Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
I’m glad I went to Davos, some years back. I went twice, back in the days when I was running Geekcorps and Davos seemed like a great opportunity to meet wealthy and powerful people and raise money for my project. The raising money part never actually worked, but it was certainly good fun to see what sorts of conversations do and don’t take place in a venue like the World Economic Forum.
I stopped going because it’s expensive, even when you’re representing a charity and don’t pay the admission fee. Travel to Davos costs a great deal, and the hotels are so expensive that I ended up staying in a spare room in a hospital the second year I attended. (Yes, they were renting rooms… though getting injured and seeking a hospital room might also work if you’re truly desperate.) And while there’s an undeniable thrill to rubbing elbows with the rich, famous and powerful, the talks weren’t nearly as good as those at TED or Pop!Tech and I never had any luck raising money in the Davos setting. Good fun, but not good for my NGO, so ultimately not worth my time.
But thanks to my friend Loïc Le Meur, I’ve had the chance to have a virtual Davos experience this year. I met Loïc years ago at Davos and we’ve stayed in touch since, which has let me watch him launch the Paris Les Webs conference and videoblogging startup Seesmic. I’m always amazed at his relentless creativity in getting people to play with the tools he’s building. And today he snagged Kofi Annan… and me.
Loïc convinced the former Secretary General of the UN to give him a fifteen minute interview on camera late today at Davos, and then solicited questions for Annan via Seesmic. Below are my two questions for Secretary General Annan and his responses.
The summary, for those not interested in the video conversation: I asked what citizens in wealthy countries should do to support UN efforts in eastern DRC, western Sudan and, perhaps in the future, Somalia. I also asked what lessons the continent could take from Ghana’s elections and how those lessons could be applied in other contexts. His responses? The UN security council needs to stop issuing mandates without resources to carry them out. More than more troops on the ground, the peacekeeping forces need resources to increase mobility – 4x4s and helicopters, primarily, and citizens need to pressure their leaders to provide the resources. Regarding the election, we need to study what worked in Ghana and try to adopt techniques and lessons for other African democracies.
Okay, so it wasn’t quite as exciting as asking Annan these questions face to face, but it beats flying to Zurich. Thanks for the opportunity, Loïc, and Mr. Secretary General. And thank you, internet – the world really does get a little stranger every day.
Like Erik Hersman, who tagged me for this meme, I usually duck Internet memes. Generally, I duck because they’re a little silly and I suspect people don’t actually want answers to the questions asked. This meme – “Why I Blog About Africa” – I’ve ducked because it’s hard.
This meme began in Francophone Africa, started by Théophile Kouamouo in Abidjan, and it’s spread first through French-language blogs and now into the Anglophone Afrosphere. Elia Varela Serra has rounded up and translated French responses, as well as a set of English responses, and it’s a fascinating set of responses from people who live on the continent who’d like the rest of the world to better understand their home countries and what they love about their continent.
For those of us who love and write about Africa and aren’t from there, the motivations are a little different, I think. I write about Africa because I’m dumb about it, and writing makes me less dumb.
This summer, I gave a talk in the Netherlands about my first trip to Africa, as a student in 1993. One of the themes of that talk was what an idiot I was, how little I knew about Ghana as I was moving there, and how much help I needed from friends to bridge barriers of culture before I could really understand my neighborhood, my city, my community.
Most Americans are idiots about Africa. It’s not entirely our fault – unless you’re looking for it, you stumble over very little news about Africa in American media, and less that’s not about natural disaster, poverty or bad leadership. Certainly part of why I blog about Africa is to try to convince people that there are other sides to see, and to celebrate.
But that’s not the real reason, if I’m being honest. I’ve spent a great deal of time blogging about Somalia not because I have happy stories to share, but because I know so little about that country, its history, its present and future. Writing forces me to learn, and sharing what I learn helps me learn more, as people correct me, contradict me and explain things to me. Ultimately, learning about Somalia – a place I’ve never travelled – has taught me a great deal about how my country exerts power and fights wars. These aren’t happy lessons, but they’re ones I’m grateful for.
It’s traditional to tag bloggers at the end of a post like this, urging them to respond as well… but I’m late to the game. Instead, let me link to some of the other amazing African and Afrophile bloggers who’ve answered the questions with their own reasons, ranging from the silly to the inspiring.
