Category: Digital Activism

Is the Internet Revolution Really Unprecedented?

How much new is there in our contemporary communications revolution, enabled by the Internet, pushed forward by blogs and microblogs? A look into history can be clarifying. And it is surprising how often Elizabeth Eisenstein uses the same phrases that today describe the purportedly unprecedented characteristics of the Internet to tell her history of “The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe”.

The similarity between blog and printing press is to obvious to go unnoticed, and many have extended on this allegory. But Eisenstein’s account highlights details which most advocates of the rise of those who were formerly called the audience will likely overlook. Who would have guessed that crowdsourcing is a practice half a millenium old? But indeed, early printers of maps and globes and natural compendia already asked their readers to contribute their discoveries to following editions, as Eisenstein shows. “After printing, large-scale data collection did become subjects to new forms of feedback which had not been possible in the age of scribes.”

This, of course, is not the collaborative process enabled by the Internet which we see today in the Wikipedia, and which Clay Shirky invests so much hope in. But Eisenstein’s work is fascinating because it allows us to look for the general principles that communications revolutions come with. Enhanced feedback processes, it seems, are one of them.

I have often heard from sceptics that they don’t see any new ideas in blogs. How can a medium be revolutionary if it just spreads the contents of its traditional predecessors, undermixed with urban myths and conspiracy theories, they ask. A historical perspective seems helpful, because the same is true for the printing press: Early printed books did barely contain any new content; in fact, they often served to spread myths and charlatanry, alongside the same old, unscientific theories as before.

Eisenstein claims that there is a benefit in knowing three wrong theories instead of one. From comparison, their inconsistence can be realized – and new, better-fitting theories can be devised. We might think similarly about the Internet. My generation has already grown up with near infinite sources of information at their hands, open for comparison. Surely, most people don’t use these intellectual pastures of plenty, but what can they effect as tools of those who do?

“The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe” had originally come to my attention via a mention in Graeme Kirkpatrick’s “Technology & Social Power”. There, the author enhances Eisenstein’s arguments in connecting it with Habermas’ writings on the emergence of the “public sphere”. He writes that “only through the agency of print [...] does it become possible for people to think of themselves as members of an ‘imagined community’, the basis of modern nationalism”.

The fascinating question that arises is, of course, whether this development will find an equivalent in the social media age. Ala’a Abdel Fattah recently wrote, regarding the current revolutions in the Middle East, that “[f]rom the internet and satellite TV a new pan-Arabism is born”, and Zeynep Tufekci (when rebutting Malcolm Gladwell) touched on hopes for an social media-enabled globalism as a possible force against global problems such as climate change:

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity that is bigger and more powerful than a handful of corporations and the corrupt, self-perpetuating class of politicians. [...] I say, bring on the hive mind, please let it be global in scale as nothing less will do, and let Facebook and Twitter lead the way.

But is this global hive mind really emerging? Despite great efforts such as Global Voices, it doesn’t seem as if national media spheres were truly converging. I recently did a series of interviews for an upcoming publication, and inspired by Ala’a comment I also asked about the chances for a social media-enabled pan-Africanism. While most interviewees had high hopes, the status quo seems less promising. I’ll quote the great Ethan Zuckerman:

I think that’s wildly optimistic. I see very little conversation outside of individual regions, with the exception of a few cross-continent ties (Kenya to Ghana, for instance.) It’s rare to see dialog between Anglophone and Francophone speakers, for instance, and the conceptual barrier that separates sub-Saharan and Northern Africa remains firmly in place in a digital age. I’d love to see digital media emerge into regional media, and will wait to see that before I indulge in Nkrumist fantasies.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Amazon.

Which revolution is being televised?

As to be expected, I am glued to my laptop at the moment following the developments of the situation in Egypt. What strikes me is the communicational difference to the situation in Iran 2009: With the Internet (mostly) shut down, Al Jazeera, as well as news agencies AP and Reuters, are nearly the sole source of information.

Naturally, corporate foreign news organisations are confined to major urban centers, in the case of Al Jazeera (resp. Al Jazeera English) Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. And following numerous attacks on their reporters, they are even restricted to their own offices. The revolution is being televised – but which revolution does the television show?

