In this essay, I have expanded some points originally made in two recent blog posts, on 30 April and 1 May 2009.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Flu shots, quarantine measures and hospital care alone cannot counter the current flu outbreak. While medical doctors and researchers spearhead the public health response, we need the mass media and other communicators to mount the public awareness response. Ideally, they should reinforce each other.
“For the first time in history, we now have the technological means to quickly reach out to most of humanity. More than four billion mobile phones are in use, a majority of them in the developing world. Nearly a quarter of the world population (over 1.5 billion people) have access to the web, even if at varying levels of bandwidth. Thousands of radio and TV channels saturate the airwaves – these still are the primary source of news and information for billions.
“Can these information and communication technologies (ICTs) help disseminate the right kind of flu awareness? How fast can we mobilise 24/7 media outlets and telecom networks to inspire preventive and curative action? What can the blogging, texting and twittering new media activists do in such efforts?”
I then return to one of my favourite points about communicating disasters and crises: the need for credible messages and credible messengers. This was a core theme in the Asian book on Communicating Disasters that I co-edited in 2007. I also highlighted it in this interview given to APC in early 2008.
Here’s how my essay ends: “Whether it is SARS, HIV or tsunami, many Asian governments have suffered from a credibility gap in managing information about emergencies. For example, the initially slow and guarded media reporting on SARS allowed the virus to spread quickly in China, with devastating results. We cannot afford to repeat these mistakes with the latest flu pandemic.
“Nearly a century ago, British author H G Wells talked about human history being a race between education and catastrophe. In the coming weeks, we would find out if humanity has what it takes to outrun and outsmart a stubborn virus.”
Read the full essay at MediaChannel.org
My latest essay is a humble birthday present to MediaChannel.org as it completes 10 years. Unique among websites, MediaChannel.org holds the rest of the media accountable with the best of the world’s media criticism and analysis — offering news, diverse global perspectives, and commentaries tracking international news flows. They cover breaking controversies, showcase change-makers, trends and cutting edge issues that you need to know about – produced by journalists for journalists and citizens.
“Our survival alone is a cause for celebration – a decade of growth and impact is impressive in ‘Internet years’,” wrote the website’s founders in a special 10th anniversary message. They added: “Over the past 10 years, we have survived financial crises and organized hack attacks. We have managed to remain relevant and on the cutting edge in a quickly evolving online landscape when many other sites and organizations have come… and gone.”
The team is making an urgent appeal for donations to keep this excellent service going. I’m very happy to amplify this – few services can deliver better value for money, and our troubled times and troubled media sure need the soul-searching constantly provided by MediaChannel.org
Today, 3 May, is once again World Press Freedom Day. It is recognised by the UN, and observed by media professionals and media activists worldwide to ‘draw attention to the role of independent news and information in society, and how it is under attack’.
By happy coincidence, today also marks the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger, American folk singer and a pioneer of protest music. Since media freedom is inseparable from the democratic rights to dissent and protest, I will devote this blog post to salute Pete and his many decades of music for worthy causes — ranging from the American civil rights movement and opposing the Vietnam war to saving the environment and nuclear disarmament.
Pete is a hero for at least three generations of music lovers and freedom lovers around the world who believe in human rights, human dignity and democratic freedoms. Armed with nothing more than his banjo and melodious voice, and driven by the courage of his conviction, this small, gentle man has stood up to mighty leaders, generals and officials.
Never underestimate the power of one determined man...Pete is celebrated as much for his artistic and cultural achievements as for standing resolutely for his political beliefs and for lending his voice and music in support of causes be believed in. In 1955, he was called before the now infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, but refused to name personal and political associations on the grounds that this would violate his First Amendment rights. He said: “”I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”
This defiance resulted in sustained harassment, persecution and professional isolation. As his recent PBS biography noted, “Standing strong for deeply-held beliefs, Seeger went from the top of the pop charts to the top of the blacklist and was banned from American commercial television for more than 17 years. This determined singer/songwriter made his voice heard and encouraged the people of the world to sing out along with him.”
‘If you love your country, you’ll find ways to somehow to speak out, to do what you think is right,” Pete says in this powerful documentary looking back at over half a century of activist singing and music.
Watch opening segment of PBS AMERICAN MASTERS series: Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, directed by Jim Brown and first aired in February 2008
Having pleaded under the First Amendment during the communist witch days of the 1950s, Pete repeatedly paid tribute to the far-sighted American pioneers who introduced the First Amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech.
