global voices, one world

I vote for GV Advocacy, because I have long been concerned with questions of censorship and control. I believe the internet has great potential to change and improve the condition and constraints of the public sphere, but that does not mean this will happen by itself – governments that seek to restrict websites such as YouTube, Flickr act out of fear and by doing so severely limit the potential of civil society. 

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

After attending ICA in Chicago then going back to Philadelphia for the 7th Chinese Internet Research conference I helped organize, I will finally have some rest in a few hours once I am done with my public talk at Harvard! 

The talk will be webcast live. Hope you can join me on the interwebs.

Here’s the teaser:

This project attempts to help us understand the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that brings together and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to, “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”

Drawing on Global Voices as an exemplar, I argue that we need to move beyond objectivity towards “hospitality” in pursuing the potential of journalism in a networked world. Roger Silverstone defines hospitality as the “ethical obligation to listen.” Indeed, in a world where the internet makes it so much easier for everybody to speak, Global Voices asks us: “The world is talking. Are you listening?” What is ultimately at stake is perhaps best described by Silverstone, who argues that, “it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity.”

Global Voices shows us that we would do ourselves a disservice by limiting our imagination to the ideal type of journalism from a previous era. Without expanding our imagination, we cannot hope to understand how the internet might alter the constraints of the relationship between journalism and democracy for the better. Indeed, communication scholar James Carey helped us understand that “the meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change.”

I just finished my first translation for Global Voices Lingua Dutch. It’s a post where bloggers discuss their thoughts on possible causes behind the floods in the Philippines. A couple of observations:

• After five years in the States and having no one to speak Dutch with, my Dutch has deteriorated so much, it’s really really rusty. The other person (who is great) I am working with is a professional translator, and I am almost to the point of being embarrassed about the quality of my translation.
• It took me about 90 minutes to translate my first post.
• With so many possible interesting posts I could translate, I wasn’t sure where to start, until the Global Voices Daily Digest came into my mailbox; proceeded to pick my first post to translate from the digest.
• Useful tool: Google Translate. At least for the purpose of translating English to Dutch. I had less useful experiences when translating Chinese to a Roman language.
• Also useful: having two windows of text editors displayed on your screen, with on the left the original text, on the right the translation.
• Coordination of articles to be translated now consists of starting a blog in Wordpress and saving it as a draft, so before I start translating a post, I first check which posts are already being translated by others by checking the blog post drafts. I was very impressed with the way the GV Lingua Chinese team uses wiki to coordinate their activities.
• Dutch online dictionaries suck. The Van Dale, which is considered the authoritative dictionary in Dutch, has two versions online, both you have to pay for. As always, if you just want to check the spelling of a word, just search for it in Google.

EDIT: Percy, who is our fearless leader at GV Dutch, was so kind to suggest two very useful websites to me: Woordenlijst, which is a reference website for looking up correct spelling, and Taaladvies, a reference website for Dutch grammar.

Some of you may know that I am doing ethnographic research for Global Voices, which includes becoming a participant myself. I finally cleared all hurdles to do so, including defending my proposal and getting approval from IRB (and this experience is probably enough fodder for another blog post).

Monumental: I just finished drafting my first post for Global Voices. Okay, so it is not exactly my first official blog post, since my contribution is part of a larger blog post that is a round-up of the issues discussed in the year 2008 in the Chinese blogosphere, with me being responsible for summarizing the part about the poisonous milk scandal. Nevertheless, if I did nothing majorly stupid, my first words will soon appear on the Global Voices website. Exciting!

Some thoughts on this first experience: it takes quite some time to write a thorough and comprehensive blog post. While I was just summarizing existing blog posts, it still took me a few hours to read them, to get the gist of them and string up a narrative that connects them all in a compelling manner (well I can hope it is somewhat compelling). A more regular post will most likely take more time since I did not have to do much original research because this was a round-up post.

I am also starting to learn how to get my ‘voice’ right for Global Voices (no pun intended). That is to say, how do I write in such a way that my post fits the ‘house style’, e.g. does not stray too much off the kind of style that is established there, while maintaining my own personal edge to it. Every publication has its own style – I write quite different on my personal blog, or on my professional blog here, or when I write for a journal targeted at a general audience, or compared to a paper I write that I submit to an academic journal. There is a style guide, but I expect I will learn how to write in the Global Voices ‘voice’ mostly through interaction with the editor and by reading how my colleagues/friends write for Global Voices.

Most of you know that I am writing my dissertation about Global Voices. They are currently looking for donations that will help them sustain the incredible valuable and good work they do. I ended up donating $77 dollar – why $77? It’s my birth year. It’s a small sum with a symbolic value that I hope will encourage others to chip in as well.

Why should you donate?

Donating to Global Voices helps tell them that they are doing a good job. The value here is symbolic, rather than material. This is not unimportant – they would never have gotten so big if most of their work was not ‘free’, free as in volunteer labor. Getting appreciation for the volunteer work you do is incredibly important. Vivian Zelizer has called this the crowding-in effect of money on volunteer work.

Donating to Global Voices helps them stay a bit more independent from big donors. And allow them to write about topics they think are important, as opposed to topics that will attract the biggest crowd. The question of how media organizations get funded is not a trivial one. Global Voices get funded through a combination of support from foundations, corporations and individual donations. Political economy, particularly work by scholars like Robert McChesney and Oscar Gandy to name a few, has pointed out how money shapes what media writes about, and what not. In a perfect world, media organizations would all be funded by many individual donations, so that they can maintain independence and write about topics without constraint. In reality, media organizations will often not write about topics that might offend their owners or advertisers. Also, they will write especially about topics that will get the attention of a lot of audiences in order to attract more advertisers. These are topics people might want, but not necessarily what they need. Consider how much words are devoted to Britney Spears and the iPhone, which are great topics, but they tend to drown out other regions, areas and topics.

To sum up, giving a donation is a good idea because they are great people that do important work nobody else is doing – we want to make sure they can continue to do this work as well as let them know we appreciate the work they do. Please consider making a donation.

Besides donating, there is another way to help and show your appreciation: by spreading the word. They have made some cool – and cute – badges you can use to put on your blog.