Since the Internet and mobile network shutdown, news from rural areas have all but vanished from international reports. Commentators have repeatedly stressed that the uprise in Egypt is exceptional for happening all over the country, but whatever is happening outside the urban centers right now – it goes unnoticed. I.e., for the international audience it effectively does not take place.1

In a short digression, it’s also noteworthy that there are now news that Al Jazeera Arabic was taken off air a couple of minutes ago. The most important news source for Egyptians first on the revolution in Tunesia and then on the developments in their own country is thus no longer available. Alaa Abdel Fattah, Egyptian superblogger and longtime opposition activist, has pointed out the impact of supranational media in the Guardian: “From the internet and satellite TV a new pan-Arabism is born.”

It’s a close call to compare this situation to the much talked-about role of social media during the “green revolution” in Iran one and a half years ago. What is noteworthy is that Blogs, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter diversified the range of news sources – I might just point to the videos of the death Neda Agha-Soltan, which were spread over the Internet. While apparently not relevant to the organisation of protest, Twitter and other social media certainly changed the portrayal and perception of the “green revolution” in the West.

However, in Iran the protests never spread nationwide in the way they are now in Egypt. There were demonstrations in other major cities apart from Tehran, yet they stayed minor events in comparison to the mass rallies in the capital. Most notably, I barely found (English-language) sources on the ongoings in these smaller cities. Should one conclude that the Internet doesn’t make reporting on uprisings (spatially) more diverse?

The recent developments in Tunesia seem to go counter such an analysis. Sure, the situation there went unnoticed by a broader (Western – it was amplified powerfully by Al Jazeera in the Arab world) audience; but social media such as movie-sharing platforms were used from the beginning to spread news about the uprising from the beginning.

The Internet enables us to get informed on the ongoings in any place connected to the network, however remote it might otherwise be. Egypt’s Internet shutdown has effectively narrowed down our perspective to the angles of Al Jazeera’s television cameras. Does that change civil resistance? Being skeptical about media’s role in these in general, I am not sure. But it is certainly an issue to watch as events unfold.

  1. Just as I am writing this, Al Jazeera English is interviewing somebody from Bani Suwaif. So it seems they are, after all, able to create connections to more remote places. [↩]

Review: Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum

I attended Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum on June 22 & 23 (days two and three). This year’s topic of the conference was climate change, with a focus both on technical and social solutions and the way media deals with the issue. The Global Media Forum also featured an award ceremony for the winners of the BOBs. Here are some short (but still belated) notes.

Environmental reporters under threat

A panel including investigative reporters from from China, Pakistan, Egypt and Haiti as well as free speech advocates from RSF and CPJ was devoted to the threats professional as well as citizen journalists encounter when writing about local environmental issues. Reporters without Borders just have a report out on this, “High-risk subjects: Deforrestation and Pollution”, which provides a good world-wide overview of the issue.

Writing about environmental issues often gets people into conflict with companies and local government, which are in many cases strongly intermingled. A Moroccan activist told me that he keeps his anonymity not out of fear of the government, but because companies would not employ him if they found out about his commitment to preserve the Mediterranean environment. This has been the fate of Egyptian Tamer Mabrouk, who was fired from his job and fined about 5.000 Euros for blogging about his employer’s illegal waste-dumping.

Liu Jianqiang, probably China’s most influential investigative journalist, told a similar story. His reports on environmental issues such as genetically manipulated seeds have attracted a lot of attention. Prime minister Wen Jiabao himself is said to have stopped work on the “Tiger Leaping Gorge” dam when Liu broke news that it lacked official approval. Yet he lost his job at the prestigious Southern Weekly over an unauthorised interview with the Washington Post – an excuse to get rid of a journalist who had angered influential companies and local government with his stories, Liu says.

While CPJ’s Frank Smyth told the harrowing story of Russian newspaper editor Mikhail Beketov, who was nearly beaten to death for reporting critically on plans to build a commercial centre in a forrest area, RSF’s Jean-François Julliard warned that “economic pressure is a strong threat”. Newspapers are facing losses in ad sales if they write articles critical of major local companies, and journalists or bloggers are living in fear to lose their jobs.

