I’ve had an artistic idea I’ve wanted to play with for some months now. It was inspired by a conversation with Dale Joachim, who uses cellphones to study owl populations. By calling forests during the night and broadcasting owl calls, he can listen through GSM-enabled microphones and hear responses.

This idea of listening into spaces has morphed into a much weirder idea, one that I’ll likely never get a chance to do… so I might as well share it with you.

There are lots of spaces around the world that map neatly to one another. A Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Canton, Ohio and another one in Canton, China, for instance. On the one hand, they’re the same spaces. On another hand, they’re profoundly different. (For one thing, the shop in Ohio probably doesn’t sell preserved egg porridge.)

KFC in Beijing, photographed by isriya.

I want to build windows between these spaces. We’d place videoconferencing systems unobtrusively in walls within these spaces - possibly something no more complicated than a flat-screen monitor and a webcam. They’d connect, at random, to one of these mapped spaces around the world, and for some period of time, you’d have a window from your restaurant in Ohio into China… and then a few minutes later, into Pakistan or Poland. You’d be able to hear the conversation in the other space, but it wouldn’t be any louder than the ambient noise in your location. If you chose to turn to the monitor and engage with someone on the other side, that would be up to you as well… which would be incredibly cool, but confusing, I suspect.

I’d like to build these windows in a variety of mappable spaces. Some would map very cleanly onto one another - one Starbucks to another, for instance. Others would be more conceptual - a public space in a shopping mall mapping to one in an outdoor market, like Makola in Accra, for instance. Or installing a monitor in place of the mirror above a sink in a public restroom, which maps to a monitor above another sink across the world.

Makola Market, Accra. Photo by Caroline Beaumont for Transaid.

I think we’d want to make all the video streams available online as well, both to show the diversity of locations and because it would create a great opportunity to monitor any possible interactions.

What would we do faced with these windows? Would we ignore them, the way we generally ignore other people in public spaces? Nod politely to fellow customers across the world and then turn to our own chicken? Or would we turn to face the monitors and introduce ourselves to the men having coffee in Bahrain, the women selling fish in Accra?

(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I’d write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping the random algorithm will connect them to their friends, rather than to a room of bewildered, unsmiling Germans.)

I’ve found myself wondering whether anyone at a global chain restaurant or store would be crazy enough to try the idea. I could imagine doing a very small-scale version at Walmart or Best Buy, converting a single television or computer monitor on display into a window. But the charm of the idea, for me, is a window that might not be noticed as part of a public space where people linger, as in a restaurant. Anyone know a truly crazy VP of marketing who wants to make the case that their company is truly a global brand? Someone convinced that stumbling onto international connection can help sell coffee or chicken to xenophiles?

What got me thinking about the idea today was an email from the folks behind Woices - a new web2.0 service that allows you to tag geographic spaces with a small piece of audio. These tags - called “echoes” - were designed to create a new type of travel guide. With a location-aware phone, you could explore audio tags that people had put on a space you were wandering as a tourist, for instance. The company founders decided to share the idea more widely, and now you can annotate random locations on the planet, for whatever reason you’d like. I spent a while today listening to people read the menu in a Japanese restaurant in Tarragona and talking about pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Galicia.

It helps to speak Spanish to get a sense for how the system works at present, but there’s nothing language specific about the technology. And I love the idea that spaces can get overlaid with the voices of local people who love these places and visitors who are trying to understand them. Maybe this is a more practical way to execute my vision and I simply need to start annotating every KFC I eat in, from Canton to Canton.

Update - Tracy points to [murmur], a project similar to Woices that’s began in Toronto in 2003 and has spread to other cities.

Four talks in eight days, four cities in three countries. (Tihany, Hungary; Barcelona, Spain; Camden, ME; Manchester, NH). I’ve come to two conclusions. One, I need to travel less. Two, I really love librarians.

I’ve had two chances recently to speak about homophily, xenophilia, bridge figures and disconnection to audiences of librarians, and the talks have been extremely good fun. The problems associated with creating serendipity are ones librarians are often well acquainted with. I finished the talk (very well reported at the NELA conference blog) and immediately fielded questions about how librarians could help patrons stumble onto serendipitious information about Nigeria or Niue. (A couple of ideas that came up: Leverage immigrant populations in your communities and ask people to suggest the best books to help neighbors understand their communities and home countries. Pick stories being featured in local or national newspapers and put up collections of resources associated with the countries or issues covered.)

I keep telling myself that I need to speak less and write more. Perhaps the answer is that I need to speak more to audiences that give me excellent and critical feedback, as I got yesterday. Good fun. Thanks to everyone at the New England Library Association for inviting me and for such a fun event.

It’s been good fun hanging out in Barcelona with my fellow speakers, both the wonderful organizers like Juan Freire and Ismael Peña-Lopez and guests like Carol Darr, Andrew Rasiej and Tom Steinberg. Tom was kind enough to hunt me down for dinner on Thursday, and we had an excellent conversation that I’ve been chewing over for the past 48 hours.

Tom is the brilliant founder of MySociety, a British organization that it relentless in its quest to make UK politics more open and participatory. Smart people around the world look to Tom and the folks he works with for ideas on how to make elected officials more accountable, link disconnected people in local communities and use distributed reporting to document social ills and push for change. Given the opportunity to pin Tom down for insights, I asked him about his thoughts on getting people to connect with people across national and cultural lines.

