For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and eliminate poverty. Those of us involved with this movement - colloquially called ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development) - have argued that information imbalances underly major problems in economic development. If farmers don’t know fair prices for their commodities in big cities, they’ll sell for too little money. If students can’t access textbooks or other resources, they’re doomed to a poor education.

There’s a strong critique of ICT4D that argues that the importance of information is overstated and that ICT4D proponents either overvalue information technology because they’re personally attached to the tools, or more sinisterly, because they’re looking to create developing world markets for these tools. Many supporters of ICT4D - myself included - will concede that there are lots of badly thought out and poorly executed projects that do little more than drop expensive technology in areas where it’s a scarce resource and likely to stay a scarce resource for a long time to come.

One bright light for the ICT4D field has been the rise of eGovernment, a movement that tries to get governments to deliver key services to citizens using digital technology. India has been the location for many eGovernment pilot projects, some of which have been very successful in delivering key information services to citizens. In many states, citizens can visit information centers where they can obtain driver’s licenses, business licenses, residency or birth certificates, and other critical documents.

Jennifer Bussell, a political scientist who recently completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, has spent a great deal of time studying these projects and asks a tricky and important question about eGovernment in India - why do some states adopt eGovernance more readily than others? Are there policy environments that we can put in place to make it more likely that eGovernment projects will succeeed and that they’ll affect the lives of citizens positively?

In a talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, she offered an interesting opening paradox. The state of Karnataka is comparatively wealthy and extremely engaged with information technology - its capital is Bangalore, the epicenter of India’s technology and outsourcing industries. Chhattisgarh is a new state, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, and is extremely poor and low-tech. We’d expect eGovernment services to catch on in Karnataka much more quickly than in Chhattisgarh… and we’d be wrong. eGovernment has caught on far more quickly in this young, poor state than in the technology giant, raising questions about what factors actually contribute to the success or failure of eGovernment projects.

To understand what’s going on in these two states - and indeed, across many of India’s states (Bussell developed her theories in seven Indian states and has tested them on nine additional states, analyzing 16 of India’s 28 states) - it’s important to understand corruption, and how eGovernment might affect corruption. Indian citizens pay a lot of money in bribes. It’s estimated that Indians pay $5 billion USD annually to bribe government officials. Sometimes this is wealthy citizens paying money to “jump the queue” and obtain services more quickly that average citizens. But extremely poor citizens pay bribes as well - Bussell references a study that suggests that citizens below the poverty line collectively paid $22 million in bribes to access essential and guaranteed government services.

Taking old, paper-based bureacracies and turning them into “e-government” services appears to squeeze some opportunities for corruption - “rent-seeking”, in the language of political economics - out of the system. It’s not entirely clear why this is - the service centers rolled out in Indian states don’t generally put computers in the hands of citizens and let them access services directly. There’s an opportunity for the operators of these new systems to seek bribes. But the digitalization of India’s massive railway system is a good example of what’s happened in some eGovernment systems. Before digitalization, it was difficult to purchase a ticket without knowing someone to bribe within the system. Now tickets can be purchased online, and transactions within railway stations are simple, efficient and bribe-free (even if you’re a clueless American looking for trains from Rajastan to Delhi, as happened to me not very long ago.)

Bussell argues that e-services tend to systematically reduce corruption, and that they therefore can be threatening to existing political elites. Elites have the power of transferring bureacrats, moving them from a job where it’s easy to seek bribes (the customs service) to one where it’s harder to do so. They exercise this power by demanding kickbacks from bureacrats, which they use as campaign finance. A politician whose political livelihood relies on control of bribes and rent-seeking officials is likely to be threatened by eGovernment efforts and might fight their introduction.

Bussell further theorizes that the removal of bribes could be a threat to political stability within coalition governments. A coalition can be thought of as a group of politicians all seeking a share of the benefits of being in control of a state’s government - part of this control includes control over offices with a high chance for gains through corruption. So she theorizes that we’ll see eGovernment projects succeed in areas where there’s lower corruption, and where there’s a single party in power.