Besides violence and economic pressure, legal procedures are another way to bar environmental reporters from doing their work. Smyth reported that Lucio Flavio Pinto, founder of the Brazilian magazine Jornal Pessoal, did not dare to attend the Global Media Forum. Pinto is currently facing more than 30 lawsuits brought against him by companies. He does not want to leave Brazil out of fear that courts could rule against him in one of these lawsuits in his absence.

To avoid these threats, Liu advised his colleagues to fact-check their reports with the utmost accuracy so as to not allow their opponents to legitimately challenge their work. Rina Saeed Khan, from Pakistan, “as a developing country journalist, you have to make as many international links as possible”, saying that international pressure was important to free persecuted journalists.

My German readers may also be interested in an article I wrote for Spreeblick about this issue, “Wer über Umweltschutz schreibt, lebt gefährlich”.

Listen to the session’s audio recording on SoundCloud.

Two projects on solutions to climate change

One panel, which discussed “covering climate protection and possible solutions”, showcased two interesting media projects with a positive outlook on climate change. One is run by journalists, one by activists. I’ll spare you the discussion on whether there is a difference between journalism and activism (and if yes, what is it?).

Global Ideas, produced by Deutsche Welle, is devoted to “showcasing people & projects from around the world taking action against climate change.” Their weekly six-minute videos feature entrepreneurs mostly in the energy sector (e.g. “Biomass briquettes in India”. All the content is available in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese). Their communication efforts on Twitter are not really successful yet, but they say they forward any request they get to the respective organization.

OurWorld 2.0, a UN University project based in Tokyo, “reports on and analyzes innovations in order to inspire people to learn” in four categories – climate, oil, food and biodiversity. It’s a webzine (about one profound article every two days) with occasional videos produced at quite a high quality. Their world-wide aim is visible in a map showing the location of the webzine’s subjects. OurWorld 2.0 is published in both English and Japanese.

Listen to the session’s audio recording on SoundCloud.

Ushahidi wins the Best of Blogs award

Crisis mapping tool Ushahidi was awarded the prize as “best weblog” at this year’s BOBs. I must say I don’t really understand why – their blog is very informative, but to me it seems as if the jury rather chose Ushahidi as a platform and organization. Nevertheless, it certainly is a very interesting project.

Erik Hersman said that while the technology behind Ushahidi wasn’t new, its use is. While “technology will always be only be ten percent of the solution”, these ten percent allowed them to “disrupt the status quo” in the aid sector, which he called the “huminatarian-industrial complex” during the press conference. Those of you following Ushahidi more closely might notice that Erik perceives the importance of these 10% vastly different from his colleague Ory Okolloh, who recently cautioned: “Don’t get too jazzed up! Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.”

Finally, some general words on the Global Media Forum

All in all, I really enjoyed Deutsche Welle’s conference. Not so much because of the panels – I only managed to see a few – but because of the great participants. The conference had an extremely multicultural atmosphere, aided by the attendance of Deutsche Welle’s international staff. I finally had the opportunity to meet Jillian C. York, who won the best English blog award for her project Talk Morocco, a blog featuring several well-known Moroccan bloggers’ articles in monthly single-topic “forums” (check out their latest edition on citizen media, including a highly critical article by my friend Mahdi).

But I was also disappointed about some things I heard. On the “dangers” panel, Jean-François Julliard did not caution to admit that in the field of environmental reporting in non-free countries, bloggers are more in advance than traditional journalists. But other panels, focusing on the role of journalists in times of climate change, were full of the ignorance of professionals, who kept up the image of journalists as reporters of nothing but the matter of fact, which prompted a Norwegian colleague to say that “this kind of objectivism has survived only in journalism”.

Alex Kirby, a veteran BBC environmental reporter, moderated the first session I attended, entitled “Who will fuel our future? A fundamental debate between rivalling energy sources.” In the beginning, Kirby said to the announcer: “You called me a gentleman twice, but I am a journalist and these two don’t go together.” Indeed, I twittered, a journalist should court nobody. Yet the session proved to be an advertising space for such controversial companies as the Desertec project, with almost no criticism.

In fact, Deutsche Telekom’s Ignacio Campino dared to propose that journalists team up with companies to “educate” the “customers” on the issue of sustainability. All this at a broadcaster’s conference. Do I even have to ask to which level journalism must have degenerated to make this shameful proposal possible?

All the sessions are up as audio recordings on SoundCloud.