This can be a tricky topic for political organizers. Most organizers are deeply concerned about the erosion of local civic life, as documented by thinkers like Robert Putnam. It’s easy to misunderstand my obsession with pushing people to connect across lingustic, cultural and national barriers as a lack of interest in connecting locally. I see a great deal of importance in both, though I’m sobered by Bill Bishop’s new book, “The Big Sort“, which makes a pretty good case that Americans are sorting ourselves into homophily traps geographically, and that connecting with our neighbors may increasingly mean connecting with people who share our perspectives and prejudices.

Rather than fighting the local versus global battle, Tom offered interesting and provocative advice about what might work to get people who aren’t otherwise inclined to connect to do so. His projects are finding interesting ways to use games to get participation that would otherwise be difficult to organize. For instance, MySociety wanted to align thousands of hours of taped debates in the House of Parliament with transcripts, so that these videos would be wholly searchable. When automatic methods failed, he and his team built a tool that asked users to complete a simple task - watch a video and push a button when a certain person began speaking. Participants would be scored on “league tables” for the number of times they’d pushed the button, aligning the video - some participants ended up coding hundreds of videos for the project, and all the video was tagged within a few weeks.

Using the same technique, Tom’s now trying to get people to classify Yahoo groups for him, specifically Tahoo groups that mention the term “residents” or “neighborhood”. There are 45,000 of these groups, and Tom wants to know what geographies they address. That way, he can build a service where you send a text message containing your zip code to his servers, and they respond with information on online groups you could join that cover issues in your neighborhood or community. (You should pitch in and help him, if you have a chance.)

So riffing on the idea of games and league tables, Tom wondered whether the way to engineer more international connection is football. Specifically, he suggested that Global Voices or some similarly globalizing entity organize online chats around World Cup matches. Chats would invite nationals from both sides represented - Ghana versus Brazil, for instance - to chat online during the game. Trashtalking would be heartily encouraged, but the hope would be to get beyond insults to an actual conversation about football heroes, national pride, politics, etc. I’m guessing this would require a certain amount of careful engineering - we’d probably limit participation so that one side didn’t overwhelm the other (20 Brazilians, 20 Ghanaians per chatroom, for instance) and recruit some bridge-figures, people who spoke both English and Portuguese and had some understanding of each country and culture.

Tom offered another idea, which is either a great way to start intercultural conversations or a surefire way to start a war. He proposes putting together an online database of regional and national prejudices, offering as an example a recent trip he took to Germany where conference organizers declared they’d be taking “a Belgian lunch”, i.e., a very long lunch. What do expressions like this reveal about what we think about one another? Are these opportunities for conversation about cultural quirks, or are these invitations to flamewars and fisticuffs? (I offered the data point that, when I visited Yerevan, Armenia, a few years ago, one of my hosts excused himself to go to the bathroom with the phrase, “I need to visit the Turkish embassy.”)

Ghana’s one of the healthiest societies I’ve ever seen in terms of resolving tensions between ethnic groups. One of the reasons, I think, is a healthy sense of humor. A great deal of Ghanaian humor depends on ethnic jokes and laughing at each other’s perceived quirks. (I watched a Ghanaian comedian bring the house down in Accra by stepping onto stage and singing a song. When my companion finally recovered enough to explain the joke to me, she told me, “He’s an Ewe, and he’s singing a Ga song, but he’s singing it in Twi.” And then she collapsed into laughter again. Guess you had to be there.) So maybe a wikipedia of ethnic stereotype - Tom calls it a “hatebase”, but I prefer the time “haterbase” - isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds in sparking conversation about and across our differences.

I suspect I’ll be rolling around Tom’s ideas around games and crowdsourcing until I can think of a clever way to harness this power for Global Voices. We are, after all, a community based around voluntary participation - finding a way to make that participation more fun, less involved and easier to accomplish is probably a smart thing to think about. I susect that folks like Tom are likely to find a profitable line of work somewhere soon figuring out how complex problems can be broken into crowdsourcing tasks and outsourced either to volunteers or to systems like Mechanical Turk.

Talking about the decision to use volunteers rather than Turkers, Tom argues that people are looking for ways to participate in useful projects. That squares with my experiences as well. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I lent a hand recruting volunteers to enter data on missing persons in the southeastern US - we were completely overwhelmed by people’s interest, and a task we thought might take two weeks was done overnight. I’ve lately been wondering whether one of the keys to getting people interested in international news is attaching the ability to get involved in social change projects. It seems logical that people who are interested in changing circumstances in Darfur are likely to be especially interested in news from Sudan. Is it possible that this runs in the other direction as well, that attaching an opportunity to get involved with a protest or a fundraising effort would make people more likely to read a story on Somalia?

In other words, it was a very good decision to have dinner with Tom, rather than staying in my hotel room and answering email. That’s now my official excuse for everyone’s email I’ve recently failed to answer…

Forgive my silence this week. There’s a plague heading through the Berkman Center, evidently, a headcold that’s been knocking many of us out of commission, and I’ve been working at roughly 30% capacity the past few days. I managed to scrape myself together and give a talk at the MIT Museum last night, as part of the Soapbox series, a set of four lectures on technology and social change, with a focus on civic media.