She studies eGovenrment adoption by tracking how many services are available in a given state - some offer just a few, like driver’s licenses, while others offer dozens. Her models try to explain the adoption of eGovernment services in terms of several factors. Some turn out to be largely irrelavent. Technology infrastructure isn’t statistically significant in explaining why some states have aggresively embraced eGovernment. Nor is the time of adoption - states that started eGovernment earlier aren’t neccesarily ahead of the curve. And the level of economic development isn’t statistically significant either.

Corruption, on the other hand, is a strong factor - states with above average corruption (based on surveys by groups like Transparency International) have adopted 10.6 services on average, while those with below-average corruption average out at 20.1 services. Unitary government matters as well - single party governments with below average corruption adopt services more aggresively than coalition governments, even in below-average corruption states.

This is useful information for anyone attempting to build eGovernment systems and roll them out in developing nations, though it doesn’t offer much insight on what to do if you’re in a high-corruption, coalition-governed area. (Duck and cover, perhaps.) And there’s a intriguing larger question - how does the introduction of eGovernment affect corruption in the long term? Do states that adopt eGovernment systems become progressively less corrupt over time? Bussell’s intrigued by these questions and looking for ways to study them going forward, which is good news for anyone who cares about ICT4D and wants to make sure people are doing rigorous, careful evaluation of what works and what fails.

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.

Sick of the US election dominating all media coverage? Dreaming of a future date, perhaps two weeks away, when it’s possible that headlines won’t feature Sarah Palin?

You could always turn to international news, where the question seems to be, “What does the rest of the world think about the US election?”

In other words, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”

That was more or less my response some months ago when some of the Global Voices team came to me and suggested we try to cover the US elections through the eyes of the developing world. Through the brilliant work of Amira Al Hussaini, support of authors like Hoa Quach and others, we’ve put together Voices Without Votes, a website that collects international blog perspectives on the US elections. Read today and you’ll discover reports on a shortage of pro-Obama yamulkes,
Voices without Votes, comments from the Philippines about a suspicious misspelling on New York ballots, and the reasons Cubans are hoping for an Obama victory. It’s been one of our most successful projects and one that I’m now inordinately proud of.

Just shows what I know.

Dominique Moisi at Real Clear World has an interesting essay wondering whether Europeans are “blue state voters” and Asians are “red staters”. Her argument is that Asians may be resistant to change and concerned about an Obama victory:

…a majority of Asian elites are awaiting the growing possibility of an Obama victory with some bewilderment and even apprehension.

For example, Japanese elites tend to favor continuity over change. In their mind, the hard power of the United States is more important than its soft power, and their vision of a United States that is “bound to lead” is largely unchanged. For them, Washington is above all the strategic counterweight needed to balance Beijing.

Recent image from theworldfor.com.

Guess those Asian elites aren’t participating in the various online polls designed to show how the world would choose to vote. TheWorldFor.com has Obama leading McCain 89%-11%, with only Afghanistan, the Ukraine and the Svalbard Islands favoring the Republican. Those change-phobic Japanese favor Obama 89-11, the same as the rest of the population sample.

Using a similarly unauthoritative methodology (allow people to identify whatever country they represent), the Economist has assigned the world an electoral college, offering electoral votes based on population. Obama’s dominating that competition, 8,954 to 88, with McCain claiming votes from Sudan, Georgia, Cuba and Macedonia. (How’s that for a voting bloc?) Oh, and the Japanese are 86/14 for Obama in their poll.

Foreign Policy’s map is lots more interesting to me, though somewhat less reassuring to fellow Obama supporters. Using data from the Gallup World Poll - which surveys people in 140 countries - they asked slightly more complex questions than “Obama or McCain?” Voters had the option to answer that they didn’t know or refused to answer. And they asked a second question - whether voters thought the US election would affect their own lives.

The addition of the third answer - don’t know or don’t care - is a fascinating one. In the Phillipines - one of the four countries where Gallup saw an advantage for McCain (28 versus 20), the majority (52%) didn’t express an opinion. Don’t know was the overwhelming majority in India, where 7% favor Obama, 2% McCain and 91% don’t have an opinion. Only 6% of Indian voters thought the US presidential election mattered to them - 87% answered that they didn’t know on that question as well. Given the shortage of undecided voters at this stage of the endless US election, perhaps it would behoove Obama and McCain to move their campaigns to the swing states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Even more interesting are the people who actively assert that the US presidency won’t make a difference to their country. 72% of people in Palestine state that it won’t matter who becomes the US president. (Israel is not included in the survey.) They lead a pack of nations that includes oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conflict-ridden Burundi, Pakistan and Lebanon, and some nations that are harder to explain: Estonia, Peru, Chile, Austria. The Palestinians, unfortunately, are probably right. And so are the Burundians, I fear.