“As some judge said, if there is any fixed star in our firmament, that is the First Amendment,” he says in a talk-cum-performance at the Ford Hall Forum. In this audio-only piece, he talks the privilege of living under the First Amendment. He recalls his experience being questioned by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, encounters with censorship, and his relationship with fellow singer Woody Guthrie. It runs for nearly an hour, but is worth every second.
For someone like Pete Seeger who sang alongside Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights movement leaders and activists, it must have been deeply moving to be able to sing at the concert to mark President Barack Obama’s inauguration on 20 January 2009 at the Lincoln Memorial.
Watch Bruce Springsteen sing along with Pete Seeger on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”. As he often does, Pete invites the euphoric audience to sing along!
One of my favourite Pete Seeger songs is “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There is a Season)”, often abbreviated to “Turn! Turn! Turn!”. It’s a song adapted entirely from the the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (with the exception of the last line) and composed to music by Pete Seeger in 1959. Seeger waited until 1962 to record it,
Pete Seeger tells how he came to write “Turn Turn Turn.”
I have always believed that we have to get creative and resourceful when the basic freedoms of conscience and freedom of expression are under siege from despotic rulers and fanatical extremists. When we are not allowed to express in factual prose, we must turn to creative prose. And when prose fails, we still have verse, lyrics, satire and drama — the possibilities are only limited by our imagination. This is why I celebrate activist artistes like Pete Seeger, and invoke the memory of activist-poets like Adrian Mitchell and Ken Saro-wiwa. When the barbarians are at our gates and we feel surrounded by the unrelenting forces of hatred, intolerance and tribalism, they remind us that Another World is Possible — but we have to believe in it, stay the course and find ways to sing, dance and laugh our way out of gloom.
And here’s Pete singing another one of my personal favourites, a song that powered the civil rights movement and has since inspired and sustained struggles for social justice around the world: We Shall Overcome.
Media joined the public awareness campaign Now that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has raised the swine flu level to Phase 5, the next to highest level in the worldwide alert system, everyone is talking about a global pandemic. On 30 April 2009, the UN’s top health agency referring to it as Influenza A(H1N1).
As I just wrote in another blog post, “While medical doctors and researchers spearhead the public health response, we need the mass media and all communications professionals to support the public awareness response. Flu shots and hospitals alone cannot win this battle.”
This is where Asian mass media – especially broadcast television – have some relevant and useful experiences. When Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) spread across much of East Asia and Southeast Asia, it wasn’t just the public health systems that took on the epidemic. The local, national and regional media joined the effort in the true spirit of public interest. There was no division between state-owned and privately-owned media. The airwaves were mobilised for preventing, containing and eventually beating the disease that wreaked havoc for several months.
The role played by Asian media during the SARS crisis has been studied and analysed in considerable detail. Lessons from that experience are worth recalling at this moment when the world is looking for ways to contain swine flu.
When SARS forced Chinese schools, universities and public offices to be closed for several weeks in the Spring and Summer of 2003, the country’s television broadcasters rose to the occasion. They started beaming a combination of entertainment and educational programming round the clock to over 400 million households across the country — now the largest national television audience in the world. The idea was to use the media to encourage more people to stay inside homes and minimise the spread of the virus through contact. China Educational Television (CETV) — the satellite distributed educational network — took on the role of substitute teacher by increasing its broadcasts.
Crisis? What crisis?Of course, as the most likely place of origin of the SARS virus, China’s initial response to the epidemic was denial. Researchers have established how the slow or muted media reporting within China triggered more rapid disease transmission of the virus both within and beyond China. As the noted Asia watcher, columnist and journalism professor Tom Plate, wrote in 2008: “All the serious Chinese journalists were left holding their heads in shame. In effect, the institution of the mass-communication of news, because it was not allowed to do its job, contributed to the enormity of the SARS toll.”
Many researchers agree that it was the island republic of Singapore that best handled the SARS crisis. Dr Stewart Auyash, an Associate Professor in Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College in New York says: “Of the countries affected, the actions of Singapore’s government stand out as an example of how to deal not only with the biological elements of the disease but with the methods, style, tone, timing and breadth of its communicated messages.”
The Auyash study was titled ‘Communications as a Treatment for SARS in Singapore and its Lessons for Infectious Epidemics in Asia’, and appeared in Media Asia (Vol 32, No 4). Although the journal’s publishers restrict online access to subscribers, a copy can be freely downloaded from here.
Here’s how Tom Plate summarised its findings: “At the outset of the 2003 crisis, Singapore’s government and media authorities hammered out a clear plan to limit the syndrome’s spread among the populace. It adopted a containment policy that offered a major role for news media institutions. The media was asked to promote the idea of positive participation by all citizens to avoid furthering transmission.
