Asking questions. Connecting the dots. Explaining matters.
These actions sum up what I have been doing in the spheres of communication and development for over 20 years. They form the cornerstone in my attempts to make sense of our globalised world and heady times.
As a journalist, I was trained to look for what’s New, True and Interesting (‘NTI Test’). Early on, I went beyond just reporting events, and probed the underlying causes and processes. With experience, I can now offer my audiences something more: perspective and seasoned opinion.
I look back (slightly) and look around (a lot) in a half-hour, in-depth TV interview with media researcher/activist and fellow citizen journalist Sanjana Hattotuwa. This was part of The Interview (third series) produced by Young Asia Television, and broadcast on two Sri Lankan TV channels, TNL and ETv on May 8 (with repeats).
Watch the full interview online: Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene
I have always worn multiple ‘hats’, and dabbled in multiple pursuits rather than follow narrow paths of enquiry. I see myself continuing to oscillate between the ‘geeks’ and greens, and where possible, bridging their worlds.
I sometimes feel a strange kinship with the ancient Greeks, who first asked some fundamental questions about the universe. They didn’t always get the answers right, and neither do I.
But it’s very important that we question and critique progress – I do so with an open mind, enthusiasm and optimism.
I once saw a sports car on the narrow streets of Malé, capital of the Maldives (total population 350,000). Nothing unusual about it — except that the whole of Malé is about two square km: we can WALK the length and breadth of the crowded capital in 10 or 15 minutes. The other 1,200 islands that make up the Indian Ocean archipelago are even smaller.
That reality didn’t stop an optimistic Maldivian from investing in a fast vehicle – after all, a car (especially a sports model) is more just a means of transport.
Something akin to this plays out in the virtual world everyday in many parts of developing Asia. Many Internet users have state of the art access devices — ranging from the latest laptops and high-speed desk tops to ipads and internet-enabled mobile phones. But most of the time the users and devices are held up by poor quality internet connections. I mean patchy, uneven, really S-L-O-W ones.
So part of the time — how often and how long depends on where you are, and who your internet service provider or ISP is — we are all like that Maldivian sports car owner. Dressed up and rearing to go, but not really going very far. Because our network is overloaded.
What can you do when your broadband internet connectivity slows down, making some web applications tedious or impossible? How can you measure and compare the quality of broadband service within the same telecom network or across different service providers?
As consumers, we have limited options. We can grin and bear, and be grateful that we are among the 2 billion (and counting) human beings who regularly access the Internet. We can grumble and rant, and even complain to our ISP. But chances are that they’ll plead it was a system fluke, an exception to the norm.
Now there’s another option. The Ashoka-Tissa method, a simple and free software developed by LIRNEasia and IIT Madras, enables just that: with it, you can gather evidence before taking it up with telecom operators.
Rohan Samarajiva: Fraudband-buster?At TVE Asia Pacific , we have just produced a short video in which LIRNEasia — a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank active across the Asia Pacific — sums up their experience in developing a user-friendly method to measure broadband quality of service experience. It also shows how they engaged telecom operators and regulators in South and Southeast Asia from 2007 t0 2010.
“256 kbps up and down is the minimum definition (of broadband),” says Dr Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia’s Chair and CEO. “There are various people debating about it: whether it should be 2Mbps and so on, but I will give an acceptable minimum definition…Our research shows that, in fact, many broadband products that say they are giving 2Mbps don’t even meet this minimum rate.”
The former Sri Lankan telecom regulator adds: “Then of course there is this whole story of companies promising all kinds of things. 2Mbps up, 2Mbps down and various other things being promised and giving not even 256kbps. So there is almost like a dishonesty factor here. As one of my friends says, this is not broadband; this is fraudband!”
PS: While writing this blog post, I was frustrated by the poor quality of my own supposedly high-speed broadband connection, provided by Sri Lanka’s oldest telecom operator.
Would 2 billion recognise this?What’s the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘Internet’?
If you’re a techie or geek, you’ll probably come up with a detailed answer that is technically accurate or precise. But most of the 2 billion plus people who use the Internet worldwide are not techies. They don’t know – or care – about the back-end technicalities.
