The world is listening. Are you talking?
Global: Now Spelt Blogal
There’s a radical shift underway in how information is exchanged, says Shivam Vij after a recent international blogger summit
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Something really big is starting to happen,” geek extraordinaire Ethan Zuckerman told a meeting of international bloggers at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2004. “What I’m really curious about is whether we’ll find ourselves becoming a movement.” Two years later, that was no longer in question, as Zuckerman’s Global Voices (GV) — co-founded with former cnn correspondent Rebecca McKinnon — held its second annual summit at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre last week. The issue now, as participants agreed, was not whether blogging is a movement, but how they are to take the blogosphere’s trans-continental conversations forward, far enough to dent the mainstream media’s predominantly Western coverage of events. At one point during the conference, Bala Pitchandi from New Jersey asked via webcast what GV’s long-term goals were. “Total world domination,” replied Zuckerman, as laughter lit up the room.
The important role that bloggers could play within and without the newsroom became clear for the first time in 2003, when an architect in Iraq who called himself Salam Pax started blogging the Second Gulf War. Ever since, the international media has often turned to bloggers in conflict zones to bring local perspective to their coverage. For GV, this has been central to its project — prominent bloggers from around the globe are roped in as regional editors who would write posts linking to blogs, explaining the context they were written in, thus making local issues accessible to a global audience. “The nature of conversation in the blogosphere tends to be insular,” says Neha Viswanathan, GV’s South Asia editor. “Bloggers in a country tend to speak only to each other. We add the context to posts and offer them to a global audience.”
The aim is to provide media spaces that bypass State controls to get citizens across the world to speak for themselves |
The stories GV covers come overwhelmingly from the developing world, ignoring almost all of Western Europe and North America. (GV has been anxious to not be seen as an American site — which is partly the reason for its registering in the Netherlands.) For journalists, it is a mine of contacts and story ideas; mainstream media too often turns to it for help with on-the-ground reportage. During April’s revolution in Nepal, bbc World picked up GV’s Nepal contributor, Parmendra, for a chat. Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and the Mumbai train blasts were two big events on which GV provided dedicated feeds to Reuters, one of its sponsors. Along with foundations like MacArthur and the Dutch NGO Hivos, Reuters also funds GV because it realises that the proliferation of individual voices on the Internet has influenced the way information is exchanged.
However, despite its democratic emphasis, issues of access persist — in every country, computer usage remains confined to the elite. How do we hear what farmers in India or street kids in Vietnam have to say? Further, while English is the dominant medium on the Web, it is not what most of the world talks in. GV is trying to expand its linguistic frontiers — it already has a Chinese version, and there are a handful of editors who read posts in other languages and discuss them in English. Oddly, however, when the issue came up at the conference, of all the Indians in the room, not one was willing to be a GV Hindi editor.
There was also some brainstorming during the summit on using software like tor to bypass Internet censorship and what GV could do for bloggers who find themselves under government suppression. “In Arabian blogospheres, human rights, free speech and democracy are topics of constant discussion,” says Amira Al Hussaini, Middle East and North Africa editor. “With strong media censorship, online self-publishing becomes an important outlet”.
“The world is talking,” goes GV’s tagline, “Are you listening?” For the innumerable conversations that GV fosters every day, Zuckerman could as well say: the world is listening, are you talking?
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Dr Singh, on Wednesday, instructed the Central authorities to extend all medical care for Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Bannerjee in view of deterioration in her health.
Doctors had put Mamata on oxygen support after she developed breathing problems on Tuesday.
Mamata has been on a hunger strike for the past 24 days, protesting against West Bengal government's acquisition of farmland for the TATA Motors project in Singur. Her party has been demanding relocation of the project out of the fertile agricultural land to some other site within the state.
The Eastern Command Hospital has been instructed to offer whatever medical assistance is requried by Banerjee, PM's media adviser Sanjaya Baru said in Delhi.
"Because of the deterioration in Mamata Banerjee's health and her refusal to accept state government's help for medical care, the Prime Minister has instructed Central authorities to extend all medical care required," news agency PTI quoted Baru as saying.
Mamata says she would not end her fast till the state government accepts her demand that the land at Singur, which had been taken "forcibly", be returned.
Mamata had termed the CPM-led state government's move to acquire of 954 acres of farmland to set up the Tata Motors project in Singur as "anti-farmer and anti-poor".
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Dinakar's residence in Naravi
Initially the police had identified the person as certain Vikram Gowda of Hebri near Karkala. However, they retracted their statement after the parents of Vikram Gowda revealed that the body was not their son's. Even ADGP Shanker Bidri in his address to the media persons earlier said that the deceased was identified as Vikram Gowda.
Dinakar's parents reading the local news paper
But today Dinakar's brother Yashavanth and his close relatives went to Chikamagalur and identified Dinakar's body.
It is learnt that, Dinakar was missing since past 3 years and he had joined the Naxals.
The police upon receiving the information that naxalites had organised a meeting at the house of certain Yogappa at Kesumudi in Sringeri on Christmas night, swiftly surrounded the house of Yogappa at around 10.20 p.m. However, by then the naxalites had left Yogappa's house. A group of armed naxals after learning that they were surrounded, fired at the police. The police returned the fire in which one person was killed. On Tuesday morning, the police found the body of a man at the spot of the encounter.
This is the second encounter killing in Chikmagalur district, the first being the death of naxalite kingpin Saketh Rajan and his associate on February 6, 2005, at Menasinahadya. Senior police officers including IGP Satyanarayan and Mr. Vipul Kumar are camping in Sringeri. The police have intensified their search for naxalites in the region.
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Naxalite gunned down in Sringeri,Karnataka
I read with astonishment yesterday an editorial in The Telegraph on the subject of forcible land acquisition in Singur by the CPI(M)-led West Bengal state govt, for handover to the Tatas for their small car project.
In a nutshell:
"The govt of West Bengal must do what it thinks is best for the economy. It is not obliged to obtain consent."
Ironically, even that hideously oppressive relic of British colonialism, the Land Acquisition Act, of 1894, gives allowance for natural justice by requiring hearing prior to acquisition. But evidently justice is very far from the concerns and desires of India's elite. If our precious democracy depends on this media and on this class - God help us!
I was immediately reminded of the words used to describe the behaviour of the Indian media during Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1975-77):
"They crawled when they had only been asked to bend."
In his book Being Indian, Pavan Varma writes:
"A concern for democracy was, in any case, conspicuously absent in most educated Indians when she imposed the Emergency. There was not even a semblance of credible protest anywhere in the country when almost the entire opposition was put in jail. The bureaucracy quietly accepted the new regimen. The corporate world welcomed it. The most spectacular capitulation was among the so-called guardians of the right of free dissent and free expression — the media. They crawled when they had only been asked to bend, with many top editors assuming the 'traditional Indian posture of respectful subservience (in which) they remained —not looking particularly dignified until the Emergency was over'. A dominant image of that time was a much publicised triptych in oils of Mrs. Gandhi by the colourful artist M.F. Husain, representing her as the goddess Durga triumphantly vanquishing her foes. The poor bore the brunt of the excesses of the Emergency, and ultimately, when elections were called, it was their hostility that defeated Indira. But the significant thing is the extent to which most Indians — poor and rich alike — were willing to quietly acquiesce in the abuse of power when in the first instance it seemed undefeatable ..."
If ever an example was needed to prove the utter ignorance, bankruptcy, and self-centred character of the Indian mainstream media and India's privileged classes - then yesterday's editorial in The Telegraph is it.