Practising what we preach...“Model citizens who followed World Health Organization guidelines with exceptional care were made proud subjects of newspaper feature stories. Top government officials, including high-profile members of the cabinet, were photographed or televised as submitting to the same mandatory preventive procedures as everyone else (for example, regular temperature checks). But citizens who fought the program by either resistance or even tepid nonchalance were portrayed scornfully, with the media publicly castigating them as ‘free riders’ who benefited from a safer health environment solely through the sacrifices of others.
“To make the media policy work, the government had to play things absolutely straight. When officials knew the answer to a scary question about SARS, they answered it quickly and completely; but when they had no answer, rather than making one up and putting their credibility at risk when this was later discovered, they flat out stated that they simply did not know but would try to find out.
“In Singapore, compliance with all kinds of government policies, not just health measures, is viewed as a personal and community responsibility. It is in the small city-state’s civic ethic that ‘individual rights and inconvenience may be infringed upon to protect the greater good of the public’s health,’ as Prof. Auyash put it. Even so, what seems both notable and possibly transportable to other countries is the cooperative role of the news media in a serious health crisis. Auyash points out that the role of the media is to emphasize symbols of positive compliance. Gestures and symbols, he says, ‘can galvanize a nation’s citizens to act. In short, symbols matter.'”
At the height of the crisis, Singapore even launched a dedicated SARS TV channel. The public service channel, which began in May 2003, was run jointly by Singapore’s three main broadcasters — Singapore Press Holdings, Media Corporation of Singapore and StarHub — and aimed to raise awareness about how to identify symptoms and prevent the spread of the disease.
Everyone was roped in, from educators to entertainers, in the all-out campaign against the invisible but formidable virus. The popular local sit-com Phua Chu Kang, which airs on Singapore’s Channel 5, came up with this hilarious rap video advising viewers the dos and don’ts of SARS.
As Prof Auyash concludes: “Singapore’s communication management around SARS can serve as a guide for future infectious disease control measure…There are major principles learned from SARS in Singapore from which other countries can learn…”
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) offered a similarly positive post-crisis judgment. This global defender against infectious diseases has praised Singapore’s aggressive and expansive policy of contact tracing and home quarantine during SARS.
“The bleakest projections about bird flu suggest that more than 300 million people could die from a global pandemic,” says Tom Plate. He adds: “Let us hope that such a number will never be realized simply because nations refuse to learn from the successes of others, simply out of pride, parochialism, ignorance or stubbornness. A pandemic of stupidity can kill people, too.”
So this is how it REALLY started...The World Health Organization (WHO) said this week that the global spread of swine flu was highly likely, and raised its alert level to Phase 5 — the next-to-highest level in the worldwide warning system. It also offered advice on prevention, caring for persons with the flu and how to seek medical help.
“Wash your hands when you shake hands, cover your mouth when you cough,” he said. “It sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference. If you are sick, stay home. If your child is sick, take them out of school. If you are feeling certain flu symptoms, don’t get on an airplane.”
That’s the basic preventive message that needs amplification and repetition all over the world. While medical doctors and researchers spearhead the public health response, we need the mass media and all communications professionals to support the public awareness response. Flu shots and hospitals alone cannot win this battle.
For the first time in history, we have the means of rapid access to most of humanity. What we now need is clarity of message, credible messengers and sustained delivery.
I see this as an interesting – even if very risky – social experiment on the preventive powers of our 24/7 media and information devices. More than four billion mobile phones are in use, most of them in the developing world. Over one billion people connect to the web. We also have hundreds of radio and TV channels saturating the airwaves. Can these media peddle the right kind of awareness and inspire preventive action faster than the flu virus propagates itself? This is the classic race between education and catastrophe that H G Wells wrote about many decades ago!
We in Asia have some useful experiences from 2003 when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) affected much of the region. On that occasion, the media led a parallel front against the pandemic, delivering both preventive messages and helping care for those already infected.
Precisely because rapid response is vital in a situation like SARS and swine flu, it’s the broadcast and online media that can provide timely and up-to-date coverage. It’s too early and too soon to compare media’s role in this crisis with SARS and other rapid-spread public health crisis of the past. Print media can also play a part in spreading general awareness, but they don’t have the speed and 24/7 outreach that we need for covering a crisis like this. Besides, in many parts of the world, newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay in business, coping with a terminal malady affecting their industry.