For anyone who hopes that global support for Obama leads inexorably to victory… well, it’s worth reading up what happened when The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” urged readers of that liberal British newspaper to send letters to citizens in a swing county of a swing state. Some argue that the letters - which were not well-received by many voters - swung the county for Bush instead of for Kerry.

One way or another, it’s safe to say that you won’t hear Obama claiming global support via any of these polls any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m getting a great deal more from the comments from individual bloggers from the rest of the world. An interesting - and cautionary - note from Naseen Tarawnah of the excellent Black Iris blog (from Amman, Jordan):

My reluctance to get on the Obama bandwagon has mostly been due to the fact that he has this seemingly cult-like following. He is seen as this messiah of change, and is described and depicted as almost prophet-like. I have a problem with anyone who puts that much faith in a single politician, especially an American president. If the on-going history of America has shown the world anything, it’s that change (in the positive sense of the word) is not a big factor in a US presidency. So I am constantly astonished by any Arab who is entranced by Obama and have to constantly remind myself that most of the fan base in this part of the world comes from a particular more-westernized demographic and have been swallowed up by the wave of US election culture that is dominated by Obama. Everyone is entitled to their own perceptions but I remain realistic to the degree of change that is expected with either candidate in the Oval Office.

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…

One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)

That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.

Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues - some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments - One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.

The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change - thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.

Last summer, Center for Disease Control officials quarrantined a man who’d flown from Atlanta to Prague via Paris, despite being ordered not to travel. CDC officials knew - though the man did not - that he was infected with XDR-TB - extensively drug resistant tuberculosis. For the first time in over forty years, the CDC used their authority to pull the man from a plane and put him into isolation in an Atlanta hospital.

The story gained a flurry of media attention - including interviews with airline passengers furious that they’d been exposed to the disease. But it didn’t do very much to raise the profile of XDR-TB in the United States.

James Nachtwey would like to change that. A celebrated war photographer honored in 2007 with a $100,000 TED Prize, Nachtwey has spent much of the past year photographing patients with XDR-TB in locations around the world. His work helps put a face on a dangerous, frightening, poorly-understood and fully preventable disease… and many possibly help stop XDR-TB from turning into a global pandemic.

Tuberculosis is an extremely common bacterial disease - it spreads through the air and it’s quite pervasive. One third of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacillus, though only 5-10% of those people will develop the disease. (People with weakened immune systems, including AIDS sufferers, are at much higher risk to develop TB.) These cases of TB are usually treatable with drugs like rifampicin and isoniazid. If these drugs aren’t properly administered - if too little is used, or treatment is stopped too soon - the TB bacillus can become resistant to these drugs. It’s then known as multiply drug resistant TB and can then usually be treated with quinolone, kanamycin, capreomycin, or amikacin. If these drugs aren’t administered well, the disease can develop resistance to some of these drugs, too - it’s then known as XDR-TB, and it’s a very expensive and difficult disease to treat at that point.

XDR-TB came to the attention of global health professionals in 2006 with an epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In one rural hospital, out of 544 TB patients, 221 had multiply drug resistant TB, and 53 of these patients had XDR-TB. (All were HIV positive). Within a few weeks, 52 of 53 had died, including those on antiretroviral drugs. The few treatments that can cure XDR-TB are expensive, difficult to administer and have painful and dangerous side effects. The lessons learned from the XDR-TB epidemic in KZN largely have to do with limiting the spread of the disease from infected patients to highly vulnerable populations, like HIV+ people. (The good news in the KZN epidemic is that the spread appears most serious within hospital environments, where patients are close together for long periods of time - the spread of MDR-TB to people in the community who’d visited patients or interacted with them was roughly 1%.)