Black Looks
David Ajao
Rebekah Heacock
Zambian Economist
Juliana Rotich
Rafiq Philips
Denford Magora
What An African Woman Thinks
I’ve noted in the past that it’s hard to pay attention to news stories in other parts of the world when you don’t have a personal connection to them. If you don’t know any Moldovans and can’t find Moldova on a map, you’re likely to ignore news about that country. Joi Ito calls this “the caring problem”, and it’s one of the phenomena I’m most interested in understanding and overcoming.
There’s a parallel to this problem, of course, which is the tendency to pay close attention people and places we do care about. I paid far more attention to the election in Ghana than to other African elections, for understandable reasons. And the Global Voices community, right now, is paying very close attention to Madagascar. We’ve got a number of terrific Malagasy correspondents, a major project in Madagascar under the Rising Voices initiative, and a lively Malagasy-language version of the Global Voices site.
And, unfortunately, there’s a lot to pay attention to in Madagascar right now. On the heels of a cyclone that’s displaced thousands of people, the nation is facing a serious political showdown that’s descended into violence. The conflict pits President Marc Ravalomanana against Andry Rajoelina, mayor of the capital city of Antananarivo. Rajoelina is a media entrepreneur, and manages a television network that has been a thorn in the side of the president.
In December, Rajoelina’s network broadcast an interview with Madagascar’s former president, who is now in exile in France. President Ravalomanana responded by closing down Rajoelina’s station. The mayor accused the president of dictatorial behavior, and called on supporters to protest in Antananarivo. Unfortunately, protesters set fire to a complex including government buildings and a television station linked to the president. More than 35 people have been killed, primarily people trapped in the building as it caught fire. Protests continue today, but have been peaceful, with more than 40,000 opposition supporters in the streets.
Photo of the fire by avylavitra
There’s not a ton of news coming from Madagascar through official channels. Search on Google News and you’ll see a few hundred stories… which turn out to be roughly half a dozen wire stories, reprinted by various publications. There’s lots, lots more information on our site, with reports from Twitter with rumors that the president has fled, discussions of instability on a Malagasy-language Yahoo group, and photos from the ground. If you look at the Topix page on Madagascar, roughly half the coverage is from our site.
David Sasaki notes that the reports coming from Madagascar help emphasize the importance of citizen media in countries where there’s little international media attention. He also points out that citizen media is helping show sides of Madagascar that are more hopeful than the recent disasters and protests.
We’ll continue to follow the story in Madagascar closely, and I hope there will be more good, and less sad, news to share in the future.
My colleagues rock.
When you give a talk at the Berkman Center these days, one of your rewards is a Berkman lunch apron. I like it so much that I’m now trying to schedule two more talks so I can get the Berkman spatula and spice rack.
(Next week’s lunch talk is about the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report authored by John Palfrey with a great deal of work by colleagues including danah boyd. Rumor has it the aprons they’ll be receiving are flameproof.)
Actually, the reason talks at Berkman are such fun is the opportunity to solicit feedback from a room full of extremely smart people. I gave a talk yesterday that touched on topics from cartography to phrenology, and I’ve been drowning in feedback and suggestions from friends for the past 24 hours. This is a very, very good thing, and a great reminder that the best time to give a talk on a topic is while you’re still figuring out what you think about it.
So, here’s the audio and video of the presentation, called either “Mapping Globalization” or “Mapping the Connected World”. (Globalization is an easier for folks to understand, while Connected World has less baggage.) I’m especially happy with the video as my excellent Berkman friends feature the slides primarily and video of me speaking only secondarily. Those slides are on Slideshare as well.
And here’s a quick outline and bibliography, either for those who don’t have an hour to hear me babble, or for folks who were hoping for more references during the talk.
I started by talking about a favorite map of mine, a “rebbelib”, which is a map of islands and ocean swells made by navigators in the Marshall Islands in the late 19th century. Made of sticks and shells, these maps are highly accurate in terms of island position – though scale is often distorted – but even more fascinating because they show phenomenon we commonly wouldn’t depict on maps. I love these maps because they show a critical piece of infrastructure – the ocean swells – which were critical to understand for navigation and for safe and efficient ocean travel.