Do they have a story to tell? Who is listening?Piracy has a chequered history, and even the Wikipedia offers a carefully qualified definition. One person’s pirate can be another person’s defender. There’s an argument that the European colonial powers rode on the backs of their pirates or buccaneers. And I’m writing this in English language possibly because the English were more successful in their overseas piracy than other nations!
Piracy is all over the news again, due to increased activity off Somalia. But in the past few weeks, we’ve started hearing another side of the Somali piracy story — one that the mainstream media didn’t tell us.
Johann Hari, a columnist for the London Independent, posted an op ed in Huffington Post on 13 April 2009 that took a different look at Somali pirates. His main argument: “In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”
In recent days, two interesting short videos have been posted by two activist groups to support the same point of view. I haven’t investigated this story myself, but am intrigued by their take on a widely reported topic…especially because it’s an angle that we don’t read or see in the mainstream media!
This film from Awareness Unfolds highlights the fact that the media is lying about the so called “pirates” of Somolia. According to the blurb: “They (media) choose not to tell you about the toxic waste dumping going on by American, European, and Asian countries that have lead to the death of many Somolian citizens.”
As Johann Hari says at the end of his article: “The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today – but who is the robber?”
Johann Hari has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. In 2007 Amnesty International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. In 2008 he became the youngest person ever to win Britain’s leading award for political writing, the Orwell Prize.
A film to reveal what the old media didn't show...When Barack Obama and his running made Joe Biden won the US Presidential Election held on 4 November 2008, they not only beat the Republican duo McCain-Palin but also a host of other also-rans. It’s too soon to tell, but that date might also mark the beginning of the end for the old media, also called the mediasaurus, who have been dominating the public’s access to news, information and commentary for over a century.
But how did it all happen? Who can tell us the real story as it happened, and why, without filters and biases so rampant among the mediasaurus?
On this blog, we have watched with deep interest and some fascination the rise of Barack Obama from relative obscurity to become the President of the United States. On 6 November 2008, soon after the election results were confirmed, we noted how Obama had just been elected ‘President of the New Media world’. I explained: “Obama’s rise has epitomised change in many ways. Among other things, he is the first elected leader of a major democracy who shows understanding and mastery over the New Media World, which is radically different from the old media order.”
On 20 January 2009, when he was inaugurated, we wrote: “For four or eight years, Obama’s every move, word and gesture will be captured, dissected and debated to exhaustion by admirers and detractors alike. And his administration will be under scrutiny by thousands of citizen journalists who don’t share much except the digital platforms and social networks on which they post their impressions. Welcome to the New Media Presidency. The hard work – and real fun – begin now!”
And now, one of the world’s leading new media activists, Danny Schechter, is about to release a new documentary on how the Obama campaign rode the new media wave to the White House — and more importantly, how the same new media can help the American public to keep Obama Administration accountable.
The film “Barack Obama, People’s President”, (slated for DVD release later this month by ChoiceMedia.net), documents the online and on the ground techniques that were used to win the highest office in the land.
As the film’s advance promo blurb says: The one story that most TV outlets didn’t tell in the 2008 election was the most important one -how did a young and relatively unknown candidate become President? If you voted for Barack Obama or not, this is a story you will want to know because it shows how the face of presidential politics changed forever. Barack Obama used techniques never seen before in a nationwide election — his grassroots mobilization and use of the internet was unprecedented, inspiring and effective. You have seen the rest of the coverage — now see the real story.
The film goes inside the official and unofficial campaign to show how Barack Obama was turned into a political brand to appeal to young first time voters. It shows how social networking on the internet — blogs, Facebook, texting and other techniques — were used carry the message to the masses and to raise tens of millions of dollars for the campaign. Popular online videos such as “Obama Girl”, along with those created by regular yet passionate supporters to engage their own communities, became one of the most important tools in the campaign’s success.
Watch the trailer of “Barack Obama, People’s President” directed by Danny Schechter:
Emmy award winning film-maker Danny Schechter, who is also blogger-in-chief at MediaChannel.org that keeps a critical eye on the media, just wrote this explaining why he made this film:
“It is hard to remember that two years earlier Obama was barely known, registering on the radar screen for just 10% of voters. He was also hardly a brand name as a first term Senator who spent more time in state politics in Illinois than on the national stage. Moreover, he was young and a man of color — not qualities that usually prevail in a presidential arena which tends to draw far older, far whiter, and far more centrist candidates. The thought that he would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the primaries was, quite frankly, unthinkable to most of the elite.