It’s not clear how widespread the problem of XDR-TB has become. There have been cases reported in 49 countries, including South Africa, India, Russia and the United States. It’s a very difficult disease to diagnose - while TB can be diagnosed within a day, diagnosing XDR-TB involves culturing baccili and testing their drug resistance, which can take weeks or months. In 2004, the World Health Organization estimated up to half a million cases of MDR-TB. Recent studies suggest that 15 to 20% of those cases might be XDR-TB.

Nachtwey’s photographs have examined the impact of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, one of the epicentres of XDR-TB infection, and his network of collaborators in the medical community were able to alert him to the importance and possible impact of XDR-TB before it entered most people’s awareness. With the 2007 TED Prize, Nachtwey had the opportunity to use the money and influence of the TED community to cover the story and disseminate the images. The challenge is that Nachtwey realized that he would have far less access as a photographer if governments were aware that he was documenting XDR-TB. So his work has been clandestine, and the subject of his work supported by the TED Prize was only revealed today. Photos of patients in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, India, Sibera and other locations will be unveiled in New York City tonight, and will be published in this week’s issue of Time Magazine in an article called The Forgotten Plague.

“Forgotten” may be the right word to describe TB, a disease that gets much less attention than HIV or even malaria, despite its enormous global impact. But XDR-TB is too new to be forgotten - it’s simply not well known or understood outside healthcare circles. Nachtwey’s intervention is a timely one - the ways to prevent XDR-TB from becoming a pervasive global threat have to do with strengthening healthcare systems in vulnerable nations. If hospitals and community health organizations can diagnose TB early and ensure compliance with treatment, the disease shouldn’t progress to multiple drug resistance.

But improving developing world hospitals is a difficult and expensive task. Eliminating pharmaceutical fakes may be even more difficult. Fake precription drugs are extremely common in developing nations, and a TB patient who is religiously taking rifampicin may only be getting the drug half the time… a prescription for creating MDR-TB. As Nachtwey raises awareness about XDR-TB, I hope that people will pay attention to innovative efforts like mPedigree, designed to combat pharma fakes using information technology and mobile phones.

Nachtwey’s campaign launches today at XDRTB.org. Here’s hoping his photographs will help draw attention not just to a treatable disease, but to the need to fix many aspects of the global healthcare system, including strengthening community hospitals and fighting drug piracy.

So… it’s speech season, that odd moment in the year where people around the world invite me to say something insightful, provocative, or at least entertaining to audiences of students, conference-goers, librarians, or anyone who happens to have wandered into the room. Between now and the first week of December, I’ve got fourteen talks scheduled on my calendar.

Needless to say, there’s some overlap between these talks. I don’t know enough about thirteen different subjects to give thirteen different talks without having talk 12 be titled “Great Red Sox Games I Have Watched on Television”, so I borrow, recycle and generally reuse talks. There’s a good chance that I’ll give some version of the talk I gave at NYU last week to audiences in New Hampshire, Barcelona and Budapest.

But every so often, conference organizers throw me a curve ball and I find myself assigned a topic. That’s the case with next week’s talk at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam. PICNIC is a wonderful event, a multi-day conference at a former industrial site near the center of town, filled with interesting innovators in new media. I had a blast last year, dropping in while enroute to South Africa, and this year, I’m lucky enough to share the main stage with friends like Clay Shirky and Genevieve Bell. But this is one of those conferences where I didn’t get to pick the topic, and where I’ve been assigned a title for the talk: “Surprising Africa”.

It’s not the title I would have chosen. I have visions of someone sneaking up behind a continent, yelling “boo” and then giggling. But I get the general point - I’m supposed to give the Africa Rising/Africa 2.0/African Cheetahs frame on the main stage on Thursday, helping build excitement for a day-long session on Friday with the same title, an event where I’ll give a quick talk on citizen media in Africa. All well and good. But it’s unclear what stories to tell, given that I don’t want to steal the thunder of friends who are also sharing the stage. Erik Hershman of Afrigadget and Ushahidi, who I generally steal from liberally, will be there, as will Binyavanga Wainaina, whose brilliant and fierce “How to Write About Africa” I quote in nearly every talk. (I get to share the stage with Binyavanga, which should leave me feeling good and properly self-conscious about any Africa clichés I manage to work into my talk.)

