Janet Haven: Vignettes from the Digital Citizen's Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa

It's been a long summer break on janethaven.com, but I'm hoping that the fall will bring me to back to writing more regularly.

I'm at the Digital Citizen's Indaba at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The connectivity is tragic-ish (i.e., there is connectivity, but not in the auditorium, and outside the auditoium it's slow wireless -- we're not allowed on university cables, bless them, and it turns out that the student population of Grahamstown has not yet demanded wifi service from their cafes and restaurants.) Rather than covering sessions blow by blow - impossible, since I lost two of them to meetings - I'm putting up a series of short vignettes that caught my attention today.

My friend Ethan Zuckerman is giving the keynote talk on citizen's media, and I'm contemplating the range of
read/write web roll-your-own news sources that have emerged over the past two years. OhMyNews, Wikinews, Digg, and Jay Rosen's NetAssignment, each of which use a different model to get their news online -- although they all rely in one way or another on "citizen journalists" to recommend or write the news. There's a temptation to sit back and see who wins in this frenzy of media model creation, but in listening to Ethan talk, it occurs to me that each model has a different strength which shines by situation. In a crisis where one is looking for immediate news, Wikinews is probably a better bet than OhMyNews. OhMyNews in English may be the place we turn to for somewhat niche topics that we know will be covered by a passionate writer covering an issue area tempered by good editing. Perhaps what we'll see evolve is an environment in which people learn the different options over time, and use citizen media/news sources based not on loyalty to a single version (like "I heart Digg") but based on situation ("If it's Hurricane Katrina, I'm at Wikinews.")

A (rough) quote from a presentation on the "Editors" panel: "The stuff is not important; it's what you think about the stuff. (Lanham) " No wonder non-bloggers think blogging is all about digital narcissism. Enough about me; what do you think about me?

Juanita Williams from the Independent Online talks about an interesting problem, the issue of corporate or company blogging -- how do you balance affiliations with personal opinion? It made me wonder how many of my colleagues and work friends who keep blogs on their professional activities and opinions maintain a private blog anonymously or on a closed system like Live Journal. This is something I've considered -- or at least when I intended to write this blog only on professional topics. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I tend to get sidetracked into other things, but were I more prolific, I'd probably want to be more focused and start a separate blog for friends and family. Of course, the real issue is that in the online world, your affiliations follow your persona whether you distance yourself or not. Despite the fact that this blog is not written under the auspices of the Open Society Institute, my employer, the undeniable persistance of data means that I wouldn't write something here that I didn't intend my colleagues to see.

This is funny. A closing comment from Ray Hartley of the Sunday Times on the "Editors" panel: "We don't want to allow what the Americans have allowed" which usually means "invade Iraq" or "international intimidation" or "dissing the UN".... but he meant "let media attention slip away from print news to the internet." (This was in conjunction with a slide showing media attention in the US, er, slipping away from print media to the internet). I'm confused: what's the plan to prevent that? To me, it seems to have a quality of historical inevitability to it, like the dictatorship of the proletariate. Anyway, perhaps we now know who's behind all the bad, expensive connectivity in South Africa: the newspapers! (Perhaps I misunderstood Ray's comment?)

Mike Stopforth: love him! He's talking right now about Web 2.0 tools, but unusually, he's not a techie at all. So he's explaining these tools entirely from a user perspective, addresssing how he avoids being overwhelmed by the world of online information. Which I think is incredibly important, because once you start telling people that they should not just read the New York Times, but also follow the African blogosphere, you have to make sure they have the tools to do that. My feeling is that web 2.0 tools for information navigation are still in a very early phase -- in some ways, I wish I could check out and come back in five years to see what all the smart people have come up with -- but they're still very useful. Back to Mike Stopforth: did I mention his presentation? He's now emphasizing the element of play and experimentation in web 2.0 tools, and how it doesn't matter if you don't understand off the bat how to use them...they're designed to be fiddled with. I think this is a great approach, and I'm delighted to see it being articulated so skillfully. Thanks, Mike.

Question at the end of the web 2.0 panel from Ray Hartley (this time intentionally hilarious): "Regarding the ever-quickening pace, what's next? What about web 3.0? I mean, it's been a year and a half."

Anriette Esterhausen from the Association for Progressive Communications speaking in the Civil Society panel on the need for a "personal relationship with technology" before it can be integrated inventively --or even usefully -- into civil society work. Like Mark Stopworth, Anriette encourages NGO directors to support play with the new technologies and the advent of a necessary level of comfort. After this panel, Anriette told me an amusing story about introducing email to South African organizations in the early 90's, and the tendency of these groups to insist they only wanted one email address for the whole organization. "If they have their own personal email address, they used it," Anriette said, "If it's a group email, they really didn't." A lesson which can, I think, be applied to all sorts of newfangled web 2.0 tools as well.

Comments

Thanks for the kind words Janet. I look forward to connecting again in the near future.

Here's to evangelising the non-techies ;)

Posted by: Mike Stopforth | September 16, 2006 07:44 AM

Great post Janet... now I just need to find the time to improve MY personal relationship with technology!

One of the quotes that stood out for me was the distinction between 'digital natives and digital migrants'. Initially it sounded quite cool, in spite of coming from one of the greatest enemies of media diversity, Murdoch.

But what is a far more significant distinction, from my perspective, is whether you are a digital consumer, or a digital integrator. Do you just consume new tools and products, or do you appropriate them, reshape them, and make them work for you on your own terms?

Posted by: Anriette Esterhuysen | October 21, 2006 03:20 PM

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