Interview with Founder of Geekcorps

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."

Comments

Third world blogs

[kundor]

I'd think that the problem with using the internet to combat censorship and corruption is that the censored and oppressed people are precisely those without internet access. Those who have it are already in the privileged classes.

Re:Third world blogs

[kundor]

How many public libraries are there in Africa?

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:Third world blogs

[MoralHazard]

First of all, RTFA. They're seeking to BRING the internet to the underprivileged in countries that are least likely to get it otherwise. That's the whole point.

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?

digital divide

[Chuck Bucket]

to make a level playing field for all to participate on the Internet, we must defeat the "digital divide". I think with good geeks like this, armed with a bevy of OSS, this will be accomplished.

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

[tobi-wan-kenobi]

first: i admit to not having read the whole article, since it really is a bit long for the hour. second: his notion about "social source" software is really interesting. commonly, the wide-spread use of the internet is said to diminuish face-to-face contact between people. the other side that often is neglected is demonstrated by this article: the internet can also be used to enable communication, as a means for a war against "corruption" and especially "censorship". what people often forget is that, no matter how big, the internet still is nothing more than a tool. and most tools do not tend to be either "good" or "bad", but achieve their quality by the way they are used. this is an excellent demonstration on how to do it right. my 2 pence, n'tn more

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Hypocrite

[david.given]

Oh, gee, how terrible that people decide for themselves what stories they want to write and what stories they want to read.

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.