The Soapbox series is a very cool format - it’s open to the public and heavily focused on dialog and participation. Speakers talk for 15-20 minutes, broaching a topic and opening questions, and then the audience breaks into small groups to discuss the questions. Each group has a tablet PC and can place questions on a projection screen, visible to the audience and speaker. The museum director, John Durant, runs a question and answer session in a salon format, inviting the speaker to address questions posted on the screen or in the audience.

I took advantage of the format to ask three of the questions I’m working on right now in thinking about media and the ways we encounter the world. How do we build serendipity into the tools we use to find news? How do we break out of homophily traps that often characterize online media? How do we cultivate the sorts of bridge figures that can help introduce us to media we’d never otherwise encounter?

I got very good feedback from the audience, including lots of pushback on my basic premise: that it’s important for people in one country to get news, information and opinions from other countries. I’m pretty confident that my core argument - that in an interconnected world, we need to be aware of issues in other places, for our economic, social, political and security welfare - is right… but it’s a good challenge to figure out how to express that to an audience. One audience member had the great insight that web users may be moving from a news-seeking behavior to a surfing behavior where they’re often looking for entertainment, not challenge. This is an interesting problem for those of us trying to “sell” international news - do we need to be relentlessly positive? Or connect this sort of news to other types of information likely to be surfed onto - sports, music, celebrity?

Joost Bonsen offered a very generous description of the talk on his blog, Maximizing Progress. You can see for yourself by watching the video from the event - would love your thoughts and feedback if you do.

For folks in Cambridge - you should catch some of the upcoming events in the Soapbox series. Henry Jenkins, master of fanfiction and participatory culture, is speaking next, and Ellen Hume, who is managing MIT’s vast and ambitious Center for Future Civic Media project is someone you should also make a point of hearing.

Want to get a Texas high school football team pumped up?

Try the haka. It works for New Zealand’s legendary All Blacks rugby squad. And it’s doing pretty well for the Trojans of Trinity High School in Euless, TX, ranked by Rivals.com as the top high school football team in the nation.

Performing the haka - a Maori chant and dance - in north Texas isn’t an act of random cultural appropriation. The offensive and defensive lines of the Trojans are filled with Tongan players, representing the 4,000 people of Tongan descent who live in this town of 52,900. The size, speed and skill of these players has a lot to do with the emergence of Trinity as a football powerhouse - in a recent NPR piece on the team, one coach of the team remarked that his offensive line currently outweighed that of the NFL’s Washington Redskins.

What are 4,000 Tongans doing living in suburban Dallas? Working at DFW airport, for the most part. A Tongan employee of American Airlines told family and friends about a Texas community with a low cost of living and lots of airport-associated jobs, and helped start a migration from Tonga to Texas. The community has been well-received, perhaps because Tongan culture is heavily family focused, which aligned neatly with local community values.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt when some of the Tongan seventeen-year olds are 6′2″, 280# and can pass block.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with rugby has seen New Zealand’s national side perform the haka before matches. It’s intimidating - huge guys, yelling and slapping their bodies in unison. I’d assumed it was a way to resolve cultural tensions in New Zealand between English immigrants and a subjugated Maori population, the sort of multiculturalist healing that I’d assumed emerged sometime in the 1970s. Nope. The haka was introduced to the wider world when a team of “native” New Zealanders - primarily Maori, but four players of British descent born in New Zealand - played matches in Britian in 1888-9. I’d also assumed that it was a war dance, and that there was a single melody and lyrics. Neither is true - the haka can refers to a set of posture dances with shouted accompaniments, and can be peformed in welcome, to commemorate events or to intimidate the hell out of sporting opponents. The All Blacks have used different hakas through the years, sometimes with lyrics specific to the match (referring to a New Zealand invasion of Australia, for instance.)

The haka’s worked pretty well for the All Blacks, and thus it’s been picked up by other New Zealand sports teams, including the basketball side (the Tall Blacks. Yes, that’s really what they call themselves) and the wheelchair rugby side. In the future, all New Zealand national teams may have their own custom hakas. But it’s generated some controversy when people from other countries have adopted the tradition. Football players at the University of Hawaii began using a controversial haka written for the All Blacks, but later changed to an original Hawaiian dance, the Ha’a.

So should the Tongan population in Euless be performing a Tongan dance instead of a New Zealand one? That’s what a commenter on the Euless Voice of Tonga website suggests:

Congratz for having an awesome team…..BUT!!! why are’nt you all doing the Sipi Tau…..instead of a Maori Haka. If you still insist on doing the Haka ….please learn to do it right….the way its being done now is an insult to the Maori ppl. Thankyou.

The Sipi Tau is the dance and chant the Tongan national rugby team performs before their matches. The dance is a version of the Kailao, a Tongan war dance, and the lyrics are pretty damned intimidating:

Let the foreigner and sojourner beware
Today, destroyer of souls, I am everywhere
To the halfback and backs
Gone has my humanness.

Which is pretty much how every defensive tackle I know wants to feel before taking the field.