A good icon is simple, language-neutral, and can be understood across different cultures and by people with very different educational backgrounds. For example, telephones – both fixed and mobile – have established symbols or icons. Sure, the devices have evolved beyond the well known imagery, but everybody recognises these.
So what’s the equivalent for the Internet, never mind its multitudinous applications and delivery methods?
We’re currently editing a short video on LIRNEasia’s broadband quality of service experience (QoSE) in emerging Asian economies. We play with images to tell complex stories in non-technical terms. We wanted to use an icon for the Internet (broadband or otherwise) — and couldn’t immediately think of one visual that everybody knows and recognises unambiguously as representing the global Internet.
So we searched. Our usually reliable friend Google wasn’t of much help. Google image search for ‘internet icon’ brought up hundreds of results — but none that is a universally accepted or recognised. But the search itself was interesting and revealing.
Some images, like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser’s famous ‘e’, are well known but are branded to one product and company.
Others, like the ethernet cable’s plug pin, are widely used — but how many non-techies will recognise it? Besides, when broadband access is increasingly going wireless, do the cables matter as much as they used to?
The same goes for those colourful images of fibre optic cables — dazzling points of light, but how many Digital Immigrants (or even Digital Natives) will know what they are?
At least wireless Internet seems to have settled its iconography — or has it? The little antenna transmitting omni-directionally seems to pop up everywhere these days, at least where such coverage is available. But there too, we have more than one icon — even if their main visual symbols are similar.
Then there’s the ubiquitous @ sign — originally introduced for, and still an integral part of, email addresses. But hey, Internet is a lot more than emails!
Are we settled on this?We asked around IT industry friends and IT-watchers, but none could give us a definitive answer. The most that they could agree on was that the 3-letter formulation www (signifying the World Wide Web) comes close to a universally recognised sign for the Internet.
Hmm, that’s far from being a visually elegant design. And it’s decidedly biased to the roman alphabet too (ok, that’s the language of science).
But is there a better icon for the whole Internet, irrespective of delivery method and language-neutral? If not, isn’t it about time we agreed on one?
Designers, geeks and others with spare creative capacity, please take this up.
18 Days that changed Egypt: 25 Jan to 11 Feb 2011The geeky Davids bring down the mighty Goliath of Mubarak: Bravo!!!Don't meddle with a proud nation that's 5,000 years old!Mubarak unplugged Egypt from the Internet; Angry Egyptians unplugged him!
Their blurb: “Violent clashes between police and demonstrators as over ten thousand gather on the streets of Cairo. The Egyptian people have endured a tyrant’s rule for far too long, millions struggle each day to find where their next meal is coming from. January 25th, 2011 marks the day when the people rise and take back what’s rightfully there’s. This isn’t the end, but hopefully the beginning to a long awaited regime change! Send to everyone and let them know.”
Song: “Into the Fire” – Thirteen Senses
Thanks to the following news sources for their footage
Daily News Egypt
The Guardian
CNN
New York Times
Al Masry Al Youm
Time is ticking away...but crises also mean opportunities
I like to think and speak in metaphors, especially visual metaphors. Sometimes I coin or design new ones. This illustration is the latest example.
Individual elements in this came from very different sources (thanks to them all). I just mixed them together to make two points during a talk I just gave at the Colombo University.
We live in a crisis-ridden world where we have to cope with multiple emergencies unfolding at the same time, impacting us on different fronts. This illustration captures three of them: crisis in biodiversity, man-made climate change, and the new reality of living in a rapidly WikiLeakable world — what I called the Global Glass House.
We don’t get to choose the timing, severity or duration of any challenge. But we do have some choice over how we respond: we can despair and grumble (blaming the Gods or karma if we believe in those); we can become really alarmist (a la Chicken Little); or we can be measured and smart in how we deal with the seemingly overwhelming situations.
Speaking at the Leaders in Environmental Advocacy Forum (LEAF) on Preserving the Past, Securing the Future on 22 January 2011 at the University of Colombo, I advocated this last option. I also pulled together a number of ideas mentioned on this blog over the past four years.
LEAF was a two-day summit held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, hosted by members of the Elon University’s Periclean Scholar Class of 2011, in partnership with the University of Colombo, the United States Embassy in Colombo, the National Science Foundation of Sri Lanka and Rainforest Rescue International.