“And yet he prevailed, as he used a phrase appropriated from labor organizer and Latino legend Caesar Chavez. Obama turned the farm workers Spanish language slogan “Si Se Puede” into “Yes We Can.” Rather than focus on specific political issues, he built a campaign on the promise of “Hope.” Rather than just rely on traditional fundraising — although by the end, he was plush with it — he reached out over the internet for smaller donations from millions of donors.
Perils of the New Media Generation...“Few in the major media gave him a chance, but he was not discouraged because he had created his own grassroots media operation using sophisticated organizing and social networking techniques to build a bottom-up movement, not the usual top-down apparatus. While his campaign ran the show, he encouraged independent initiatives including citizen-generated media, music videos, personalized websites, twittering and texting, etc..
“This is the new direction our politics has taken. It is a story that may be somewhat threatening to old media – and older activists – who prefer a one to many approach to communication, as opposed to forging a more interactive empowering platform. There is no question that young people — especially those mobilized by Obama — prefer online media and that choice is making it harder and harder for traditional outlets to sustain their influence and, in some cases, even their organizations. Old media may be on the way out.
“This is why our film is, in my mind, so important, not just as a record of how Obama won and what happened in 2008, but in what will happen, can happen, and is happening in the future. This is why I believe its critical for Americans to see it — and others in the world as well — to recognize how Obama represents more than just another politician, but a whole new approach to politics. That old adage is worth remembering: “It’s not the ship that makes the wave, it’s the motion of the ocean.”
“Obama, for all his shortcomings, which are becoming more obvious by the day, has pioneered the way change must be won — not by people on the top, but by all of us. It remains for “us” to hold him accountable. We live in a culture of amnesia – it is important to learn the lessons of the recent past.”
Read the full comment: New Film Tells Unreported Story of Obama’s Election on MediaChannel.org
Blogs put ME back into MEdia...The Moving Images blog completes two years today. So we pause briefly to look back – and forward.
I launched the blog with two posts from near-freezing Washington DC on 17 March 2007, while participating in the DC Environmental Film Festival. Both concerned my own offering to the festival: Children of Tsunami: The Journey Continues, product of monthly filming with 8 survivor families in 4 countries for nearly one year after the Asian tsunami.
Since then, this blog’s own journey has continued: in 24 months, we have produced 342 posts in 134 categories and with 562 tags. These elicited a total of 622 comments from readers who came from all walks of life, and all parts of the world. To the end of 16 March 2009, I received a cumulative total of slightly over 246,900 page visits. I now average 500 – 600 visits a day.
I share my blogging journey with these readers who have enriched it in various ways. Some commented under their own names; others used pseudonyms. Some left email details; others none. A few have actually suggested stories that I later wrote up as blog posts. I don’t know most of my readers in person, and have only met them online. As this blog enters its 25th month, I thank them all. You’ve kept me going in a particularly tough time in the world…and in my personal life.
When I started Moving Images, I was driven by a simple motive: to discuss and reflect on the many and varied topics and subjects that interest me professionally. In one way or another, these fall into the area of communicating science, development and environment to the non-specialist public. Because my work at TVE Asia Pacific involves using television and video for this purpose, there is a bias on moving images in many things I do.
But by design, this is not an official blog of TVE Asia Pacific, or any other organisation that I am associated with. In fact, I regularly express here views that I cannot say wearing any of these hats — because we live in a world where most people still react not just to the song, but also the singer (and can’t separate the two).
Are we there yet? No!So this blog is unashamedly, intentionally self-centred: it puts ME back in Media. I make no apologies for speaking my mind on a variety of topics, and for returning to some issues that I’m passionate about.
After 22 years in journalism, broadcasting or communicating development, I find I have sufficient perspective in which to anchor my thoughts, and to express my views in a way, I hope, interests and engages readers. Like the ancient Greeks, I try to ask the right questions – even when I don’t always know or get the right answers. And I have more than a few stories to spice up the narrative.
I’m well aware of the inherent danger of combining writer-editor-publisher all in one: personal blogs don’t always operate under the usual checks and balances that we expect and presume in the more structured media outlets (whether they are in the mainstream or new media spheres). On more than one occasion, I’ve written impulsively – in frustration, anger or elation, and sometimes on the run. Thanks to the training in my news reporter days, I can still churn out readable prose fast. And only once in all these 24 months and 342 posts have I regretted rushing to publish (so, using my absolute discretion as the media tycoon of this blog, I pulled it down).
Do I see myself as a citizen journalist? Yes and no. I don’t report news, and only very occasionally write on latest developments (or breaking news, as it’s now called). I see myself more as a citizen commentator – the op ed equivalent in the new media domain. Yes, I do occasionally report from large conferences that I attend as a speaker or panelist. But I have found how demanding it is to blog from events while keeping up with everything that is going on.
