Comments on: What I think we’re trying to do…

By: The End of Blogging Utopia

The End of Blogging Utopia — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:15:00 +0000

[...] and funny guy David Weinberger comments on Ethan Zuckerman’s remarks (both interesting fellas, and well worth reading; David in particular an antidote to the relentless [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » Fred Turner: the rhetoric of cyberutopianism

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:59:49 +0000

[...] This set of ideas is often called “cyberutopianism”, usually by people who are criticizing or attempting to complicate these ideas. My colleage Rebecca MacKinnon offers a critique of the idea that the Internet will neccesarily bring democracy to China, arguing that China may instead transform the Internet in its own image. I’ve argued (in a response to Moore’s essay) that it’s a massive oversimplification to expect the Internet to create social change in developing nations without addressing underlying disparities of access and attention. More recently, I’ve been trying to make the case that the prophets of cyberutopia need to be read prescriptively, not descriptively – they’re describing a possible, not an inevitable, future. [...]

By: ABC Digital Futures » Blog Archive » The evolution of blogging

ABC Digital Futures » Blog Archive » The evolution of blogging — Mon, 21 May 2007 01:55:16 +0000

[...] Zuckerman’s post is a fascinating insight into the origins of Global Voices – the blog that “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.” It’s also something of a study of the germination and flowering of an activist mind and sensibility… How Zuckerman’s experiences with the early days of the internet led him to discover activist users in politically-repressed countries and the realisation of the net’s potential to give a voice to those struggling for basic human and political rights outside the spotlight of mainstream media. [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » The survival of languages in a digital age

Wed, 16 May 2007 22:27:11 +0000

[...] There’s a tendency, I think, to believe that the spread of the Internet and the desktop computer is inherently connected to the global spread of the English language. (That was certainly my assumption fifteen years ago as I played with early internet systems.) But we’re starting to discover that this is a fallacy. There are now more blog posts per day in Japanese than in English, and there may be even more Chinese bloggers. (While Technorati does a great job of counting blogs that contact pingservers to let them know about updated blogs, many Chinese blogs don’t use these services and tend to get undercounted.) As I wrote about last week, when a large number of users who speak a particular language come online, they seem to start talking to each other in their native tongue, rather than in a second tongue. [...]

By: Amira

Amira — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:42:03 +0000

Interesting insight Ethan! It was worth every word! Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share this dream.

By: Alek Tarkowski

Alek Tarkowski — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:27:32 +0000

“What’s harder is finding people interested in reading what they have to say”.

I remember reading a study of the environmental social movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The researcher argued that while the movement set for itself the goal of transforming the society, it mainly succeeded in transforming the members of the movement. So in some way it was a failure, and in some not, only in a roundabout manner.

So maybe this is a similar case. It would be wonderful to have readers, but writing these texts is a transformative experience.

Though the problem of cacophony, to which the lack of readers is clearly connected, is a big big one. What if, in a society of writers (towards which we are maybe moving, though the blog growth curve is supposedly flattening) those occupied with writing don’t have enough time to properly read? Especially when being media-savvy creatures there are interconnected into this web of hyperabundance?

I tried reading Global Voices regularly, but the subjects are too alien or abstract, and there’s too much content. It’s intimidating. The only solution I see is cleaning out my RSS Reader of all feeds and reading GV instead. An interesting experiment, but I’m hopelessly glued to my feeds!

By: paolo

paolo — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:33:45 +0000

As usual, your “freakishly long posts” are worth every second spent reading them.

You say “our project is encouraging people from around the world to talk to one another” and “What’s harder is finding people interested in reading what they have to say”.
I wonder if the solution is not changing this “reading” with “listening”.
What about many face to face encounters? People interested in listening what other people from other parts of the world have to say.
I hardly have the time to read posts about a part of the world I don’t know and I’m not going to meet directly any time soon. It is hard to me to get a partial understanding of what is going on in Italy, why should I try to keep up with events in Chad? And why not in Georgia? And why not in Vietnam? Or in Harare?
But I’m hyper-willing to listen someone from Chad when she is a guest in my house or when I’m a guest in her house, listening from her lips what is going on in Chad, what bothers her, what makes her happy, …

And somehow CouchSurfing (http://couchsurfing.com) is all about this.
CS mission is “Participate in Creating a Better World… One Couch at a Time”. “CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal. CouchSurfing is not about the furniture, not just about finding free accommodations around the world; it’s about making connections worldwide. We make the world a better place by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents, cultures, genders, races and any other type of border. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world! ”

But as you can imagine the people who travel a lot and get a chance to listen people from other countries are mainly rich, white, European and North-American.
For instance, in the entire Africa there are 3480 Couchsurfers (and most of them are white people leaving over there) while in Europe there are 94271 CouchSurfers. See http://www.couchsurfing.com/statistics.html for more.

This unbalance must be fixed. And maybe you have good ideas (and good “freakishly long posts”) about how to fix it.

About your post, maybe you are interested in knowing that there are 3 small typos: 1) “writing a paper” links to http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/ and not the specific paper, 2) “relavent” and 3) “millions of of”

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 13 May 2007 01:41:29 +0000

Really liked this post, helped put into perspective some of the thinking behind GVO.

“It’s been surprisingly easy to find xenophiles who want to work on Global Voices. What’s harder is finding people interested in reading what they have to say.”

One thing I think is that it might not be realistic to expect the average person in, say, Madagascar, to be interested in what’s happening in Japan (for example). On the other hand, I’m sure that there *are* many people in South Korea, and in China, and other East Asian countries that would be interested in reading Japanese perspectives (and vice versa). The same goes for other clusters of countries across the globe (the case of China/Korea/Japan is particularly compelling given the huge language barriers, but that’s another issue…)

So maybe while the “unitary net culture” might be a false dream, the idea of starting by bridging regional clusters — and then possibly expanding from there — seems, to me at least, a good starting point.

By: A Social History of the Internet at Mohamed Nanabhay’s Blog

A Social History of the Internet at Mohamed Nanabhay’s Blog — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:10:03 +0000

[...] Ethan Zuckerman has just posted a powerful and compelling essay on his reasons for (co-)founding Global Vocies. It is more a social history of the Internet than an “about us” post. In it he suggests that the utopian ideals and values that were held last century (okay, last century sounds dramatic but remember this is internet time!) has failed to scale as the internet became more broadly available. This is because this utopian vision didn’t factor in the rich and complex nature of the history, culture, langauge, religion and experience that is deeply ingrained in societies across the globe. [...]

By: JKE

JKE — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:57:10 +0000

Great post indeed.

And I learned that what “I’ve been trying to do” in the past on my blog must have been this bridge blogging approach you mentioned in the article.

So what is GV all about? Just a platform for stories from around the world for an audience that is mainly interested in local content and funstuff?
Are we expecting too much from the readers?