What’s fascinating to me is the way in which the Haka made it into Euless. It wasn’t through elders communicating a dance tradition to their children. Instead, some of the players watched the New Zealand rugby team perform the haka on YouTube and began learning the moves in a local park. With the permission and blessing of the local Tongan community, they began performing the dance at community events. It later worked its way onto the football field, where it’s become a critical part of Trinity football culture.

At this point, the ritual - whether the culturally appropriate one or not - is a sign of the acceptance of the Tongan community in Euless. This is, after all, a community where the school’s principal - originally from West Texas - routinely comes to work wearing a lava-lava. A Tongan community leader, talking about the reception the dance has received, said,”I had two older men with tears in their eyes tell me afterward, ‘After seeing that, we know that our future generations will be accepted here.’”

I mentioned a few posts back that I found individual sentences in Paul Starr’s brilliant “Creation of the Media” worth remembering and exploring later. One sentence that stuck with me was his observation that, despite Thomas Edison’s role in creating a popularizing moving pictures, the US wasn’t initially the world’s biggest producer of movies: “In 1907, two-thirds of the films released in the United States were imported from Europe; Pathé-Frères alone supplied one-third of all movies shown in America, more than any domestic firm.”

It’s not that US filmmakers were late to the technology - they were simply late in understanding their audience. In the early 20th century, the US was a nation of immigrants, to a greater degree than we are today. 14.7% of the US population in 1910 was foreign born (as compared to 12.5% in 2006) and the recent immigrants from Europe may have had more of a taste for European films than for early American films, which were largely focused on the edification of the middle class. The US film industry didn’t really take off until immigrant theatre owners entered the production business and started creating films that would appeal to their customers. Starr also observes that the US audiences were so polyglot that “filmmakers in the early 1900s may have been uninterested in adding sound to pictures partly because their audience spoke not one language but several.”

This all changed, and quickly. By 1918, the US was producing 80% of films worldwide. While the US isn’t quite that dominant these days, Hollywood studios now make between 50 and 60% of their revenue in overseas markets - blockbuster films featuring recognizable stars make as much as 70% of their revenue overseas.

I haven’t been able to find good figures that indicate what percent of cinema tickets sold worldwide are for American-made films, but the box office statistics from BoxOfficeMojo.com are endlessly fascinating (to me, at least). In most of the world’s markets, American films are the most successful, crowding out local competition. The site offers a chart of the most successful films of all time in a number of international markets.

The highest-grossing film of all time in cinema-mad France? Titanic, taking in roughly a tenth of its global $1.2 billion gross in that country, almost doubling the revenue of #2 Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre. Titanic holds that distinction in the UK, Spain and Germany as well. (I remember visiting a rural hotel in Mongolia a few years back, staying in a ger in the middle of a national park. Looking for evening entertainment besides Mongolian television, I bought a pack of playing cards from the hotel desk… which featured scenes from Titanic on the back of the cards. Even in Mongolia, my heart will go on.)

It could be worse. According to BoxOfficeMojo, the highest-grossing film of all time in Australia is Crocodile Dundee, which seems like something of an insult and an injustice.

I’m interested in the influence of American cinema because I’m interested in parochialism, the tendency of people to pay attention to their own interests, both personally and nationally. When I speak to audiences about media attention, showing what countries get more and less attention in the US media, I often get asked whether citizens of the US are more parochial than those in other nations, perhaps due to our geographic isolation from other countries, or through some brand of American exceptionalism.

My response has generally been to cite some lovely maps produced by Nicholas Kayser-Brill and Gilles Bruno, which use cartograms (proportional map distortions) to show what countries get more or less attention in different global newspapers.

It makes sense that The Australian, published in Sydney, would pay more attention to Australia and New Zealand than to other, far-off nations. And the attention paid to the UK is an interesting cultural artifact, evidence of Australia’s historical and economic ties to the UK. (I saw a very similar pattern in analyzing the BBC’s media attention - BBC pays more attention to countries that were previously part of the British Empire than to similar nations.)

Similarly, a map of Slate’s news coverage shows how parochialism can include an intense focus on rivals and on military involvement - you can see disproportionate coverage in this US media source of Iran and Iraq.

So everyone’s parochial, right? That certainly seems to be a trend in news reporting - the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s report “The Changing Newsroom” saw strong evidence that US newspapers were limiting their ambitions and refocusing on reporting local and state-wide news, rather than on national or international issues.

But movies appear to be a different matter. American moviemakers are extremely talented at producing content that sells in international markets - we’re cultural exporters, outcompeting the local, parochial filmmakers with products designed to be easily translatable and understandable in other cultures. (Explosions and chase scenes translate easily; complex character development, witty banter, multilayered plots - not so much.) Certainly, filmmakers in other countries are aware of this disparity - film studies professor Thomas Doherty points to a wonderful line in German director Wim Wender’s film “Kings of the Road” - “The Americans have colonized our subconscious.”

What effect does this cultural asymmetry have on those of us in the US? My guess is that Americans have a tendency to assume a global culture… which might be assumed to be more or less co-equal to American culture. Does this make it less likely that people in the US pay attention to cinema from other parts of the world? Are we less receptive in general to perspectives from other parts of the world because we’re used to exporting and not importing cultural information?

