Foreign Correspondents of the Virtual and Real
I am occasionally asked by reporters interested in the Second Life Herald (where I’ve been an editor for two years now) what the appeal of doing journalism in virtual worlds is. In an attempt to locate a pithy soundbite for them, I sometimes say it’s like being a foreign correspondent without having to leave your desk (though this is not, in fact, the whole story; read on). So I was interested to spot this post by Ethan Zuckerman (via the Business Communicators of SL blog), which contains some thoughts on similar topics, inspired by a conversation with Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen for Dahlen’s latest column. Dahlen wonders whether the Internet is up to the challenge of providing information about places like Africa, since it looks like you can find a lot more detail on the Web about Buffy than about the Somalian Union of Islamic Courts, for instance. Which touches off a thought on Zuckerman’s part: “I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces while it’s shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that these new spaces — whether SecondLife, World of Warcraft, the culture of fanfiction or machinima — are far more coverable than many events in the real world.” While both those statements are true, to an extent, I’d argue that there isn’t the causal link between them that Zuckerman sees, or at least that that link is not as strong, and that there are more important factors at work.
To me, it’s not a zero-sum game. More coverage of virtual spaces doesn’t lead to less coverage of real places. Coverage of places like Africa has never been sufficient, and it has only dwindled in recent years, but that dwindling began long before anything like virtual journalism made the scene. I’ve been on both sides of this issue (having covered developing economies for years before I started writing much about technology; that’s me and my good friend Jon Marks above, in Abidjan) and can tell you that even ten years ago it was already harder to sell a story about Africa than it was to sell one about a tech company. Virtual worlds hardly existed, at that point, and marquee magazine stories about them were all but unheard of. They certainly weren’t the thing that was hampering coverage of Africa.
I’m not sure Buffy is what’s keeping us from knowing about conflicts in places like Africa, either, whether in print or on the Internet. In fact, I’m quite sure it’s not. As Zuckerman says in the Dahlen column, “If you’re writing ‘Buffy [the Vampire Slayer]’ fan fic, you may not know the name of the third junior subvampire who showed up for one episode in season four. But someone does, and you can authoritatively build the Buffy index on Wikipedia.” By contrast, “We don’t know authoritatively who’s in the Union of Islamic Courts. And we probably never will.”
That’s not because there are more people interested in Buffy than in Somalia (whether or not that’s the case). That’s because the information on Buffy is easily available to anyone who cares to look, while much information on Somalian governments and rebel groups is jealously guarded by the people involved, usually with guns. There’s also a lot of apples-n-oranging going on here: fandom is not the same as journalism. Most of the people writing fan fiction, filling in Wikipedia articles about Buffy or blogging about what they got up to in Second Life last night are not making a choice between that and haring off to Somalia to risk their lives investigating the inner workings of various deadly political factions.
That said, some people (like me), do make choices that appear to be similar. If I wasn’t writing about virtual worlds these days, there’s a good chance I’d be writing about Africa and other parts of what was once called the “South,” which was an interest of mine for years and remains one today. (In fact, I still do get to write about those things occasionally.) But I haven’t stopped writing about those things in order to fill in Wikipedia articles about television shows. Instead, I’m now covering a part of global culture that’s growing increasingly important, as well as many of the ways in which we communicate and get our information today.
One of these ways is Google Earth. And if there’s any doubt that Google Earth can be a force for political awareness and possible change in countries outside the U.S. and Western Europe, this Washington Post article should lay it to rest. It’s about (among other things) a 24-year-old student in Bahrain who became clued in to what he says is an unequal distribution of land and wealth in the country by seeing images of Bahrain on Google Earth. That’s important access to information, and one of the reasons so many people are so excited about virtual worlds is that there’s the sense that they may be able to help broaden access to similar facts about the world. With an increasing amount of communication happening online, covering the workings and governance of such places is also important to helping shape what society will look like in the decades to come. The technology is still young and it’s probably too early to say just what good will come out of it, but it would be madness not to explore it and see where it could go.