In fact, some challenges of living on a warming planet are comparable to coping with a WikiLeakable world: both demand quick adaptation to a new reality. In both cases, governments and society have to change mindset and practices on the go — business as usual is no longer an option. Denialism, or demonising the messenger, won’t take us forward. We need more measured, sometimes even pragmatic responses.
In that process, all-or-nothing is not a viable approach. Waiting for full knowledge and understanding is not feasible either. As I once described it, responding to the planet’s climate and other ecological crisis with partial scientific understanding is akin to many pages of our planet’s ‘operations manual’ being still completely blank — and yet we have to manage the planet to the best of our knowledge, intuition and common sense.
Many of the same principles apply to living in the modern networked info society, where no secrets can be kept that way for too long. The sooner we come to terms with this new reality and adapt, the better.
I’m delighted to see others are addressing these parallels. In my talk, I mentioned a recent essay titled Could climate science become open source? by Brendan Barrett and Sulayman K. Sowe, published earlier this month on the UN University’s Our World 2.0 website.
In their perceptive piece, the authors ask whether climate science would benefit by being more firmly grounded in the principles of openness, perhaps along the lines of the free and open source software communities and open content movements. “The concept of openness behind free and open source software describes a mode of creative knowledge production and sharing in which individuals and communities freely generate and adapt or remix resources (content or software) without licensing restrictions.”
They add: “Proposing a move to a new model of climate science in no way suggests that climate change is not a real and present threat or that we cannot rely on the integrity of our contemporary climate science institutions and scientists. Rather, the argument here is that learning from the way free and open source software projects and communities work may be an important way forward in engendering more effective global, national and local responses to climate change.”
I have always worn multiple ‘hats’, and dabbled in multiple pursuits rather than follow narrow paths of enquiry. I see myself continuing to oscillate between the ‘geeks’ and greens, and where possible, bridging their worlds. It’s really encouraging to see some others straddling the two spheres.
My DIY as POY: Famous at last?“All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No-one’s frightened of playing it
Ev’ryone’s saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All thru’ your life I me mine…”
When George Harrison sang those words in the 1970 Beatles song ‘I-Me-Mine’, he was in two minds about expressing in the first person (or ego). He wasn’t alone: mainstream journalism has long had reservations about where ‘I’ fit in journalistic narratives.
“Never bring yourself into what you write,” we were told in journalism school 20 years ago. Journalists, as observers and chroniclers of events, write the first drafts of history – and without the luxury of time or perspective that historians and biographers take for granted. We often have to package information and provide analysis on the run. Bringing ourselves into that process would surely distort messages and confuse many, it was argued. We had to keep our feelings out of our reportage lest it affects our ‘objectivity’.
In other words, we were simply mirrors reflecting (and recording) the events happening around us. Mirrors can’t – and shouldn’t — emit light of their own.
Occasionally, if we felt the urge to express how we personally felt about such trends and events, we were allowed the luxury of an op-ed or commentary piece. Of course, as long as we ensured that it was a measured and guarded expression. And if we really wanted to bring ourselves into the narrative, we could use the archaic phrase ‘this writer…’ to refer to ourselves.
But never use I-Me-Mine! That would surely sour, taint and even contaminate good journalism – right?
Well, it used to be the ‘norm’ for decades — but mercifully, not any longer. Thanks largely to the new media revolution triggered by the Internet, writing in the I-Me-Mine mode is no longer frowned upon as egotistic or narcissistic. It sometimes is one or both these, but hey, that’s part of cultural diversity that our information society has belatedly learnt to live with…
We journalists are late arrivals to this domain. The first person narrative was always valued in other areas of creative arts such as literary fiction, poetry and the cinema. In such endeavours, their creators are encouraged to tell the world exactly how they feel and what they think.
Of course, some writers ignored orthodoxy and wrote in the first person all along. One example I know personally is the acclaimed writer of science fiction and science fact, Sir Arthur C Clarke. Shortly after I’d started working with him in 1987, Sir Arthur encouraged me to fearlessly use the first person narrative even in technical and business writing. A lot of writing ended up being too dull and dreary, he said, because their writers were afraid of speaking their minds.
Yet we had to wait for the first decade of the Twenty First Century to see I-Me-Mine being widely accepted in the world of journalism. Did the old guard finally cave in, or (as sounds more likely) did Generation Me just redefine the rules of the game?