The Arab Human Development Report, a remarkable document produced by Arab scholars focused on development shortcomings in the region, focused in part on translation of books as evidence of cultural isolation of the Arab world. The authors observe that the Arab world, as a whole, translates about 330 books a year from other languages into Arabic, roughly a fifth as many as are translated into Greek, a language with a much smaller community of speakers. (More starkly, the total number of works translated into Arabic in the past thousand years is smaller than the titles translated by Spain in a single year. Eugene Rogan, in Eurozine, challenges this assertion.)

If translation is associated with a willingness to connect to other cultures, the US doesn’t stack up very well, at least according to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, a database which attempts to provide a comprehensive index of global translations. The US ranks 14th in the number of total translations, well behind nations like Germany, Spain and France, who’ve published many times as many translations as US publishers. This may reflect the fact that English is, by far, the most popular language to translate from. But it’s striking that French publishers have translated almost three times as many texts from Arabic as US publishers.

This sort of data suggests the possibility of analyzing countries in terms of import and export of media from other nations. We might conclude, for instance, that the US is a stronger exporter than importer, and that a translation powerhouse like Germany is a major cultural importer. This might be an interesting complement to indexes like the KOF Index of Globalization, which seek to put an absolute number on a country’s “cultural globalization”. The factors KOF uses to calculate how culturally globalized a nation is are focused primarily on connections between the citizens of one nation and other nations - telephone and mail traffic, international tourism, use of television, internet and newspapers. Countries that export culture, but aren’t especially skilled at connecting to people in other nations are not likely to top this index. And indeed, the US ranks 24th in terms of cultural globalization on KOL’s index, down ten positions since 1970. (The US’s absolute score in cultural globalization has increased, not decreased in that time… but over twenty nations have had larger increases than the US in that interval, led by Portugal, which has moved from one of the most culturally disconnected to most culturally connected in that period.)

I wonder whether the US’s cultural export dominance will continue in the long term, with the rise of other culture-producing nations on a global stage. India’s film industry, including the Hindi film producing “Bollywood”, is the world’s largest film producer, in terms of new titles per year. These films are enormously popular outside of India, and may constitute a form of cultural soft power for the nation. (An Indian friend tells a wonderful story about being deported from Moldova via Turkey, and passing his time in a detention cell in Ataturk airport singing Bollywood songs with his fellow deportees. Representing nations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the deportees didn’t have a common language, but they all knew the great Bollywood hits and could sing along.)

The rise of low-cost video equipment has helped Nigeria emerge as another major cultural exporter, sending Nollywood films throughout Africa. Franco Sacchi, who produced the film “This is Nollywood”, observes that this film industry isn’t interested in reaching the US market - it’s an industry that produces films for people who make a dollar a day. Films can be made in seven days for less than $10,000. At a certain point, the line between professional and citizen cinema gets pretty blurry. Does the rise of Nigeria as a cultural exporter presage what might happen as individuals around the world start producing video? Is the group that eventually ousts Hollywood from the dominant position as a cultural exporter… everyone?

Update: International Network Archives, a fascinating project at Princeton, has answers to a few of my questions about cultural export in a beautifully designed graphic titled “Stealing the Show“. They calculate that Hollywood controls 35% of the world’s movie markets in terms of revenue, and point out that 19 of 20 of the biggest movies worldwide in 2007 were produced in the US. They also note that the US’s cultural export extends to the small screen as well, with roughly four times as much EU television programming produced in the US than in Europe.

One of the better conversations I’ve had lately was with an old friend who’s now working in Sudan, reporting on local news and politics as well as on the ongoing conflict in Darfur. (Said old friend has asked to remain nameless in this post, as friend is concerned that opinions expressed in this conversation might make it difficult to continue working as a journalist in Sudan.) I asked him a question I’ve been contemplating lately: Why has the conflict in Darfur been able to gain so much media and activist attention?

Because you may or may not be an Africa-based journalist, let me unpack the question for a moment. There are a number of international conflicts that have claimed more lives and displaced more people than the conflict in Darfur. The Second Congo War and its ongoing aftermath is believed to have killed more than 5.4 million people, mostly due to “excess mortality” connected to disease and starvation. Other conflicts compare to Darfur in terms of brutality and displacement, but have received far less attention. War between Ugandan forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda has displaced more than a million people from their homes, and one in three boys in the region have been abducted, for periods of time or permanently, by LRA forces. The war between Ethiopia and Islamist forces in Somalia - supported by the US military - has created 1 million internally displaced persons and 450,000 international refugees.

It’s admirable that activists have been able to draw so much attention to Darfur. I’m interested in the phenomenon not to criticize focus on Darfur over other conflicts, but because I’d like to help people working on other conflicts gather attention and resources. I see Darfur as a rare example of an international crisis that’s gotten huge attention in the US despite the fact that most Americans have no direct, personal connection to the region. (I’m not the only one trying to do this - John Prendergrast, who’s focused on Darfur for the International Crisis Group, is one of several Africanists who’s started a new organization, Enough, designed to harness some of the attention around Darfur and call attention to situations in DRC, Uganda, Somalia and elsewhere.)

Agreeing with the analysis that attention paid to Darfur is unprecedented, my friend offers a two-part analysis, which I’ve modified to a three part analysis:

- The time was right. Guilt over the failure to intervene in Rwanda, especially on the part of North American and European nations, offered an opportunity to demand intervention in another African conflict.