Some references to maps from the Marshall Islands:
A detailed article from Visual Wikipedia
Academic references to articles on stick charts and to Captain Winkler’s 1901 article on rebbelibs
An excellent article on stick charts which features Marshall Islands stamps, which depict the charts.
An analysis of Winkler’s paper and his history of studying rebbelib
Another excellent overview of stick charts
A contemporary geographer looks at the charts and connects them to paddling songs, used to measure time
I’ve found (and been sent by many readers of this blog) a wealth of maps from the late 19th century that depict infrastructure: shipping routes, telegraph connections, railroads. It seems to me – though it’s hard for me to verify – that there’s a surge of interest in mapping infrastructure at the end of the 19th century, a moment in time where a great deal of infrastructure is being put into place, which helps enable a great wave of globalization. By some measures – particularly the mobility of individuals via migration – the world was significantly more globalized in 1900 than it is today.
It seems to me that these maps are a form of celebrating this infrastructure, and indirectly celebrating the connection it made possible.
The Mapping Globalization project at Princeton has some excellent early infrastructure maps.
Library of Congress’s collection of Railroad Maps.
One of my blog posts on mapping infrastructure.
While our age is characterized by international connectivity – made possible by infrastructures like fiberoptic cable, integrated electrical grids, air travel and container shipping – it’s surprisingly hard to find maps of infrastructure. This is especially odd because we’ve come to expect a huge amount of geographic data to be available via sites like Google Maps, and we tend to complain when these maps are censored (blurring Dick Cheney’s residence, for instance.)
Certain infrastructures have been mapped ad nauseum – there’s an explosion of internet mapping in the early 1990s, which peters out around 2004, perhaps because the internet is so complex that mapping becomes more of an aesthetic exercise than a geographic one.
Martin Dodge’s Atlas of Cyberspaces, 1997-2004
opte project’s internet maps, last rendered in January 2005
Telegeography’s undersea cable map
Maps of other types of infrastructure are available, but usually from commercial vendors, and they’re often not cheap. (I griped about the cost of Petroleum Economist’s maps on my blog recently, and they generously sent me a copy of the map I’d mentioned as well as their 2007 World Energy Atlas, a truly lust-worthy volume of maps.)
It is possible to reconstruct good maps of infrastructure if you’re willing to invest them time. John Young of Cryptome has created a very strange series of maps, called the Eyeball Series – some are overviews of critical infrastructure in the US, while others seek to reveal government secrets.
Spending too much time mapping infrastructure in the US can get you into real trouble. As a grad student at George Mason, Sean Gorman was mashing up a map of fiberoptic cables in the US with the locations of US businesses. The map revealed a large number of vulnerabilities, where it would be possible to cripple the communications infrastructure by attacking a small number of cables. US government officials took an interest in his work, making it very hard to distribute his thesis, and leading counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke to declare, “He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it.”
If maps of infrastructure were celebrated in the late 19th century as icons of our newly global world, they’re feared today as maps of vulnerabilities. But while terror experts worry that mapping infrastructure can make us vulnerable, I worry that we rarely see these maps.
Generally, these maps get pulled out when something goes wrong. (See this blog post for a discussion of maps of infrastructure and infrastructure failure.) I worry that this distorts our understanding of infrastructure. To offer a (potentially inept, and very strange) analogy, the history of mapping human brain function incudes phrenology (mapping the visible geography of the brain by measuring lumps on the head) to mapping infrastructure when it broke (guessing at brain function based on massive trauma like the iron rod through the head of Phineas Gage.)
These days, we have a far more accurate way of analyzing brain function – we inject people with radio-tagged glucose or oxygen and map what parts of the brain light up on a PET scan. We’re mapping the flow of oxygen or glucose, but that flow allows us to intuit brain function.
To understand globalization and our connected age, we need to map flow, not just infrastructure. (Nearly all the examples in this paragraph are mentioned in this blog post.) A visualization of airplanes flying over the world shows us patterns that aren’t apparent from just looking at route maps – the dominance of domestic air travel over international; the thick connections between the east coast of the US and western Europe, an air corridor from Spain and Portugal to Brazil and Argentina, the almost complete absence of South-South air traffic. Maps of San Francisco made by tracking taxi cabs show non-obvious traffic patterns from neighborhoods to nearby hospitals, and render invisible neighborhoods where there’s virtually no taxi traffic.