Whatever it is, I-Me-Mine is now very much in vogue. And not a moment too soon!
Joel Stein (Photo-illustration by John Ueland for TIME)As Time columnist Joel Stein, who often writes with his tongue firmly in his cheek, noted in a recent column: “All bloggers write in first person, spending hours each day chronicling their anger at their kids for taking away their free time. Every Facebook update and tweet is sophomoric, solipsistic, snarky and other words I’ve learned by Googling myself.”
And look at what Time just tempted me to do: put myself on their cover, as the Person of the Year (POY), no less. While designating Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg as its POY 2010, Time teamed up with the social media network to introduce a new application that allows anyone to become POY with just a few key strokes. Provided you have a Facebook account, of course.
Joel Stein quotes Jean M Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, as saying that we are living in the Age of Individualism, a radical philosophical shift that began with Sigmund Freud. It has exploded during the past decade with reality television, Facebook and blogging. “You’re supposed to craft your own image and have a personal brand. That was unheard of 10 years ago,” Twenge says.
What a difference a decade can make. Although trained in the pre-me era, I was never convinced as to why I had to keep myself out of what I write. However, my use of I-Me-Mine was done sparingly in the late 1980s (when I started my media work) and during the 1990s. It was only in the 2000s that I finally found both the freedom to speak my mind – and the ideal platforms for doing so: blogging and tweeting.
As my regular readers know, I blog about my family, friends, pet, travels, writing and conference speaking. I liberally sprinkle photographs of myself doing various things. I tell you more than you really want to know about my life. Ah yes, I’m self-referential too.
And not just on this blog. I’ve also been writing op ed essays for various mainstream media outlets for much of the past decade, and have never hesitated in expressing what I think, feel and even dream about. (Isn’t that what opinion pieces are meant to be?)
But the Digital Immigrant that I am, all my writing is shaped by my pre-Internet training. Even for a blog post or tweet, I still gather information, marshal my thoughts and agonise over every word, sentence and paragraph.
As my own editor and publisher on the blog, I don’t have gatekeepers who insist on any of this. My readers haven’t complained either. Yet I write the way I do for a simple reason. I may indulge in a lot of I-Me-Mine, but I don’t write just for myself. You, gentle reader, are the main reason why I strive for coherence and relevance.
(OK, if you really must know, it also ensures a joyful read when I occasionally go back and read my own writing…)
The Face of Facebook
“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year,” TIME magazine’s editors announced on 15 December 2010.
As if to support their choice, their profile of Facebook’s co-founder added: “One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.”
As usual, TIME’s selection was eagerly awaited, and the most popular choice online was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He ended as a runner-up as the next four newsmakers of 2010 — perhaps it was too controversial a choice for TIME’s editors considering the heavy polarisation of views at home about WikiLeaks?
I first read about this selection on Twitter. By coincidence, I was just finishing my latest essay, which was more about the challenges of living in the WikiLeakable world that we now find ourselves in. But Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook get honourable mentions in there.
“I’m not so sure what you might have made of this thing called Facebook. With more than 500 million active members, the social networking website is the largest of its kind (well ahead of its nearest rival Myspace, owned by your friend Rupert).
“Going by the sheer numbers, Facebook is behind only China and India in population terms. But those who compare it to a major league country don’t imagine far enough — it’s really becoming another planet…
An essential survival skill in this Info Age...“While Facebook’s high numbers are impressive, not everyone is convinced of its usefulness and good intentions. Can we trust so much power in the hands of a few very bright (and by now, very rich) twentysomethings? How exactly is Facebook going to safeguard our privacy when we (wittingly or unwittingly) reveal so much of our lives in there?
“I raise these concerns not only as a long-time ICT-watcher, but also as the father of a teenager who is an avid Facebooker. I once called Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg a ‘Digital Pied Piper’: might we someday see Hamelin the sequel?”
PS: On 1 Oct 2010, when the movie The Social Network (based on the Facebook story) opened, I tweeted: “www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com Story of da world’s biggest Pied Piper. And his 500 million+ rats!”
“In the struggle for freedom of information, technology — not politics — will be the ultimate decider.”
These words, by Sir Arthur C Clarke, have been cited in recent days and weeks in many debates surrounding WikiLeaks, secrecy and the public’s right to know.
