Ethan Zuckerman studies how the world (the whole world) uses new media to share information and moods across cultures, languages and platforms. His TED talk earlier this summer focuses on how our growing reliance on the localised web as a news source means that we are becoming more and more isolated from the plight of our fellow net-zens in other global regions:

Sure, the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves. Blogger and technologist Ethan Zuckerman wants to help share the stories of the whole wide world. He talks about clever strategies to open up your Twitter world and read the news in languages you don’t even know.

[click here if you cannot view the embedded clip above]

Zuckerman puts it simply:

“We end up in these filter bubbles… where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture.”

Reading some of the comments on the original TED page for this talk, it is interesting to see how Zuckerman divides opinion with his take on the cultural web – particular when he refers to Twitter trends in terms of white vs. black conversations:

“Fernando Viegasand Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers… looked at a weekend’s worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations – and in ways that you wouldn’t expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what’s crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it’s literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don’t.”

However, it is clear that cultural differences and agendas are often just a Google search away and never has it been more easy to access the views of disparate communities with just a few clicks of a mouse. Which is perhaps why Zuckerman finds it disappointing that we generally stick to what we know when it comes to accessing foreign content online.

It is interesting to hear for example, how the flow of communication between the English speaking web and the Chinese web is set to change in the next few years, with Chinese Internet users currently logging an average of 2 billion hours online each week. The point is made succinctly by Zuckerman when he points out that he English web is practically ignoring (or cannot linguistically access) content produced by 400 million internet users out there who have Chinese as a first language. He adds: “My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say”… or as they say that in Chinese:

The whole TED talk could probably be summarised in the following paragraph where Ethan focuses on Fijian content online:

“If I walk into a store in the United States, it’s very, very easy for me to buy water that’s bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It’s actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It’s really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It’s extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there’s an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There’s a coup government. There’s a military government. There’s crackdowns on the press. It’s actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment.”

Zuckerman cites examples from around the globe that fill us with optimism that the net is a true leveller of cultural barriers to communication. Yeeyan, for example, is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day and look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites and then put it online for free.

It’s the project of  Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn’t believe how biased American media coverage was. Lei’s motivation was to get people between these two countries start understanding each other a little bit better.

Since its inception in 2006, the site has grown into a key gateway for Chinese speakers who want to follow international news. It has been so successful that it has attracted the attention of major news sources like The Guardian and ReadWriteWeb — and also the Chinese government, which abruptly shut Yeeyan down last year for several months.

Read more about Yeeyan here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/01/06/welcome-back-yeeyan/

Zuckerman also cites the example of the Foko Club in Madagascar which was originally formed with the simpler premise of teaching Malagasy citizens to learn English and computer literacy by using citizen media to portray their daily realities and connect to the global conversation.

However, in recent years when Madagascar went through a violent coup, most independent media was shut down and the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence and everything that was going on within this country. So a very small programme designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country.

Read more about Foko Club here: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/project-foko/

About Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. He and his team recently launched Media Cloud, an open-source platform for studying online media that enables quantitative analysis of media attention.

With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices, sharing news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations, translating content from over 30 languages, and publishing editions in 20 languages. With support from foundation funders and media partners, Global Voices supports dozens of smaller citizen media projects in developing nations, and is a leading voice for free speech online. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Geekcorps sent over 100 volunteers to projects throughout the developing world, working on projects that ranged from bringing internet connectivity to Malian radio stations to digitizing databases to manage Rwanda’s Gacaca trials. In an earlier life, Zuckerman was a founder of Tripod.com. He’s a legendarily dedicated blogger at … My heart’s in Accra.

“Ethan Zuckerman is up there with Yo-Yo Ma among my heroic models of global citizenship. His brainchild, Global Voices Online, is my model of journalism transforming itself.”

Christopher Lydon, Open Source Radio

Photo: Ethan Zuckerman

Parting question: When was the last time that you went to a foreign language page online and learnt something new about a different culture?

Comments, as always…. below.