still, there is the possibility governments are working together to keep censoring content - usually not just blocking specific posts or videos but entire platforms.

“I don’t know if governments are coordinating,” Gharbia said. “But I do know activists in those countries are working together to circumvent the censorship.”

Activists - together with NGOs, researchers and technologists - are using the same techniques worldwide to circumvent government controls - as Gharbia’s annotated map illustrates.

Posted on June 27, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.