Access and Voice in New Technology – GFMD08
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Access and Voice in New Technology – Athens, Greece December 8, 2008
James Deane, Head of Policy Development, BBC World Service Trust is trying to get a group of folks who mostly work with legacy media to talk about online media. Ivan Sigal, executive director of Global Voices, talks about the challenge of working for an audience that is dispersed and fragmented.
(I’m at the Global Forum for Media Development, nearly 400 people from around the world who work to support media in their own country or others, you can watch webcast here: http://gfmd.info/ or follow #GFMD08. Warning – liveblogging ahead, inaccuracies and typos guaranteed.)
Ivan Sigal is explaining Global Voices and the challenges of serving an audience online. James asks how they’re going to sustain the work. Ivan says it’s very tough, they’re working on building on their community-driven project to make a new strategy.
Eduardo Avila explains Voces Bolivianas, a project to get marginalized people in Bolivia blogging. James askes about whether this work is staying in the blogosphere or is it being picked up in mainstream media? Eduardo says it’s getting out more in the developed world, because he is Global Voices editor and features the work of Voces Bolivianas there so more people know Christina (Bolivian blogger) outside Bolivia than in.
Ivan argues for the “network effect” thinking of information as a process. The reason Global Voices wanted to here at GFMD was to try to figure out how to build links between blogs and community media.
Someone brings up the issue of how individuals get privileged to be speakers.
Jane Ransom of International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) says there has been too little attention to the role of gender not enough info. She is glad to see projects like Eduardo’s bringing women’s and other marginalized voices online. What happens when the 1000 blooming flowers of the blogosphere begin to be aggregated? Will we be careful enough to preserve women’s leadership?
Whether Blogher is a women’s movement or a bloggers’ movement. James Deane says but why didn’t the women’s movement take root on the ‘net? Jane Ransom – I don’t think there’s a global women’s equality movement on the Internet – someone contradict me if I’m wrong. But I don’t think that means there’s something wrong.
Ivan brings us back to the role of institutions or movements in the citizen media environment.
Ying Chan from Hong Kong University is showing some wonderful information on the media and Internet in China. A hysterical story about a picture of a supposedly extinct tiger that turned out to be stolen from a calendar. See the story here. And much more serious stories about citizen reporters reporting on injustice of many kinds. Workers in brick kilns held in slavery were rescured thanks to a letter by a parent on the Internet saying I’m looking for my child that helped break the case. It’s so moving to hear about these stories from other countries – the former Soviet region I’ve spent so much time with feels so tired and cynical.
She says the government and Internet users are in a game of “spy vs. spy.” They change their blocking and filtering techniques, we go around them, they learn new ones.Troy from USAID asks about journalistic standards and market forces. Chan: you can’t expect market forces alone to give us good journalism in any medium. She mentions the work of Global Network Initiative (which both Internews and Berkman both are part of, along with many other fine organizations) to get corporations to agree to ethical principles about user privacy, freedom of expression, etc.
Chan: we don’t have enough civil society institutions paying attention to what’s happening on the Internet, what’s happening on the ‘net is very raw, it has the best and the worst of everything. But there need to be more intervention there.
Laura Stein from Internews DC asks what should local legacy media do in relationship to citizen journalism/blogs? Should media development be looking at the Global Voices model, getting local media to work with more with online media, as aggregators?
Ivan Sigal – yes! In fact, why talk about new and old media any more (GO IVAN!) we need to look at values and audiences everything is converging. Some citizen media will take on the values and functions of traditional journalism and vice versa.
Masha Rasner says what about former Soviet Union, no one ever talks about them and citizen media, are they behind the curve? (Masha: for Russia, the answer is no, they’re totally active, they just don’t bother promoting themselves in the West, because they don’t need the West. Other countries like Georgia ARE, by all accounts, behind.) Woman from Panos says yes, let’s have a lunch discussion tomorrow about this.
James wrapping up asks Chan to wrap up and talk about the next 5 years in China. Chan: Ivan’s right it’s not new and old it’s digital media. I’m an optimist. There are many examples of the best invtigative reporting in China being digital media, they are a driving force for traditional media, in spite of stepped up government control. The technology is so powerful and people’s desire for information is irrestible.
Someone from Nepal – we can’t look that far ahead, the euphoria of freedom is fading, we’ll soon be in a situation where we need the digital media as in Burma, China and so on to be free. The form of blogging and digital media, its immediacy and localization is really better than standard news style. It’s keeping traditional media on its toes. It’s not either/or, both sides must learn from each other.