I invoke these words, and many related reflections by the late author and futurist, in a 2,250-word essay I have just written. Titled Living in the Global Glass House, it is presented in the form of an Open Letter to Sir Arthur C Clarke. It has just been published by Groundviews.org
This is my own attempt to make sense of the international controversy – and confusion – surrounding WikiLeaks. Taking off from the current concerns, I also look at what it means for individuals, corporations and governments to live in the Age of Transparency that has resulted from the Information Society we’ve been building for years.
Sir Arthur foresaw these developments year or decades ago, and wrote perceptively and sometimes in cautionary terms about how we can cope with these developments. As a research assistant and occasional co-author to Sir Arthur from 1987 to 2008, I had the rare privilege of sharing his views firsthand. In this essay, I distill some of the best and most timely for wider dissemination. The above Wordle graphic illustrates the keywords in my essay.
The essay was also prompted by recent experiences. Here’s that story behind the story:
By happy coincidence, I arrived in London on 28 November 2010, the very day the WikiLeaks Cablegate erupted all over the web, beginning to spill out what would eventually be over 250,000 secret international ‘cables’ within the US diplomatic corps.
The Guardian UK that day published an interactive map-based visualization of the leaks. By moving the mouse over the map, readers can find key stories and a selection of original documents by country, subject or people
During the week I spent in London, I experienced not only uncharacteristically early and intense snow storms, but a mounting international storm on the web over the leaked cables. WikiLeaks’ co-founder and chief editor Julian Assange was also somewhere in the UK, playing cat and mouse at the time with the Swedish police and Interpol. (He later turned himself in to the British authorities.)
Sir Arthur Clarke: The legacy continues...On December 1, the British Interplanetary Society invited me to join their annual Christmas get-together where they were remembering their founder member and past chairman Arthur C Clarke. They talked mostly about the man’s contribution to space exploration, but listening to those fond memories against the wider backdrop of WikiLeaks very likely inspired me to write this essay.
Soon after I returned to Colombo, Transparency International Sri Lanka asked me to speak at a workshop on the right to information they had organised for journalists. Given my reputation as a geek-watcher and commentator on the Information Society, they asked to talk about what WikiLeaks means for investigative journalism. Two days later, the Ravaya newspaper did a lengthy interview with me on the same topic which they have just published in their issue for 19 December 2010.
All these elements and experiences combined in writing this essay. Being confined to home by a nasty cold and cough also helped! In fact, on 16 December when Sir Arthur’s 93rd Birth Anniversary was marked, I was too weak to even step out of the house to visit his gravesite. In the end, I finished writing this Open Letter to him on the evening of that day.
My daughter Dhara and I would normally have taken flowers to Sir Arthur’s grave on his birth anniversary. This year, instead, I offer him 2,250 words in his memory. The fine writer would surely appreciate this tribute from a small-time wordsmith.
As an avid watcher of ICTs and the Information Society they help create, I have always been interested in how new technologies are perceived and adopted by different individuals and communities.
In the wake of WikiLeaks, there is renewed interest in the free flow of information. Governments and large corporations are naturally anxious about their secrets being leaked. Journalists and activists are working overtime to produce coherent stories or advocacy positions out of the massive volumes of hitherto classified information being released by WikiLeaks. And the rest of society is bewildered on just how to make sense of it all.
Can humanity survive the deluge of information unleashed by ICTs?
This is the question I posed to Sir Arthur C Clarke in a wide-ranging interview I did on the eve of the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December 2003. The full exchange was published on OneWorld.net, where it is still archived.
Here’s the relevant Q&A:
Q: So you are confident that humanity will survive the current deluge of information?
A: Undoubtedly. There are many who are genuinely alarmed by the immense amount of information available to us through the Internet, television and other media. To them, I can offer little consolation other than to suggest that they put themselves in the place of their ancestors at the time the printing press was invented. ‘My God,’ they cried, ‘now there could be as many as a thousand books. How will we ever read them all?’
Strangely, as history has shown, our species survived that earlier deluge of information, and some say, even advanced because of it. I am not so much concerned with the proliferation of information as the purpose for which it is used. Technology carries with it a responsibility that we are obliged to consider.
Open Minds! 