So, friends, I’m appealing for help. I’ve got roughly a half an hour to share a couple of stories with a smart audience that probably doesn’t know much about the continent. The goal, as always, is to help people develop a more realistic picture of the continent, focusing on opportunity as much as hardship, technological innovation as much as conflict, HIV/TB/malaria, etc.

I’m likely to tell stories about:

- How mobile money emerged in East Africa, and why companies like Safaricom and Celpay are changing the rules for how money moves in a 21st century economy

- How mobile phones and talk radio have helped make government more accountable, and helped monitor elections

- How Kenyan bloggers and activists responded to an electoral crisis in their country, creating unique tools for crisis reporting

- African blogging and the rise of aggregators like Afrigator

- Innovative projects, like mPedigree, which is tracking medications in African pharmacies to help detect pharma fakes

The unifying theme is likely to be, as always, what we pay attention to in Africa and what we ignore. With that in mind, what other stories should I be sure to tell? What stories have we heard too much about and don’t need to be told? Any and all (constructive) suggestions appreciated.

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.

I had an opportunity to share my observations about “citizen propaganda” in the Russia/Georgia conflict with someone far more knowledgeable than myself - Gregory Shvedov, the editor in chief of Caucasian Knot, a leading alternative news publication focused on the Caucuses, joined the fellows at the Berkman Center for a brief discussion yesterday. Shvedov has been following the conflict closely, both through the reports of journalists associated with Caucasian Knot who are on the ground in Georgia and Ossetia, and through the panoply of blog accounts that have accompanied the war.

Shvedov confirms that there’s been deep interest in “eyewitness accounts” of events on the ground, and that the blogs he’s read seem to include people in Moscow or Tblisi misrepresenting themselves as being on the ground, usually to forward a political agenda. He worries that people are paying more attention to these bloggers - some of whom are misrepresenting themselves - than to reporters he and other publications have on the ground.

This situation presents interesting challenges for those of us who advocate for citizen media or who are involved with projects that aggregate and promote citizen media. If it becomes clear that many blogger eyewitnesses are simply amateur propagandists, it’s going to be harder and harder for journalists to reference and amplify the opinions of bloggers on the ground. It puts an interesting pressure on projects like Global Voices - in citing a blogger writing from Ossetia, are we authenticating that blogger, certifying that the person in question is really an eyewitness?

We can’t offer that authentication - that’s not what we do. We study the blogosphere closely, and we know who’s been blogging for a while, and can often offer background information on the bloggers we amplify. But we’re not a news agency, we don’t have reporters on the ground in Ossetia, and we’re discovering that there’s a real challenge presented by fast-breaking news events: news inspires people to start blogging. It’s not hard to believe that someone in Ossetia would begin blogging shortly after Georgian and then Russian troops came into the region - that blogger would be an eyewitness, and would likely have some interesting insights on the conflict. But she wouldn’t have a reputation or a track record, and it would be difficult to evaluate whether she was actually on the ground, or writing from either Tblisi or Moscow.

We all make decisions about the authenticity of information we receive, either online or offline. I tend to take a story more seriously if it comes from the New York Times than if it comes from the Montgomery County Bulletin. (Friends of mine who lean to the right may suggest that this is an error on my part.) We rely on the reputation and brand of the Times, and the fact that the paper is widely read and fact-checked by bloggers and readers. The Times gets it wrong sometimes - Jayson Blair, Judith Miller - but the reading public tends to be quite aware of those errors.

Reading blogs demands a different strategy. Reputation matters, but it’s less about brand than about longevity, links and comment threads. It’s not hard to manufacture a single, incorrect blogpost and have it survive some scrutiny - it’s harder for a blog to survive scrutiny over a long period of time. If a blog has no history, no incoming links, no active comment threads, it’s hard to value the opinions expressed there any more (or less) highly than those from a stranger on a city street. A blog that’s made controversial and questionable statements will often generate discussions, either on comment threads or on blogs linking to the blog - reading those threads often helps establish whether this blogger is viewed as reliable or with skepticism, as mainstream or fringe within a particular debate. These methods certainly don’t guarantee that a blogger is neutral or non-partisan - they simply make it easier to determine whether that person is a respected voice in an existing community of interest.