- In the US, there was already close attention paid to Sudan by human rights and by evangelical Christian communities, based on a perception of the Sudanese civil war as a religious conflict between the Muslim north and Christian (and animist) south. (My contribution to the analysis, based on my experience talking to evangelical friends about their anti-Khartoum activism as early as 2000.)

- The conflict in Darfur has been reducible to a fairly simple media narrative, with good guys and bad guys… even thought this narrative doesn’t accurately reflect the reality on the ground.

It’s this last point my friend and I focused most of our discussion on. The process of covering the conflict in Darfur has convinced my friend that a narrative centered on a merciless proxy army raping, chasing and killing innovent civilians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse a region isn’t wholly accurate. “This isn’t good guys versus bad guys. This is bad guys versus bad guys.”

An illustration of this argument was the May 10, 2008 attack by the Darfur-based Justice and Equality Movement on Omdurman, one of the cities that make up Khartoum. While the target was a military headquarters, roughly 30 civilians were killed in the clashes. My friend, who reported from the scene, reports that JEM was using mortars to attack goverment positions, well aware that those positions were surrounded by residential areas and would necessarily involve civilian casualties.

What frustrated my friend more was the response from Darfur activist groups to the JEM attack. It wouldn’t have been hard to condemn the violence and mourn the death of civilians before pointing to the larger context for the violence. That’s not what Save Darfur, the US non-profit coordinating “180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations”, did. Their May 12th press release focused almost solely on the danger of retaliation against Darfuri communities in Khartoum and elsewhere:

Reacting to rebel attacks in and around Khartoum over the weekend and the Sudanese government’s heavy-handed response, Save Darfur Coalition president Jerry Fowler today released the following statement.

“The rebel attacks have endangered the lives of civilians in Khartoum and in Darfur and have raised fears of widespread retaliatory atrocities. The Sudanese government has often responded to rebel violence with brutal attacks against civilians. That these latest attacks took place inside the Sudanese capital enhances these fears. All parties must understand that there can be no violent solution to this conflict.

“Darfuris in Khartoum report that the Sudanese government is already conducting arbitrary detentions, torture and killings in and around Khartoum. Reports from Darfur indicate that the janjaweed militias are mobilizing and have begun to attack the town of Tawila in North Darfur.

“The Security Council and the entire international community must demand the protection of civilians in Darfur, Khartoum, and Chad. Individual governments – including the United States, United Kingdom, and China – must make clear that there will be significant consequences for any attacks on civilians, including U.N. Security Council sanctions upon individuals responsible for those attacks.

“Ending the violence requires the full deployment of the UNAMID, EUFOR and MINURCAT civilian protection forces and the initiation of a robust peace process with a clear end state for Sudan. The international community should therefore hold a special donors conference to announce the commitment of all necessary resources and equipment for UNAMID, and should renew diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Darfur and craft a peace for all Sudan.”

It seems odd to argue that there can be no violent solution to the conflict without condemning an attack by JEM, as the UN, EU and US did. Groups like Save Darfur run the risk of being viewed as propogandists for a violent group if they don’t find ways to condemn violence as well as urging peace.

My friend’s concern isn’t that Save Darfur is serving - knowingly or unknowingly - as a PR arm for JEM. It’s a concern that groups advocating on behalf of Darfur aren’t dealing with the real Darfur so much as a simulated Darfur, “Second Life Darfur”, as my friend put it, referencing a rant I posted two years ago about a simulated refugee camp built in Second Life designed to call attention to the conflict in Darfur. The situation in Darfur is incredibly complex, with several Darfuri groups with different aims and tactics, and complicated relationships between the Janjawid militias and the Sudanese Army.

My friend points to conflict over estimates of death in Darfur as an example of both how hard it is to report news from Sudan and how easy it is to slip into simulated realities. There’s no good consensus over how many people have been killed in violence in Darfur. Sam Dealy, writing in the New York Times, points to a study, viewed with high confidence by many researchers, by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters which projected 131,000 excess deaths between September 2003 and June 2005, with a likely sharp drop in mortality after June 2005 because many Darfuris are now in refugee camps. Respected Sudan researcher Alex De Waal offers a “best guess” of 200,000 dead, including 50,000 from direct violent conflict, the rest dying from disease or malnutrition connected to forced removal from their land.

The uncertainty over figures hasn’t stopped Save Darfur from using a specific, very high number. Ads in the UK included the claim, “After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.” Not only is that figure much higher than most estimates, it’s clearly incorrect that everyone killed is “innocent” - all estimates include combatants, and it’s hard to call guys who invaded a base of AU peacekeepers, killing ten, “innocent”. The European Sudanese Public Affairs Council, an explicitly pro-Khartoum group, complained about the ad to the British Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled in their favor, telling Save Darfur that the 400,000 figure was a disputed opinion, not a fact.

It’s possible to read Save Darfur’s exaggerations cynically, as Brendan O’Neill does in a fierce piece for his online journal, spiked. We should expect the campaign for Darfur to play fast and loose with the facts, “since ‘Save Darfur’ activism – from Hollywood celebs calling for Western military action to the growth of campaigning commentary on the conflict – has not really been about Darfur. Rather, it has been about creating a new moralistic and simplistic generational mission for campaigners and journalists in America and Europe.”