So while I agree with many of Ethan’s individual points, I don’t think it’s fair to draw lines of cause and effect between them. If coverage of Africa is dwindling in print and broadcast media, and on the Internet, it’s not because people are setting it aside in favor of Buffy. There may well be more morally frivolous content rattling around the Internet than ever before, but the vast majority of it is newly created content, content added by users who weren’t creating anything before; it’s not content being created by people who were formerly creating more morally valuable content, for the most part. It’s true that Western society has little appetite for important stories about social conditions in far-off lands, but I don’t think that can be blamed on fanfic, virtual worlds or even television shows.
The great part about Dahlen’s column and Zuckerman’s comments comes toward the end, when Dahlen cites what Joi Ito calls the caring problem. “People won’t follow the news in a foreign land just because they think it’s important; they keep tabs on it because they have emotional investment in watching what comes next,” Dahlen writes.
Zuckerman names a few ways that people can get past the caring problem, and they center on building real relationships outside the U.S.– whether by working abroad, or travelling for long stretches of time, or even marrying into another culture. As Zuckerman says, “I find myself wondering whether deeper change comes from creating a set of postnational citizens — people who have friends and collaborators and colleagues all over the world.” In other words, we care about countries when we care about their people and their stories. And instead of watching in flashes of outrage, we’d cultivate a lifelong urge to follow along.
I couldn’t agree more. (Some would argue that with such a diverse population in Second Life — there are more Europeans at this point than Americans — it’s already having that effect.) 3pointD urges you all to start cultivating.
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Mark, I’m so glad you took the time to comment on Zucerkman’s post - I truly hoped that some discussion just like this would start from it. I hope other people weigh in here on this.
I agree that because we care about people, we care about what is happening to them, wherever it is - we are touched by individuals, not so much by “news.” Virtual spaces allow us to broaden both our world view and the people we care about.
Your point about the flow of information and its availability is true, but this also points out why it is vital for us all to be working for greater and greater connectivity of all peoples everywhere. We have little knowledge of Somolia or the Sudan or wherever because the “citizen journalists” (a la your wikipedia point) aren’t there, like they are in the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.to spread the information. No news outlet, no matter how large, can match the capability of citizens armed with fairly simple technology and an Internet connection.
I should be clear, Mark, I don’t see a causal link either. Had the Boston Globe closed overseas bureaus and opened ones in World of Warcraft, that would make for a clear causal argument. Instead, I see the two phenomena - the shrinking of a global press corps and the growth of a virtual press corps - as two really interesting phenomena that might or might not be connected in some fashion. (Correlation is not causation.) The linkage between the ideas - the Tatooine/Tunisia comparison - comes from Dahlen, rather than from me, though I will certainly confess that I find the connection interesting and worth thinking about.
What I’m intrigued by, I guess, is the inexhaustible appetite people seem to have for discovering “new” worlds, and the comparative lack of interest in discovering new things about existing parts of the world. I run a website (globalvoicesonline.org) which focuses on citizen journalism in the developing world. We get a lot less interest in the content we cover than sites like Second Life Herald do, and lots less love from the mainstream press. It’s hard to bring up issues like this without getting into issues like “moral frivolity” - my goal isn’t to declare Second Life/WoW/etc. frivolous - if anything, it’s to discover why they’re accessible and fascinating to people in ways that I haven’t been able to make African news accessible or fascinating.
Thanks for commenting on the piece.
In all his debates about Second Life, which he has had for a year, I’ve found that Ethan always seems to take this tack: “Let me see if I can find a way to wake up and shame these white, liberal Westerners obsessed with new technological gadgets into caring more about the hell-holes of the world where I work by dissing their fascination with their toys because my people in the region can’t have these toys”.
And I simply find that a facile and ineffective way of trying to get these issues covered. Oh, to be sure, he doesn’t phrase it in quite that bald way, and he doubles back after *every* single one of these incidents to explain, “but oh, I didn’t quite mean it like that,” but really, that’s the underlying text.
I’m one of those people whose covered the hellholes for 25 years and been in some of them. And it’s not just that there is no causal relationship; you cannot effectively use the tactic of shaming liberals anymore because they are unshamable. If somebody with a Blackberry is told on Park Avenue that somebody in Darfur doesn’t have a black berry to eat, let alone a Blackberry, they don’t care. And one of the reasons they *are* unshameable is because despite the reduction of foreign news coverage, we now have more information than we’ve ever had in our lives about hellholes. And the facile explanation about hellholes that they are the developed world’s “fault” just doesn’t work anymore when people can peer into them more and see that kleptocratic governments, cultural attitudes toward gender, the legacies of communism just as much as colonialism, and many, many other complex factors have just as much to do with the problems of Africa as the indifference and apathy of outside Westerners, whom activists are busy trying to find at fault.