These reputation mechanisms don’t work well in the case of breaking news. We don’t check the previous blogposts or the incoming link count of the people who sent mobile phone photos from the underground during the 7/7 London bombings. Those images were believable to the recipients because they came from known contacts - they were believable in the press because the photos were consistent with other individual and professional press accounts. How do we make decisions about authenticity of observations coming from a war zone that’s not closely covered by the professional media?

My sense is that we’ve generally assumed good faith in reading citizen accounts of wars and other disasters. We may need to re-examine that assumption. As citizen media becomes a more influential and closely watched space, there’s a greater incentive to fight information wars on blogs and video-sharing sites, not just in the traditional press.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on citizen propaganda, the Ossetian conflict isn’t the first time we’re seeing propaganda efforts in digital media. We’ve seen evidence both of professional, paid posting by the “fifty cent party” and well-organized amateur efforts in the Chinese blogosphere, especially around riots in Lhasa.

We’ve covered these efforts on Global Voices because our job isn’t to report news, but to report what’s being discussed in a nation’s blogosphere. If that discussion includes amateur propaganda videos, or organized campaigns to post pro-government comments on blogs, we need to cover those posts… but we also need to provide context, helping people understand where these comments are coming from. Are these the spontaneous expression of angry individuals in China, Georgia, or Russia? Are they part of a larger, orchestrated campaigns? How do we value an opinion expressed as part of an organized campaign versus the opinion expressed by an independent individual?

My colleague Judith Donath offered a very useful framework in considering these questions. She suggests that what we’re trying to determine here is the “authenticity” of a particular voice. There are a number of factors we consider in considering authenticity… and perhaps we overvalue some and undervalue others.

In discussing the “fifty cent party” (a group of bloggers paid by Chinese authorities to publish pro-government comments on blogs and in forums), the fact that commenters are being paid makes me tend to take their contributions less seriously. It isn’t clear that we should draw this conclusion - it’s quite possible that the people who choose to work with Party authorities are generally in agreement with Party position on most matters… but somehow the presence of money causes me, personally, to consider these comments as less authentic.

Spontaneity also appears to be a characteristic that we correlate with authenticity. If I find a comment on a New York Times story comparing Vladimir Putin to Vlad the Impaler, it looks like a spontaneous, heartfelt response. If I find 100 comments all making the same analogy, it looks like an attempt to organize a campaign drawing associations between a world leader and the inspiration of vampire novels. Should I take the apparently spontaneous comment more seriously? Doesn’t the attempt to engineer a meme about Putin and vampires reflect a seriousness of sentiment that’s at least as authentic as an offhand comment?

Remember, the goal here isn’t to determine the accuracy of a statement, but the authenticity. Are people in China really angry about Jack Cafferty’s characterization of Chinese authorities as “goons and thugs” or was this simply an orchestrated campaign? Are thousands of angry Russians commenting on New York Times coverage because they were authentically pissed off? Because someone’s organizing a campaign to encourage them to do so? Does it matter if such a campaign is organized by a clever, web2.0 activist or by the Kremlin? What should we consider as we try to evaluate whether individual blogs are authentic or orchestrated? (Or both?)

Donath had another intriguing suggestion - she wonders whether large-scale text analysis could help detect blogposts that are part of orchestrated campaigns. Assume that there’s a wave of blogposts about, oh, say Sarah Palin. It might be possible to automatically identify blogposts that use similar phrases to attack or defend the VP candidate. A wave of posts all making the same three critiques or offering a similar worded defense might indicate organized campaigns to spread certain talking points. (Or they might just point to the tendency of bloggers to cut and paste arguments from people they read and like.) Even if such a tool didn’t help us figure out the authenticity of sentiment, it could help us avoid reading another half-dozen repetitive posts on the same topic.

Is authenticity the right characteristic to consider when evaluating blog accounts from conflicts? How should we evaluate authenticity when it’s difficult to verify the identity and location of an author?

