Listening to Global Voices: Notebook

News and notes from the EJC staff listening to the Global Voices conversation in Budapest:

Bite out of the blogosphere

When gathering RSS feeds for the EJC’s aggregation page, I wondered why in the world a seemingly serious Pakistani blog would be called Teeth Maestro. I thought it was a cultural reference I didn’t understand.
Turns out, the Teeth Maestro is a dentist, Dr. Awab Alvi.
He and a few friends gained notariety in the international blogosphere when they worked to help Pakastani bloggers work around technical censorship in Pakistan with their site PKblogs.com. The government there blocked access to blogspot.com, a hosting platform, in 2006.
Reflecting on the creation of PKblogs after its creation, Alvi realised he wanted to be more forward-thinking with his online activism.
“Taking reactionary steps is is somehow lame. You want to be proactive… get these tools designed beforehand,” he said.

Back on the chain gang?

Rebecca MacKinnon spent more than a decade covering Asia for CNN before co-founding Global Voices. She is now an assistant professor for new media in Hong Kong.
She used an impressive chart showing the lack of online links between English-language and Chinese media sites concered with the Olympics to illustrate the lack of communication between Westerners and Chinese society.
So it’s unsurprising that when conversations between these two societies are facilitated via translation and platforms like Twitter, misconceptions and misinformation fly.
“It’s a psychological issue,” MacKinnon said. “How do we talk to each other with compassion and understanding rather than just yell at each other about who is more brainwashed?”

Talk to me

Global Voices is now available in Italian, Hindi, Albanian and Macedonian, it’s Lingua staff announced Saturday to a room full of applause.
When Ethan Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices, he said, the idea was to translate these kinds of languages into English. Not the other way around.
But the Global Voices community - a highly decentralised staff comprised largely of volunteers - wanted to translate into other languages. So they did.
Why?
Cherry blossoms.
Rezwan of Bangladesh, a volunteer translator for Global Voices, said he did not know anything about cherry blossoms until reading an article translated from Japan about celebrating the blooms in springtime.
He translated it into Bangla - and received heartwarming feedback from a reader who had also never come in contact with cherry blossoms.
“That’s when I knew I am not doing a wrong thing, I am going in the right direction,” he said.

Freedom of speech: A winning team

Football managers who win keep their jobs. They stay out of the owners’ office.
Losing managers are critiqued. They can lose their jobs.
So it is with freedom of speech, it seems. When it isn’t needed - when a society is “winning”, i.e able to fulfil its needs and wants on a high level, there’s not of concern about free speech.
Unsuccessful sides - er, societies - however, have a lot to talk about.
But many at the Global Voices conference are concered about how to keep society interested in exersizing its freedom of speech so that it isn’t “out of shape” when needed.

Posted on June 29, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.