Do I see myself as a Sri Lankan blogger? Not really. Scanning the 342 blog posts I’ve written, I can count only a two dozen that have an appreciable reference to Sri Lanka. This is not because I’m aloof or disengaged; I have simply set a framework for myself that goes well beyond the country of my residence and social/cultural anchor.
Another reason for this intentional lack of geographical focus is that besides this blog, I regularly write op ed essays for other online outlets like Groundviews, MediaChannel.org and MediaHelpingMedia, and print news magazines like Montage. I use these platforms for commenting on Sri Lankan issues that interest or concern me.
I find it a bit incongruous that we who use the new media tools of web 2.0 – which signify the end of old geography – must contain ourselves to geographical or cultural cocoons. Thus, while I sometimes join gatherings of bloggers based in Sri Lanka, and share concerns for freedom of expression, I have consciously avoided joining Kottu, the leading aggregator of Sri Lankan blogs.
And I get more than a little miffed when the excellent aggregation service Global Voices constantly labels me as a Sri Lankan voice (with a map of Lanka to boot!) whenever they helpfully flag my blog posts for wider attention. I have privately discussed this with GV’s South Asia coordinator who says their current tagging and categorisation do not allow anything else. Is this an example a new media platforms being trapped in an old media mindset?
If you really must pin me down to some place, call me a South Asian (or, as my friends at Himal would like to write it, Southasian).
Do I see myself as a new media activist? I’m not sure. I’m not a geek, and have no great knowledge or insights on the back-end technologies that make all this possible. My interest is in how the new media tools shapes societies, cultures and politics in emerging Asia. Those braver and smarter than me are actually innovating and improvising new media tools for social activism. I just watch — and occasionally blog to critically cheerlead them. Mine is definitely the easy part…
Mainstream media...and bloggersOn this blog, I place a higher premium on still and moving images. Regular readers know my fondness for cartoons, which I avidly search for and collect on a wide range of topics. In fact, I believe cartoonists are the best social and cultural commentators of our times – they say so much with such economy of words!
Similarly, I try to embed relevant online videos that I can find. Sometimes it takes me longer to scan YouTube and other platforms than to write the accompanying text for a blog post. And I get frustrated when WordPress does not allow embedding from certain online platforms like EngageMedia, a new Asia-based service that we have recently started to collaborate with.
As I travel around in Asia and Europe, and move across the sometimes overlapping circles of development, media and communications technology, I keep meeting readers who read and follow this blog. Some have never commented on any post; a few have chosen to write emails to me on specific matters.
This means some of the conversations inspired by this blog happen bilaterally — for example, film festival organisers have written asking me for contacts of specific film-makers whose work I have reviewed. Students often write to me seeking additional information or my own views. Long lost friends or associates have revived contact after stumbling upon this blog. I have no illusions of being famous, but it’s nice to stay engaged.
My policy on visitors’ comments is clearly stated in my intro page: “This is a moderated blog where I approve/disapprove the publication of readers’ comments to individual posts. I do allow all reasonable comments left by readers — including those that radically disagree with my own views. The basic rules of my moderation: I don’t publish comments that are outright libelous of individuals, or are so explicitly self-promotional bordering on spam.”
Only once in the short history of this blog have I been threatened by someone whose conduct I questioned in the public interest. In late 2007, I wrote a hard-hitting comment on how certain media organisations are exploiting concerns surrounding climate change to their institutional advantage. I was standing by to publish their response, for the institution I named claims to promote public discussion and debate. None came my way, although some peer pressure was used, unsuccessfully, to make me remove the blog post. In mid 2008, when our paths accidentally crossed in a European capital, the individual concerned confronted me. I gave him a patient hearing, and reiterated my offer to publish his response in full. He insisted on my deleting the post (gosh, it must have hit a raw nerve!). He ended our unpleasant encounter saying: “If you lived in my jurisdiction, I would have sued you!”
There has never been a denial or rebuttal from this person or his institution on the substantive points in my blog post. But I was repeatedly told that my candid remarks are ‘not helpful’. Perhaps. But anyone who remotely believes in ‘illuminating debate’ would have engaged me on this blog, or theirs, or in a neutral forum (plenty exist).
Luckily, I've rarely faced this situationEncouragingly, many others have done just that. This includes the reader who thinks I have an axe to grind with the BBC (I don’t, but I’m also not a fan of the ageing Auntie), and a few who feel I’ve been unkind to the fledgling global newscaster Al Jazeera English.