I’ve been researching stories that help demonstrate how the Internet has helped people make connections across cultural boundaries… and the ways in which it’s fallen short of its potential to do so. One of the stories that’s fascinated me is the story of how Filipino singer Arnel Pineda became the new lead singer of US rock band, Journey. For those who missed my post earlier this year, or the interview with Charles Osgood on CBS Sunday morning, the story goes like this:

In 2007, Arnel Pineda was singing with his band, The Zoo, in the Hard Rock Café in Makati, one of the cities that make up Manilla. The Zoo played long sets of soft rock ballads, the sorts of songs that topped the charts in the US in the 1970s and 80s. Zoo fan Noel Gomez recorded videos of their performances and posted them to YouTube, where they generated long comment threads from Filipino admirers, amazed by Pineda’s ability to unerringly reproduce the vocal stylings of legendary American balladeers.

While Pineda was already well known in Asia from his performances in Hong Kong and singing contests in the Philippines, You Tube displayed his gifts to a much wider audience. Specifically, he caught the attention of Neil Schoen, the founding guitarist of Journey, one of the bands The Zoo regularly covered.

Journey reached the peak of its popularity in the early 1980s, with a succession of chart-topping hits sung by Steve Perry, whose high, clear tenor gave the band it’s signature sound. Perry left the band for a solo career in 1986, returned for a reunion in 1996 and left the band for good 2007.

Finding a new frontman has been difficult - the songs Perry is remembered for are technically challenging and stretch the vocal range of many talented singers. And Journey’s fans, like those of many classic rock bands, are looking for performances that honor the original recordings, not a novel interpretation of the classics.

So Schoen was two days into a restless perusal of YouTube, watching videos of Journey cover bands, when he discovered Pineda’s uncanny vocal talents. Schoen emailed Gomez, who’d posted the video, and their email exchange - which Pineda initially dismissed as a prank - turned into an invitation to audition for the band. Pineda is now the frontman of Journey on a concert tour through the US, a tour that’s been warmly received by fans, who compare Pineda’s vocals and energy favorably to Perry’s.

I’m interested in the story because it seems like a realization of the highest aspirations some of us had for the internet when it entered the public consciousness in 1994. Here was a space that promised a common ground, a level playing field for people around the world to share their ideas and talents. (Needless to say, it’s never been truly level, as barriers of language, education and access make it likely that many geniuses living in rural Africa will go undiscovered.) The internet hints at a truly globalized world, one where the best person for the job has a chance at it, no matter what her accident of birth; a world where the best idea, invention or performance might win out despite the origins of its author.

I’ve been thinking about using Pineda’s story as a contrast to other, less hopeful videos that show how difficult it is to understand the needs, motivations and worldview of the person on the other side of the screen. For me, the paradigmatic video about disconnection in a connected age is the “Nigerian Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the video, a pair of young Nigerian men perform Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch. They’re performing because they believe they’re auditioning for a drama scholarship - instead they’re performing for the pleasure of Mike Berry, a “scambaiter” who spends his free time responding to 419 scammers, encouraging them to humiliate themselves and posting documentation on his website, 419eater.com. Some consider scambaiting an effective and amusing way to combat internet abuse and attempted fraud. Others wonder whether “some of the more derogatory baits say something about our darker selves, laying bare the divide between white and black, rich and poor, First World and Third?”

In thinking about how to frame a constrast between the videos, the Dead Parrot one struck me as more troublesome. It’s clear that email scams are pervasive and damaging, not just to the people cheated by them but to the economies of African nations, who now have difficulties persuading overseas business partners to enter into legitimate partnerships. While the jocular abuse on sites like 419eater is disturbing, so is the gangsta stance associated with celebrations of 419 in Nigerian culture in songs like “419 State of Mind“. The more I look at the phenomenon of scambaiting, the harder time I have feeling comfortable with the motives of anyone involved with the encounter.

The more I read about Pineda’s story, the more I realize that this story is complicated as well. One aspect I’d never bother to consider was the challenges Pineda might have had in getting a visa to audition in the US. There’s an intriguing forwarded email, posted on Filipino-community blogs like Flipland, evidently authored by a US embassy staffer at the visa section in Manila. The anonymous author tells the story of hearing The Zoo in a Manila club and being amazed by Pineda’s abilities. A week later, the author found himself sitting next to an immigration officer, who turned to him bemusedly, midway through interviewing a “nutjob” who wants to go to America so he can audition for Journey. The author offered to take the case, with some skepticism: “Given the malarkey you get at a Manila NIV window, this story only got points for being original. He produced some flimsy emails and letters, etc.” So he asked Pineda to prove his bonafides by belting out “Wheel in the Sky”. The author closes his story:

I said, “Look sir, there isn’t a person in this Embassy who would believe that story– going to try out for Journey!– not a soul would believe that. Except for me. I saw you sing last Friday and I couldn’t shut up about how your vocals were perfect Steve Perry.

