Interview with Founder of Geekcorps 88
cynical writes "WorldChanging has a new interview up with Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and editor of BlogAfrica, the best source of access to African bloggers around. Zuckerman talks about the growing role of blogging in the developing world, fighting corruption and censorship online, the emerging world of "social source software," and a lot more. It's a long, wide-ranging conversation; clearly, this guy is thinking big about the power of the web, especially outside the United States."
Third world blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
digital divide (Score:4, Insightful)
it's literally giving Power To The People - and not just the elite.
call me a socialist, call me a communist, call me a rainy day anarchist, just don't call me late for dinner.
CB
the world-wide-web as a tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Third world blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
How many public libraries are in the African boondocks?
How many of those libraries have internet access?
I think you'll find the number is vanishingly small.
Re:The first time (Score:3, Insightful)
There are quite a few people I know who can make even the banal sound exotic, and those who lead interesting lives while only publishing sentences.
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me old fashioned; but food, santitation, housing, education and social justice come first.
Who came up with this 'literacy divide' crap? I only associate this phrase with ludicrous schemes such as teaching kids impoverished African states to read.
Call me old fashioned; but food, santitation, housing, education and social justice come first.
Re:Third world blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
Second of all, it's not like censorship and oppression uniquely affect the poorest of the poor. There's a thing called the "middle class", or perhaps "Bourgeoisie" (if you're that kind of cat). Everybody who isn't politically/economically elite can suffer from these kinds of things. Take a look at China: the Great Firewall blocks the traffic of the wage-slave and entrepreneur alike.
And yes, it's more likely that those in the middle class will have the resources, education, perspective, and political voice to resist censorship on their own, but that's a tendency, not a binary situation.
Besides, tools like these don't magically make oppressive governments stop being evil--the tools have to be applied to the problem by motivated actors. It turns out (despite what Marx thought) that the middle class is the source of a hell of a lot more political resistance to government than the poor.* This isn't a denigration of the poor--it's just an observed fact of social change movements around the world in the last 50 years. So the logic follows that giving tools to fight oppression to the middle class permits them to carry the fight for everybody.
* Personally, I chalk this up to the fact that the line between the middle class and the workers that Marx noticed has blurred and become a really big, fat zone. A huge portion of the American/European middle class are wage-earners, which would make them "workers" according to Marxist thought. But they also own a substantial amount of property (houses, cars, boats, bank accounts, investments), which would make them capitalists. Funny old world we live in, isn't it?
Re:Hypocrite (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hypocrite (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a pity there isn't a -1, Missed The Point.
If people only read what they want to read, they'll never hear about anything that they don't want to read --- but should be reading. Let's say your country is having a war. It's going badly. Do people want to hear about yet another messy encounter where far too many people died on both sides with no actual result? Hell, no. They'd much rather read about heroic rescues of photogenic young soldiers, and then skip on to the sport pages. The result? They end up either not knowing about what's going on, or not caring, or both. It's good for people to have their world upset every so often, regardless of what they want.
Ever hear of freedom of the press?
Yes. It means that journalists are allowed to print anything that they think the audience should know about, which is totally different.
Re:Third world blogs (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes. They are privlidged because they live in a place where there are free and open libraries in the first place. Not to mention living in a place where internet access isn't censored.
The vagrant may be poor, but being able to live off the scraps of the rich gives that vagrant a standard of living better than working-class people in many 3rd-world countries.
um? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the context that reads very very wrong to someone from Europe. Please! Send us solar panels and laptops for our village so we can learn about your advanced American ways!
Well a large part of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I do computer support for a living (to people with MSes and PhDs) and we provide plenty of educaiton. We are happy to explain why you should not infect your computer and how to avoid it. Thing is, many don't care to listen. They don't want to learn about it, they just want it to happen with no effort on their part.
Also where do you get this illetercay from? America is a very, very literate country. Even street bums generally have functional literacy (meaning the ability to read and write enough to get around in everyday life). Just because a highschool student isn't writing thesis papers on Chaucer does not mean they are illeterate, at least as it would pertain to using technology. There is a huge difference between literacy as in English skills sufficient for university and literacy as in English skills sufficient to read the newspaper.
For education to be effective it requires desire on the part of the learner. You can't force someone to learn if they do not wish to. Thus, to an extent, there will ALWAYS be a digital divide. People that don't wish to understand computers, won't.
It's just like cars. People would do well to have basic knowledge in servicing an automobile. You don't need to be a mechanic, but know how to diagnose simple problem and do something like replace sparkplugs. However, many don't, anything that goes wrong, their car goes to the mechanic. It's not that they can't learn, it's not that their aren't Haynes and Chilton books to teach them, it's that they don't desire to do so.
Re:Third world blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
most blogs and text within is "Ego Masturbation" (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Mostly just some guy tooting his own horn, beating off to the fact that people read his dinky website.
b) It's boring... omg it's soo boring.
c) I (href link) don't(href link) like (href link) links (href link) embedded EVERYWHERE (href link) in a god damn paragraph I'm (href link) trying to read. Especially when they make a word like "zuchini" a link.. fuck!
Oh, and people who are going through genocide have better things to do than blog about their woes simply to entertain us western folks.
Love,
Zaq