Then there are those who assume that I hate state-owned, so-called public broadcasters (again, I don’t, although I question their conduct more rigorously because they are public-funded). In fact, I have sung praise of Burmese TV as a model public broadcaster, and maintained excellent relations with NHK and other public broadcasters in Asia. I’m regularly invited as a speaker or panelist at gatherings of mainstream broadcasters – where I express pretty much the same views as I do on this blog.
Some think I’m too harsh on the United Nations, especially UNICEF. Again, I’m a great believer and supporter of the UN’s ideals, but never hesitate to critique the public communication policies and practices of individual UN agencies. I like to think that the United Nations is bigger (and deeper) than the inflated egos of its senior officials. In fact, middle level officials and experts working in various UN agencies have privately commended me for keeping the spotlight on their agencies. During the two years of this blog, I have worked closely with UN-OCHA, UNEP and UNAIDS, and they have been pluralistic enough to engage me in the greater public interest.
I believe that it’s not just the UN, but the entire development sector, that needs to get its act together when it comes to communicating policies, practices and choices. Having occasionally (and luckily, only briefly) forayed into the charmed development circles, I realise how detached from reality, self-referential and inward looking many development professionals and their institutions are. Communication is often no more than self-promotional publicity for overambitious agency heads. I have watched how the sector has struggled to adjust to the new realities in media and communications technology. Sometimes I have ridiculed their worse attempts on this blog; more often than not, I have quietly worked with them in small groups or bilateral meetings trying to build their capacity to do things better with greater focus and impact.
I survived mediasaurus - and lived to tell the tale!Precisely because I have access to various policy, development and research circles in Asia while (or despite?) being a blogger critiquing the same players, I exercise caution in quoting people or citing examples. Some meetings I attend discuss matters too sensitive for immediate publication; others operate on the Chatham House rule (generic points may be communicated, but without attribution). As a journalist, I’ve been trained to clarify what is on the record and what isn’t; in sourcing content for this blog, I follow the same principles.
Every writer, editor and publisher has her own agenda. Mine is fairly easy to discern, for example from the recurrent themes on this blog. These include: * humanising development communication (going beyond mere facts, figures, analysis and jargon); * demystifying and debunking self-serving development myths (for example, about community radio, or rural poverty); * practising what we preach (broadcasters addressing their own carbon emissions); * evolving more inclusive copyright policies (poverty and climate change as copyright free zones); and * engaging in simple, clear and effective communicating of science and technology in society.
For those who occasionally look for a hidden agenda, my only advice is: get a life. I write this blog for fun. I don’t set out to kick anyone – although I often get a kick out of receiving online or offline feedback.
And that’s my wish for the coming months and years: while I work hard to earn some honest bucks else where, may I continue to derive my kicks here. And if some of you also get a mental kick out of reading or commenting on this blog, that’s my bonus.
Since I remain open-minded and eager for new knowledge, my views on some topics and issues keep evolving over time. Although it’s tempting to go back and edit some of my earlier blog posts in the light of new knowledge or understanding, I refrain from doing so. And if that sometimes presents (minor) inconsistencies, I can only quote Walt Whitman in my defence: Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Being the fourth monkey?“Historically, organised and commercialised mass media have existed only in the past five centuries, since the first newspapers — as we know them — emerged in Europe. Before the printing press was invented, all news was local and there were few gatekeepers controlling its flow. Having evolved highly centralised systems of media for half a millennium, we are now returning to a second era of mass media — in the true sense of that term. Blogs, wikis and citizen journalism are all signs of things to come.”
This is how Sir Arthur C Clarke and I summed up the transformative change that is currently taking place in the world of mass media, in an essay we co-wrote for the Indian news magazine Outlook in October 2005.
We’d given it the title ‘From Citizen Kane to Citizen Journalist’ – a formulation that I’m still proud of – but the editors changed it to ‘Arise, Citizen Journalist!’. Of course, our original title made evocative sense only for those who knew the popular culture reference to the movie Citizen Kane.
I recently had a chance to revisit these issues and explore them further in a half-hour, in-depth TV interview with media researcher/activist and fellow citizen journalist Sanjana Hattotuwa. This was part of The Interview series produced by Young Asia Television, and broadcast on two Sri Lankan TV channels, TNL and ETV during the second week of February 2009.
Sanjana covered a wide range in his questions. Starting with a brief reflection on my 21-year association with Sir Arthur Clarke, we moved on to the bewildering world of new media and its co-existence with the mainstream media. We discussed the fragmentation of audience and the concern that some current and would-be bloggers harbour: is anyone listening or reading?
