The infrastructures of globalization - in particular the internet - encourage us to imagine the world as a thoroughly connected place, where people, goods and ideas flow freely across borders. The reality is more complicated - atoms are surprisingly mobile, while the mobility of bits is constrained by people's interests. If readers are fascinated by a story - the Green Revolution in Iran - they'll seek out available information. If they're not, whatever professional or amateur reporting is produced won't reach an audience.
Media development professionals need to stop assuming that global infrastructures equal global coverage or global interest - instead, we need to map what coverage is actually being produced and start mapping
people's consumption of media. We can rapidly discover that old imbalances in international media coverage are sustained in a digital age and that tools like Facebook don't magically build connections
across borders of language, nation and culture.
If we want citizen media to help close gaps in understanding, we need to take steps to make it easier for people to discover and embrace content from other parts of the world. This involves routinizing
translation, creating curation strategies that emphasize serendipity over existing search or social discovery methods, and taking advantage of bridge figures who can contextualize local stories. Our goal might
be to cultivate xenophiles, who are fascinated with the diversity of the world and anxious to do the hard work to cross barriers of language and culture.
Bio
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman is an activist, blogger and geek, living in Western Massachusetts and working in Cambridge as a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He is co-founder of Global Voices, a project designed to feature citizen-created media from around the world. His research focuses on ways that citizens' media can address longstanding biases in the news media.
Before working at the Berkman Center, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that shipped geeks to the developing world to work with technology entrepreneurs and community internet projects. Prior to that, he was part of the team that founded Tripod.com, one of the early online community companies. When not blogging, researching or making trouble, he chairs the board of directors of Worldchanging.com, sites on the board of Open Society Institute's Information Program and works on a variety of fun tecnology and development projects. His blog is at www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog, and Global Voices is globalvoicesonline.org.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
Important points that most people never think about, supported with data. More systematic and thorough evaluation of "who looks at what" on the web is a necessary first step in assessing how the web affects/reflects attitudes and behaviors.
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