National Highway

“Something really big is starting to happen,” said Ethan Zuckerman in a meeting of international bloggers at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2004, “What I’m really curious about is whether we find ourselves becoming a movement.”

Two years later, in December 2006, Global Voices Online (GVO) had its second annual summit at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. The question now was not whether blogging constituted a movement, but how that movement should be taken forward: the movement of facilitating conversations across continents and making a dent in the predominantly Western coverage of news in the mainstream media as well as on the internet. Together with former CNN foreign correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman started GVO.

Prominent bloggers from blogospheres across the world were roped in to be regional editors and along with other contributors, this army of information warriors started to write short posts linking to blogs from all over the world, telling what bloggers had to say. They would explain the context these were being written in, and thus make local issues accessible to a global audience.

Bala Pitchandi from New Jersey asked via IRC chat: What are GV’s long-term goals? “Our long term goal is total world domination,” replied Zuckerman, and collective laughter lit up the Gulmohar seminar room.

The idea was not just to build a community of global bloggers but also to provide mainstream journalists with story ideas and local contacts. And not least, to bypass what governments feed journalists, getting citizens from across the world to speak for themselves. This is why GV covers only the second and third worlds, ignoring almost all of North America and Western Europe.

The important role that bloggers could play within and without the newsroom became clear for the first time when an architect in Iraq started blogging the war, calling himself Salam Pax. Since then, international media has often used bloggers in conflict zones to bring local perspective to their coverage, and very often they use GV for this purpose. During the April revolution in Nepal this year, BBC World picked up GVO’s Nepal contributor Paramendra for a studio chat. Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and the Mumbai train blasts were two big events this year on which GV not only did a lot of coverage but also provided dedicated feeds to Reuters. Apart from foundations like MacArthur and Hivos, Reuters also funds GV because they realise that the proliferation of individual voices on the internet has influenced the way information is exchanged on the internet. And so it was that in a meeting on corporate social responsibility in New York early this year, Global Voices bloggers participated from across the world via live chat, posing some very difficult questions coming from local concerns.

“The nature of conversations in the blogosphere tends to be insular,” says Neha Viswanathan, GV’s South Asia editor, “Bloggers in a country tend to speak to each other. GV adds the context to them and offers them to a global audience.”

At the second annual Summit in Delhi, the concerns were obvious. People wondered about biases and information imbalances within GV’s coverage. Zuckerman said that GV encouraged people to ask why a particular story was not picked up by GV editors, and Trinidadian blogger Georgia Popplewell, a co-managing editor with GV, gave the example of a Cuban who wrote in to say GV wasn’t covering Cuba well. Georgia hired that blogger as Cuba editor to do just that. Such instant connection of dots, instant coming together of volunteers and like-minded people for collaborative practice is a hallmark of Web 2.0 culture, and was seen in the conference as well. So when someone wanted to know if GV was willing to invest in disaster relief blogging, Rebecca replied that they want someone on board to cover disaster blogging from the world over. Bala Pitchandi, connected to the conference via IRC chat, instantly agreed to join.

There were concerns about reaching out. Computers are accessible to the elites of every country. How do we hear what farmers in India or street kids in Vietnam had to say? While internet on mobile phones may help widen access, there was also in the room Samuel Klein, head of the One Laptop Per Child project. English is not what most of the world talks in. There is already a Chinese GV, and there are a handful editors who read posts in other languages and discuss them in English. GV is trying to expand its web on language, but of all the Indians in the room no one was willing to be a Hindi editor for them! There have also been concerns about not being seen as an American site, and that’s partly why GV is registering itself in the Netherlands.

There was alos some brainstorming on using softwares like TOR to bypass internet censorship and whether GV would stand up for bloggers who are supressed by governments for their blogging. The idea seems to be providing people the tools to protect themselves and raising awareness about the violation of bloggers’ right to free speech rather than being an activist organisation. “In Arabian blogospheres human rights, free speech and democracy are topics of constant discussion,” said Amira Al Hussaini, Middle East and North Africa editor, “And since there is strong censorship of the media, online self-publishing becomes an important outlet”.

“The world is talking,” goes GV’s tagline, “Are you listening?” For the innumerable conversations that GV fosters every day, they could well say: the world is listening, are you talking?

‘THE PROJECT IS PEDAGOGICALLY SUSPECT’

Others may see hope in the One Laptop Per Child plan, but India’s having none of it

The issue of the digital divide has perplexed advocates of technology as a means of development for as long as the Internet has been around. The mit Media Labs’ One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a solution: distribute an inexpensively-produced laptop to all the world’s children. At the Global Voices Online Summit in Delhi last week, SJ Klein of the OLPC project demonstrated one of the first such machines, which, while designed to be child-friendly, runs on free software and has no hard drive.

The project hopes to be able to persuade governments to buy this laptop — what it calls the Children’s Machine — in bulk for as little as $100 a piece and distribute them to children. The current cost of production is $140 and is expected to fall to $100 by 2008.

Countries like Nigeria may have ordered a million machines, but the Indian government been dead against the project. There has been speculation that this summary rejection goes back to disagreements between Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Labs and the Indian government over the running of the Media Lab Asia. Negroponte is the chairman of the OLPC project and had made a presentation at Yojana Bhavan in April this year. In the government’s opposition to the project, reports have quoted former education secretary Sudeep Banerjee as saying that it was “pedagogically suspect”, and that it would even hurt the “creative and analytical abilities of the child”. States Prof TA Abinandan of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, “The cost of a million of these machines is the same as educating 1.38 million kids a year. A country which has roughly 40 percent of its kids out of its school system should not be wasting its resources on a fancy gadget of questionable educational value.”

However, Klein has it that laptops are both “a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn through independent interaction and exploration.” In this sense, the project could perhaps also be seen as a means to circumvent the problem of the quality of education in government schools, but the HRD ministry just won’t have it.

[An edited version of this article by me has appeared in Tehelka.]

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