And more importantly, how do we get conversations started and going. I look back on my own experience as an active blogger for almost two years, and assert that if we have something new and worthwhile to say, and know how to express it well, we can slowly build up an audience. There’s no blueprint or road map – everything is in ‘beta’ mode, and the name of the game is try-it-and-see!
Here’s that full interview on YouTube, broken into four parts:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 1 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 2 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 3 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 4 of 4:
Sam Gregory“It’s an immensely exciting time for people working with video. More and more people creating and using video, more places to share it, more ways to place it in front of people who can make a difference.
“It raises challenges too: saturation of images and compassion-fatigue, finding your place to be heard, and the safety and security and consent issues that arise when many more people are filming each other.
“But overall I think we’re seeing a really powerful moment for individual expression but also collective accountability being supported via image-making.”
So says Sam Gregory programme director of Witness, a human rights organisation which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. The New York-anchored organisation works around the world to ’empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change’.
http://www.witness.orgSam recalls how he was once making films and also involved in activism, and ‘frustrated at how the two didn’t fit together’.
He adds: “In the traditional TV documentary world, the advocacy purpose of film was under-utilized. The fact that you got 500,000 viewers for a TV broadcast told you nothing about whether that turned into action. So I started looking for ways to really make the video fit as a tool for real advocacy and change-making, and came upon WITNESS.”
We at TVE Asia Pacific worked closely with Sam in 2002-2004, when we implemented a collaborative Asian regional project called Truth Talking where Witness was a partner. It was through Witness that I met courageous info activists like Joey R B Lozano.
His own brand...Inauguration Day is finally here! Today, 20 January 2009, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.
Obama campaigned – and won – on the core promise of change. And even before he moved into the White House, he achieved many firsts. Among them was being the first American leader to understand the power of new media and to use it effectively to harness both campaign contributions and, eventually, votes.
On 6 November 2008, soon after the election results were confirmed, we noted how Obama had just been elected ‘President of the New Media world’. I explained: “Obama’s rise has epitomised change in many ways. Among other things, he is the first elected leader of a major democracy who shows understanding and mastery over the New Media World, which is radically different from the old media order.”
Of course, others had different takes on the same outcome. One of the funniest was by The Onion, which proclaimed: Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.’ It read, in part: “African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis.”
The sheer magnitude of Obama’s challenges has become clearer in the weeks following the historic election. While the economy will certainly dominate his agenda, he will also have to live up to the many expectations of hope that his campaign sparked off in hundreds of millions of people — and not just in the United States.
How will the ‘President of the New Media world’ remain engaged with the millions of conversations taking place 24/7 on the web and through mobile devices? Is this realistically possible given his roles as the chief executive of beleaguered America, Inc., and commander-in-chief of the world’s only superpower?
The new face of HopeMore to the point, how long will the mainstream media’s honeymoon with the new President last? And how will citizen journalists, many of who cheerled Obama in his long and arduous campaign, now relate to their man in Washington DC? Can the Obama Administration strike deals with citizen journalists as every administration has done with the mainstream media over the decades? Outside the strict security cocoon of the White House, will this presidency ever be able to have any moments ‘off the record’ with every digitally connected person being a potential citizen journalist?
Remember how his comments about “bitter” small-town Americans clinging to their guns and religion — uttered at a ticket-only and supposedly no-media San Francisco fund-raiser during the campaign — came to be publicised? And that, too, by a pro-Obama blogger writing on the openly pro-Democratic blogger site Huffington Post!
Then there’s the power of moving images moving around online as broadband rolls out across the planet, and speeds improve to support real time video-watching. The day Americans went to the polls to elect Obama, we recalled the hugely popular Obama Girl (‘I got a crush on Obama’) – an internet viral video, first posted on YouTube in June 2007 – and asked Can this little video change history? We had our answer within 24 hours.
While Obama Girl was a well-edited, slick campaign-boosting video released online, the thousands of citizen-filmed videos being posted online are not. And yet, in that no-frills mode, some bring out public interest concerns that have implications for public policy debates and/or law enforcement.
President Obama arrives at the White House to lead the executive of a nation that is unlike any his predecessors faced. His inauguration will be the most digitised, but that’s only the beginning. For four or eight years, Obama’s every move, word and gesture will be captured, dissected and debated to exhaustion by admirers and detractors alike. And his administration will be under scrutiny by thousands of citizen journalists who don’t share much except the digital platforms and social networks on which they post their impressions.
Welcome to the New Media Presidency. The hard work – and real fun – begin now!
Open Minds! 