When local journalists are empowered and enabled to write about their own region’s issues, they dont’ spend the time that white liberals spend wringing their hands about the evil North and its indifference to the sacrosanct South, and how they are obsessed with toys. Instead, they get right at the local issues of the kleptocrats and the murderous thugs and the child-soldier abductors and the lack of opportunities for women. So seriously, the task is a more complex one, and it’s about forging international solidarity and working relationships with civic groups that don’t rely on this old hinge of activism, trying to shame people into action by fanning their guilt.Journalism used to be able to work by “comforting the afflicting and afflicting the comfortable”. Now, with everybody being a video star, there’s no more guilt tripwires to be tripped.
It’s more than fine for Western people to have technological toys. Their having those toys doesn’t take it away from someone in the East who has no toy. In fact, those people in the East are merely busy following the same path as the West to acquire the toys, too, so that they, too, will become exploiters and polluters and pillagers just like the evil West before you know it, and are already responsible for global warming and such in their way as much as evil Amerika.
Having said that, I think you can probably make some pointed commentary about the popularith of WoW and SL and such in the US precisely during the period when the government plunged the U.S. into an ill-advised and bloody misadventure in Iraq — about which we know little from our filtered media. There may be psychological points to make about this phenomena, though they aren’t necessarily causal.
What journalists and NGOs have a VERY hard time doing is drawing the conclusion from their love affair with the Internet in the 90s and their penchant for hardy Hi-8 trekking into hell-holes and bringing back atrocity footage. What happened is that they made a lot more stuff visible. They saturated the Internet. They put footage everywhere — on public television and websites if they couldn’t get it on mainstream media. They put every frostbitten Tibetan refugee struggling over the Himalyas and every motherless emaciated Darfurian child clinging to a tree in the desert on millions of websites, videos, blogs, and newspapers.
And it didn’t work as they thought. It didn’t inspire to action. It didn’t convert.
Instead, it led to more indifference and cynicism and even a sense of helplessness, that something like Darfur is too big and too complicated and therefore no action by an individual matters. That shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and we need to face the consequences of it.
I’m sorry that you find my thinking facile and ineffective. I don’t think the arguments I’m trying to make reduce to the simple formula of blame and shame that you’ve offered here, but clearly your reading of my words suggests that I’m doing a poor job of getting my ideas across.
The argument I found myself in a year ago over Second Life had to do with the potential for this technology to transform and influence opinion. I thought the potential for the technology as a tool to transform views was being vastly overstated. And I thought that the fact that the technology was largely inaccessible to the people it was supposed to benefit called into question whether this was, in fact, the right tool to use for advocacy for Darfur.
It’s a stretch, though, to position me as someone against technological “toys” as I’ve spent the last decade trying to get said “toys” into the hands of people in the developing world to do precisely the sort of citizen journalism you describe here. It’s certainly fair to describe me as being skeptical of the specific tactic of 3D spaces - which I don’t think are currently as effective tools for advocacy as text, photos and videos.
I will also happily concede the point that these tools aren’t nearly as effective as I’d like them to be. My sense is that they get more effective the more they’re used by people in the developing world rather than by people talking about the developing world. So I’m very much a fan of working to ensure that these tools can be used as widely as possible by the people who are in places like Tibet or Darfur (or Somalia or northern Uganda and other less media-friendly conflicts.)
My hope is that the “underlying text” of my arguments isn’t blame and shame, but finding ways to let people in developing nations speak and increasing the chances they’re heard. But I’d be the first to admit that we haven’t worked it out at Global Voices or at any of the other projects I work on. Working these questions out in public, on blogs, in real-time guarantees that you’re going to encounter some of my fuzzy and malformed thinking - if what you’ve read of mine reduces just to blame and shame, clearly I’m missing the mark.
