A Talk with Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices Online Co-founder, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law

How can we use technology to turn apathy into action?

I think the only force that combats apathy is empathy. Until you care about a situation in another part of the world, it’s very hard to decide to pay attention to that situation and even harder to decide to act.

To get people to care across cultural, language and geographic barriers requires some sort of exposure. I knew very little about Africa and cared very little until I lived in Ghana as a student in 1993. Coming back to the US, I was suddenly interested in African politics because there were a lot of people in Ghana I cared deeply for. This discovery is what led me to form Geekcorps - I wanted to give other geeks the chance to get exposed to different parts of the world, build interpersonal ties and work on solutions to tough technical problems.

The question I’ve been wrestling with the past few years is how to increase empathy without purchasing huge numbers of airplane tickets. One of the ideas behind Global Voices was the idea that blogs give you an interesting way to meet people. Read Ahmed Al-Orman’s “Saudi Jeans” and you don’t just learn about news in Saudi Arabia - you meet a fascinating young man, a Saudi feminist concerned with the implications of gender divides in his home country. Over time, you get to know him through his blog and, I hope, care more about Saudi Arabia as a result. That’s the theory and the hope…

What do you think about events like the Table of Free Voices? How do you think projects like the Living Library can be utilized to its fullest?

I’m fascinated by the Table of Free Voices. It’s a truly audacious project, and audacity is all too rare these days. I’m very interested in the process used to collect questions, and I’m excited to see how the answers can be made navigable - there’s an enormous amount of video and audio generated, and making it available and accessible is a critical step in making the project useful.

How have you seen online activism change the social sector? What are the new trends?

I think online activism is breaking down the barrier between “citizen” and “activist”. Instead of identifying oneself as an activist, there are an increasing number of ways one can be an activist for a period of time. I’m not convinced that all the forms of online activism are especially effective - signing petitions online seems especially ineffective. But what I think is most interesting is the way the online space makes it possible to research issues, express yourself on these issues and connect with others who’d like to find ways to go from words to action.

I gave a talk a few months ago to a group of non-profit organizations about the future of advocacy. I made the argument that we need to rethink what it means to be an advocate. There are a lot of organizations that have done great work over the years speaking for people who aren’t able to speak to the wider world - activists, dissidents, political prisoners, etc. But the rules are changing. People are increasingly able to speak for themselves, to a global audience.

An example:
My friend and colleague Hao Wu was arrested in Beijing in February 2006 - he was held without benefit of legal counsel and without formal charges for five months. My colleagues at Global Voices and I started a website to advocate for his release, contacted Congressmen and diplomats and generally made as much noise as we could. But a much better advocate for Hao was his sister Wu Na (Nina Wu), who began a blog in Chinese. We organized a set of translators to make her writing accessible in English. Given her connection to her brother and her passion writing about the situation, it was smarter for us to point to her words than to speak on Hao’s behalf. In the future, advocacy will be less about speaking for and more about pointing to.

What are the best ways to conquer the digital divide?

There’s multiple digital divides, not just one. The technical digital divide - access to phone lines and electric power - is being addressed in part by market solutions. The rise of mobile telephony in Africa is really instructive - the spread of landline telephony had reached fewer than 2% of the population in many countries. With 100m mobile phones purchased on the continent in the past decade, teledensity has gone up to 10% in many nations. It wasn’t intervention or government plans - it was companies figuring out how to make money.

But this quickly bumps us into two other digital divides: the literacy divide and the relevance divide. Right now, the Internet isn’t very useful if you’re not highly literate. This will change as the net becomes more about audio and video (though we’re still really bad at indexing audio and video…), but really bringing the benefits of the Internet to the developing world is going to require widespread literacy education and development of more content in local languages.

Ultimately, the reason mobile phones have been so popular is that they’ve been relevant - they’ve solved problems for people in developing nations. They let people find out what’s going on in neighboring villages, communicate with family, check on the prices and availability of goods - basically, they’re a replacement for travel in many cases. For the Internet to be viable in the developing world, we need to find ways that access to the net is relevant in the way that voice communication has been. I think access to educational content through projects like One Laptop Per Child will be very important in bridging the relevancy divide, but I also think it’s a subject we need to think about more thoroughly and carefully.

What current projects are you devoted to at the moment? Future plans?

Global Voices occupies most of my time these days. I’m doing a lot of the organizational development, trying to diversify our funding, build advisory and governing boards and basically build an organization that can be run by the writers and editors, rather than by Rebecca and me. I advise a number of other online projects, including Worldchanging.com, and The People, Yes - a project to bring citizen media to the homeless community in Greensboro, NC.

I do a great deal of work with Open Society Institute, serving on a sub-board that oversees OSI’s Information Program - this gives me a great chance to keep track of some of the most interesting projects in the “technology for social change” space. Through both OSI and Global Voices, I’m very interested in projects that work to protect free speech online - I’m doing a lot of workshops nowadays on online anonymity and security, trying to make it possible for dissidents in repressive environments to communicate safely online.

Any advice for people interested in working in international development?

I’m not convinced that “international development” is a field unto itself. I know that folks train in international development, but I think many of the folks who are most effective are people who’ve got deep expertise in a subject - economics, law, health, technology - as well as a fascination with the developing world. I have no formal background in development - just a lot of professional experience in technology and a real desire to apply this knowledge in the developing world. And despite the fact that almost all my tech work is in the developing world these days, I have to stay in close touch with geeks in the North because that’s where much of the innovation is taking place. So I guess I’d urge anyone serious about working in development to make sure they’re deeply tied into the community of professionals in the facet of development they’re working in: health, agriculture, technology, etc.

What policies/issues do you see being drastically changed by improvements in technology over the next few years?

I think the Internet is training a whole generation of citizens to expect information on all topics to be easily available. Once you discover how much you can figure out with a few Google searches, you begin asking questions about topics you can’t research online. Why is it so hard to find out how much the US government spends on military intelligence? Who inserted what piece of political pork into a health spending bill? Just what’s going on in Iraq?

I think - or perhaps I hope - the generation of citizens raised on Google is going to demand information from businesses and government and are going to be increasingly resistant to the sorts of secrecy that has characterized the Bush administration. I think transparency could be one of the great victories for the world of new media. In the same way that bloggers are discovering they can monitor and challenge the press, I hope we’ll start discovering new and better ways to monitor our business and corporate leaders.