O’Neill references a challenging and compelling piece by Professor Mahmood Mamdani in the London Review of Books. Mamdani wonders why the same western campaigners anxious to get the US out of Iraq - a complex conflict involving national armies and paramilitaries - is so anxious to push military intervention in Darfur, which has similar dynamics. The reason he offers is that “There is nothing messy about Darfur [in the minds of American activists]. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.” This radical oversimplification of the conflict is something he puts squarely on the shoulders of activists, focusing in particular on Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times:

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

His critique of Kristof expands to an indictment of journalism as a whole: “Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context.” Obviously, not all journalism reduces situations to good versus evil, ignoring history, context and nuance… and it’s probably too much to suggest that all Kristof’s work has ignored context and nuance, though he’s clearly taken the stance of an advocate, rather than a journalist on this issue.

My question is this:

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague?

In other words, is it possible to get people interested in African stories without oversimplifying them? Is it possible to solve “the caring problem” too well, convincing people to care too much and in the wrong directions? For those of us trying to get more attention to the rest of the world, how do we strike this balance between too much and too little?

There’s this guy, Matt Harding. He describes himself as “a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames.” After Matt got sick of his job making videogames in Brisbane, Australia, he started an extended global walkabout. And as he travelled the world, he danced - badly - and had friends record him performing the same dance in front of some of the great sites of the world.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Matt is something of an internet celebrity - his videos have been watched millions of times, and the most recent one (above) is pretty damned charming. I watched it about half a dozen times yesterday, realizing that I liked it so much because the goofy smile on his face in the scenes where dozens of people rush on screen to dance with him is the best approximation of the way I felt at the recent Global Voices Summit. Trust me - there’s very little in life that feels better than talking, singing, dancing and drinking with people from around the world who are working with you on the same project, sharing many of the same values, goals and perspectives - dancing like an idiot on the streets of Lisbon or Sana’a is a pretty good approximation.

(I will also admit that I got a little choked up by Matt’s decision to edit, back to back, a clip of him dancing with a wild group of friends in Tel Aviv followed by a clip of him dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem in the West Bank with a small group of children. Rachel is in West Jerusalem right now, and was planning on travelling to the West Bank tomorrow, for an encounter program intended to let rabbinic students stay with Palestinian families to better understand the complexities of modern Israel and the personal dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, yesterday’s bulldozer attack means the trip was called off, and she’s now looking for other ways to connect with the local Palestinian population.)

Since I’m obviously having some trouble returning to my ordinary work life after the Summit, I spent a bit more time today looking at Matt’s videos, digging into his earlier dance videos. As I started watching his original video, shot in 2005, I winced involuntarily as I realized that the soundtrack was Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby”, a piece of music I have strong feelings about.

“Sweet Lullaby” is a song based around a vocal sample misrepresented as a Pygmy song from Central Africa. Actually, the sample is from a lullaby, “Rorogwela”, sung in the Solomon Islands. The song is sung by a woman named Afunakwa, who was recorded in 1970 by the legendary ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hugo Zemp. The story of Deep Forest’s unauthorized use of the sample, their miscrediting of the sample’s origins and Zemp’s understandable anger has been brilliantly documented by Professor Steven Feld in an article called “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” in Public Culture. Suffice to say that the guys behind Deep Forest, who portray themselves as “sound reporters”, didn’t feel compelled to properly credit the person or culture the sample came from, or the ethnomusicologist who recorded it.

I used the story of Afunakwa as a way to discuss intellectual property in developing nations in a law class I co-taught, which I documented in a piece called “Tumeric, pygmies and privacy“, one of my favorite blogposts, though one that’s literally never gotten a blog comment or much reaction. (And the students, for the most part, seemed to think that my argument that developing nations might want to use copyright to protect indigenous knowledge was pretty contrary to everything they believed about free culture, remix and all that cool web2.0 stuff…)

So I was pretty blown away to discover a video on Matt’s page titled “Where the Hell is Afunakwa?” Matt evidently discovered the controversy over the song and went to the Solomon Islands - as he says in the opening of the video, “I figured it was time I learned what I can about the song and Afunakwa… and also see about paying back my debt.”

On the island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in the town of Auki, Matt met David Solo, a cousin of Afunakwa. Talking to David, he learns that Afunakwa has been dead for some years, and gets a partial translation of the lyrics of the song:

[Small brother or sister] keep quiet
I tell you, even though you cry, I try to stop you
Even though you cry, I still carry you

Solo and a friend agree that they’re not able to accurately translate, as the words used are no longer used by people of his generation - they offer to take him to meet with relatives of Afunakwa, older people who can offer a better translation. He wasn’t able to change his flight to have that meeting, but he has plans to visit Afunakwa’s family in Baegu village in a future trip.

I find it deeply moving that a man best known for his goofy dancing felt compelled to discover the real story behind Afunakwa, and I’m grateful for this next chapter in the story. If you’re a documentary filmmaker looking for a tale to tell, allow me to suggest flying Matt and Professor Feld off to the Solomons and tell a final chapter of this story.

By the way, Internet, have I told you lately how much I love you?