[…] 3pointD.com ? Blog Archive ? Foreign Correspondents of the Virtual and Real Interesting followup by Second Life correspondent - former Africa correspondent - on my virtual/real comments re: Pitchfork the other day. (tags: secondlife africa journalism) […]
woo, lots of stuff.
First off, apologies to Ethan for misreading you. My bad.
Linda: I don’t equate Wikipedia with citizen journalism. In fact, I’m not crazy about the term citizen journalism at all. “No news outlet, no matter how large, can match the capability of citizens armed with fairly simple technology and an Internet connection.” <– That’s simply not true (in terms of gathering and disseminating facts). That said, I do think it’s important to arm citizens with technology and connectivity; in places like Somalia and Sudan, it might give us a great deal more information about what’s going on there. But of course, that’s a different conversation than the one about how to get Western print media to stop drooling over Second Life for a moment.
Ethan, I think part of the problem is simply the newness of these places. Anything “new” is naturally going to be more interesting to most domestic hacks than anything “still” or “again.” For most of America, when you tell them, “People are making their fortunes in Second Life!” (whether or not that’s true), they perk up and think, hey that’s interesting, I wonder what that even means. I want to read this.” Whereas if you tell them, “Africans are still poor!” they turn off, both because they’ve heard it before and because, as Prok points out, “liberals . . . are unshamable.” Which story is the enterprising and ambitious editor going to print?
The challenge of drawing more eyeballs to http://www.globalvoicesonline.org (which richly deserves them) is a different one, but I’ll address that one offline, I think.
Mark, I don’t equate Wikipedia with citizen journalism either - nor do I love the term, like you. It just happens to be the one most often used - it goes over better than “blogger” in my circles. :-) Didn’t mean to imply that - I was referring more to the ability to pubish easily.
But I have to counter your “simply not true” with another “simply not true” - (where does that leave us?). The fact that there are some 934 million people with access to publishing tools to potentially collect, disseminate, correct and report facts, information, news, etc., cannot be matched by any single news outlet. No organization can hire enough resources that compare to that potential of spreading news. Please elaborate when you get a chance.
And Ethan, what you are doing is fantastic - been a fan of Global Voices since you launched. The “secret sauce” of sustaining and growing interest (after the newness wears off) is how sites have connected people to each other - or how it connects people to the stories. Second Life does this, social networks do it, and media seems to be learning that modern lesson.
It leaves us agreeing to disagree, Linda :)
I’ll grant you that the potential is there, but I haven’t seen the results. I’m not claiming that news organizations always have all the facts (in fact, the nature of the business is that no story will ever have *all* the facts). But I do think they still get the largest proportion of the facts out to the largest number of people. This may change at some point in the future, but I don’t think it has quite yet.
I don’t mean to take away from the value of sites like Global Voices (which I agree is outstanding), or of people like Riverbend. But the number of such sites that have an audience anywhere near the circulation of international newspapers or broadcast / cable news is … zero? I’m not sure. (In any case, there are very few news sites of any kind that draw as many eyeballs.) One of the problems that needs addressing is how to draw more readers to such sites.
In any case, though, access to publishing tools is very different from knowing how to do journalism. We may simply have a difference in semantics here. Recounting one’s experience of day-to-day life in a war zone, while it may be valuable and may be deserving of a wider audience (I believe both those things are true), is not journalism as I think of it. I may be slightly old-school here, but I do think filters and gatekeepers are an important part of journalism. I want the top-level view from someone who has experience in gathering and synthesizing facts, but I do also want the kind of ground-level view that can be had from the kind of people my father writes about on his blog, the kind of people who show up on Global Voices, etc. There is certainly room for both, I just think they’re two slightly different things.
[…] Writing the other day about journalistic fascination with imaginary words, my purpose wasn’t to argue that people’s interest in the imaginary is limiting their interest in the real world… though I can understand why some people have read the post that way, as my writing was even muddier than usual. There’s a deep and powerful fascination with virtual worlds that seems to be shared by journalists, readers and the inhabitants of these worlds. While I don’t share that fascination, I am perpetually fascinated with the way the real world can layer upon itself in the way Kapuscinski describes. My ongoing hope is to find a way to make this layering and interconnection as interesting to readers as some people find high media-attention topics like virtual worlds. […]