So I tell you what. I’m giving you that visa. You’re going to try out. And you’re going to make it….”

For me, the story is a reminder of how fragile a success like Pineda’s actually is. It isn’t enough to be able to emulate Steve Perry and capture the attention of an eighties guitar god - you’ve also got to survive an encounter with (understandably) skeptical and suspicious US government bureaucrat. Pineda’s good fortune raises the spectre of a Srinivasa Ramanujan never able to leave his clerk’s job the Madras Port Trust office to join G.H. Hardy at Cambridge, helping push the boundaries of number theory.

(Not that Ramanujan’s story is an uncomplicated one, either. His intuitive working methods caused clashes with some of his British colleagues, and the difficulty of maintaining a Hindu vegetarian diet during WWI Britain might have contributed to his early death from hepatic amoebiasis. )

Filipino blogger and journalist Benito “Sunny” Vergara has a provocative and thoughtful set of columns in AsianWeek on Pineda’s improbable story. (Please see “Tongues like Parrots“, “The Man Can Sing Anything”, and “It’s Steve and It’s Not Steve“.) One column focuses on the idea of “plakado”, which Vergara defines as “a compliment given to bands that can unerringly reproduce what is heard on the plaka, or vinyl record.” (In an earlier post, he refers to a longer phrase - “plakadong-plakado”.) This highly accurate mimicry may be related to the popularity of karaoke machines that score performances based on their technical accuracy, their similarity to the recorded version. (If you’ve played “Rock Band”, this experience will be familiar to you.) With truly plakado singers, it’s as if you can close your eyes and imagine you’re listening to the original performer. Vergara observes:

This act of closing one’s eyes is important. It signals a kind of erasure of cultural difference: that these Filipino musicians are, in a sense, aurally alienated from the products of their musical labor, so that they act as substitutes or copies of “the real thing.” And part of the pleasure in consumption of this technical mastery is that the audience would open its eyes, as it were, and discover, to its surprise, its music uncannily reproduced by the Third World.

In a later piece, Vergara wonders whether Pineda has to erase his cultural difference (not to mention a difference in age and in experience) to experience his new life:

Do the guys hang out with him after work? What do they talk about — are they all friendly, or are the conversations sometimes awkward? Does he tell them stories about how he was a big Journey fan back in the day? Do the other band members reminisce about Steve, then remember he’s not there anymore?…

Does he feel lonely? Does he get homesick? Does he think about his former bandmates, his family, his people, his homeland, thousands of miles away? Does he get to sneak out, away from the tour bus, and find the nearest Filipino restaurant? Does he get tired of the American food on tour, and long for tapsilog in the mornings?

In other words, is it possible to become “the ultimate Overseas Filipino Worker” without becoming a little - or a lot - less Filipino? A version of the question applies to everyone who’s ever lived and worked within another culture - how does the experience of encountering another culture, living in another world, change you? Are you the same person after the experience? Is the reward - fiscal or otherwise - worth the price?

Commenters on Vergara’s post point out that it’s Pineda’s presence on stage - bold, striding, playful - that is impressing the fans as much as his vocal qualities. They’re not closing their eyes and imagining Steve Perry - they’re reveling in the dislocation of hearing a band sound just like they did 25 years earlier, despite faces full of wrinkles and an energetic Filipino frontman. But I think Vergara’s right to be worried - watching the interview on CBS, Pineda looks nervous… not necessarily unhappy, but clearly still adjusting to the profoundly weird developments in his life.

The internet - more than the telegraph, telephone, radio or television - has the potential to bring the rest of the world closer to us, to help us cross cultural boundaries quickly, casually, accidently. But the human work of bridging cultural distance hasn’t gotten any easier, and it’s still a challenge to understand the world we encounter. We’ve got a long way to go before the internet helps a British scambaiter empathize with a Nigerian spammer, or a Nigerian scam artist with an American victim. Maybe a Filipino balladeer is just the man to lead us as in bridging this disconnect.