Mapping flow is a form of surveillance. We’re able to do it when people cooperate (like the BBC project The Box, to monitor the flow of a shipping container around the world) or when we can blur the data (information on city traffic on Google Maps.) But it’s hard to map flow because people and things don’t stay still, and because they often – understandably – don’t like being watched.
Maps of flow aren’t the same thing as maps of intent – I may intend to go from Boston to Budapest, but if I’m flying Lufthansa, I’m going through Frankfurt. And as much as we may hope that infrastructure is built to match flow, that’s not always the case. Infrastructure precedes flow, and it rarely is able to adapt quickly to support new flows. There’s amazing economic opportunity in figuring out where flow exists outside of existing infrastructure and building infrastructure to accomodate it – the business case for small airlines in West Africa.
So what?
It’s my contention that most of us badly misunderstand what is and isn’t globalized in our connected world. French economist Daniel Cohen posits the phenomenon of “imaginary globalization”, where we see global stuff (a bottle of Fiji water, in my example) and assume we’ve got more connection with Fiji that we actually do. We don’t know much about Fiji, don’t know many Fijians, don’t get much news from Fiji, and Fijian ideas rarely shape our thinking.
When we don’t know about the infrastructure that connects us, we don’t know who we could be connected to and who we’re prevented from connecting to. When we don’t know what flows over this infrastructure, we can overestimate some kinds of connection (and underestimate others). To understand how the world really works, we need maps, not just of infrastructure, but of flow. We need maps not just of the internet and shipping lanes, but maps that help us understand who and what we pay attention to, how we get information, what we know and what we don’t know.
My objective isn’t to start a project to build an atlas of globalization – though if I did, it would be by linking to the maps others are making, rather than by becoming a cartographer. Instead, I’m interested in watching the ways people are building novel tools to allow citizens to build maps, opening up data and cartographic tools, and turning publicly available data into new maps. As we find ways to put these maps of infrastructure, flow and intention together, we’re going to learn something about the world and how we see it, much as a shell and stick map tells us volumes about the Marshall Islands a hundred years ago.
It’s the attack of the internet memes! I’ve been tagged by two good friends, so I’ll take a few moments on a cold, dark January day to answer questions you may not actually want answers to…
Joi Ito recently tagged me with a blog meme with the following rules:
1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
So… seven things you may not know:
1. I used to be a pretty competent musician. I spent much of my time in college playing hand drums as part of the college’s African music ensemble. My first trip to Africa in 1993 was on a scholarship to study Ghanaian music. While I’ve still got two xylophones and half a dozen drums in my house, I rarely play these days, mostly because I remember how if felt to be a competent drummer and I’m usually disappointed by how I play these days.
2. I’m a good cook, and my kitchen is generally filled with cooking experiments, some of them more successful than others. My latest experiment is a homemade mustard that features a heavy dose of Otter Creek Stovepipe Porter – it’s very yummy.
3. While I write a lot about journalism, I haven’t worked in a newsroom since I was sixteen years old, writing for the sports page of the Lewisboro (NY) Ledger, a weekly. The story I remember best was a feature on a game of donkey basketball that took place at the local high school.
4. I was a dreadful athelete in high school. Unfortunately, the school I attended made sports mandatory, and I spent a lot of my teenage years running on the school’s cross country team. I was so bad that I recall my parents celebrating a race in which I didn’t finish last, perhaps the only one of my career.
5. I ran a freelance graphic design business in college, accepting work from professors to lay out their books for publication and from college organizations. I probably learned more about the Internet by looking for pirated graphic design software, fonts and clipart online in the early 1990s than from any other aspect of my education.
6. I love accordians, though I don’t play as well as I’d like. There are two accordians and a concertina in my living room, and I firmly believe there is very little music that couldn’t be improved by adding an accordian line to it.
7. I collect bad movies, and have a special fondness for terrible musicals. Gems of my collection include “Big Meat Eater“, Psychos in Love, and Tongan Ninja. Recently I acquired the late Brandon Lee’s “Laser Mission“, which is rapidly becoming a favorite.
All right, and now to spread the joy. I hereby tag Lokman Tsui, Daudi Were, Mike Stopforth, Georgia Popplewell, Amira Al-Hussaini, ThaRum Bun and Rachel Barenblat.
And now, to write the post I was tagged about weeks earlier…
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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