David Weinberger somehow manages to find time to write books, write thoughtful blog posts, AND produce a periodic newsletter - Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization - that’s one of he best reads on the ‘net. I’m deeply flattered that the current issue features David’s thoughts on some of the topics I’m obsessed with: media attention, caring, international understanding. More generously, he gives me the chance to react to his essay within the essay…

David’s generosity isn’t the main reason I’m linking to his piece - it’s that he’s broken some important theoretical ground with his important new concept in media criticism: The Ninja Gap. It takes a moment or two to explain - bear with me.

Almost anyone who’s heard me give a public talk has heard me observe that Japan and Nigeria have roughly the same populations, but vastly different media representation: you’re roughly 8-12 times more likely to find an article focused on Japan in an American newspaper than an article on Nigeria. There are a lot of possible explanations for this phenomenon, from racism to comparative economic power. David offers a new one: Japan’s got ninjas, and Nigeria doesn’t.

It’s a brilliant observation because it’s funny, true and highly relevant to conversations about media attention. Johan Galtung, in his seminal “The Structure of Foreign News“, draws a persuasive metaphor between a radio receiver’s ability to tune in one of many radio stations, and a listener’s likelihood to “receive” a piece of news:

F4: The more meaningful the signal, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.
F5: The more consonant the signal is with the mental image of what one expects to find, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.
…
F7: The more a signal has been tuned in to the more likely it will continue to be tuned in to as worth listening to.

Context matters, Galtung argues. If we’ve got a mental image of Africa as a backwards and technically retrograde place, we’re likely to miss stories about innovation in mobile commerce (see the lead story in issue 407…) or success in venture capital. Galtung’s fifth maxim is closely linked to the idea of cognitive dissonance - it’s uncomfortable to attempt to resolve new information that conflicts with existing perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.

Context doesn’t just come from hard news - we all consume far more entertainment and advertising content than we consume of hard news. This information helps shape our views of these countries, and likely helps us unconsciously decide what sort of information to accept or reject. These perceptions construct something over time that might be thought of as a “nation brand” - as the man who coined that term,marketer Simon Anholt, observed, “Ethiopia is well branded to receive aid, but poorly branded as a tourism destination.”

In this context, Japan is a place branded in many of our minds as a place that’s innovative, high-tech, and more than a little strange. Whether or not we’ve been to Japan, we’ve encountered anime, monster movies, martial arts flicks, SONY tv’s and Toyota trucks. Whether or not our ideas about Japan are well-founded, reflect the reality on the ground, are rich in stereotypes, etc., we’ve got preconceptions about Japan. On some level, the fact that we know that “Japan = Ninjas” means that we’ve got receptivity for a story about Japan that we might not have for Nigeria.

And so, Nigeria needs ninja. Or as David explains:

One reason we care about Japan more than Nigeria (generally) is that Japan has a cool culture. We’ve heard about that culture because some Westerners wrote bestselling books about ninjas, and then Hollywood made ninja movies. Love them ninjas! Nigeria undoubtedly has something as cool as ninjas. Ok, something almost as cool as ninjas. If we had some blockblusters about the Nigerian equivalent of ninjas, we’d start to be interested Nigeria.

In other words, we’re more inclined to pay attention to Japan because we’ve got some context - a weird, non-representative context, for sure - while we have almost no context for stories about Nigeria. The context we do have for Nigeria - 419 scams - tends to be pretty corrosive, and may make us likelier to pick up only the stories that portray Nigeria as wildly corrupt and criminal.

David’s observation leads him to some concrete advice for those of us trying to inspire xenophilia: write better: “Good writing can make anything interesting. We will read the story about the Nigerian peddler and his neighborhood if there is a writer able to tell that story in a compelling way.”

That’s harder than it sounds. But it’s also one of the best pieces of constructive advice I’ve seen on cultivating xenophilia: tell good stories in a compelling way. And it wouldn’t hurt to throw a ninja or two in there while you’re at it.

If you haven’t had your daily dose of Weinberger from this post - and you might be surprised to know that the USDA for Weinberger is higher than you probably think - you might consider watching this video interview, produced by Ulrike Reinhard, who was kind enough to interview me a few days earlier. Feel free to ignore the first couple of minutes of Dr. Weinberger being unspeakably nice to me and fast-forward to the point where he disagrees with me and points out my pessimism and his comparative optimism on the Internet’s ability to help us encounter serendipity.

While we’re on the homophily/xenophilia/serendipity track, allow me to point you to a wonderful comment on my H/X/S post from Aaditeshwar Seth, a computer science researcher and new media innovator, who offers a useful perspective on xenophilia and homophily in terms of strong and weak social ties. Citing Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties“, Seth argues that we can see social graphs cluster in terms of strong and weak ties, and that xenophiles may be people who connect different strong-tied groups. I’ve got one of Seth’s papers queued up for addition to a future homophily reading list - hope to post some of the papers I’ve been reading later this week or early the next.

It’s been very gratifying to read comments and posts linking to my post last week on homophily, serendipity and xenophilia. I have high hopes of writing more on the topic, and am currently digging into “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks“, which danah boyd recommends as a thorough academic introduction to the subject. (That link will give you a summary of the paper, which is available in full text on JSTOR, a subscription-only journal archive. You may be able to get the full text of the paper if you access JSTOR from a university library… which is how I got a copy of it.)

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)