So I lived in India for the first five and a half months of this year, in Goa, which is a major tourist destination. Yet somehow I couldn’t seem to find a proper supermarket, with all the fixins of home.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but on my first visit to the “Finest Supermarket” which is on the edge of Taimani neighborhood/district of Kabul City, I was overwhelmed by the abundant options that abounded.

On our way to the Supermarket we encountered one of Kabul’s campaigning politicians:

After we made it past the overzealous “Pear candidate’s” staff, we set to work looking for the various western staples we needed to stock our guesthouse refrigerators. It’s amazing, but Kabul’s “Finest Supermarket” has a perfect selection of any American’s basic suburban needs:

As well as Ragu, the grocer stocks Campbell’s Soup, among a plethora of other canned and condensed necessities. Not only is the store well-stocked, they have futuristic shopping inventions such as the “shopping basket-rolling cart” hybrid, perhaps a Chinese  or Japanese invention:

If all that wasn’t enough to assure you that this is truly the “finest supermarket in Southwest Asia,” you need only check out the second floor, glassware, chotchkies, DVDs, and Barbie!

Kabul’s been quiet for me thus far (knock on wood) so today I’ll leave you with a funny story I heard the other night from a friend.

In Kabul the ice cream man has a push cart and a mini-megaphone, rather than a truck as happens in so many western countries. It just so happens that one particular ice cream man in Kabul, has slightly more sinister plans than many others. If you hear the ice cream man at a certain hour of the evening, it never bodes well. In some parts of the world that’s because the ice cream man is secretly dealing/transporting heroin. In others it has to do with children and such.

Now kidnappings of foreigners have allegedly gone out of fancy in Kabul,  however Afghan kidnapping is still in vogue. So when some certain foreigners noticed their dog was missing after hearing the ice cream man at an odd hour, they didn’t initially think anything of it.

A few days later the Ice Cream Man showed up at their door in the evening and suggested that for $300 dollars it might be possible for him to locate the dog.

You might be thinking what you would do in this instance, $300 is a lot of money for a dog that might have just as well run away or been killed.

But what else is an expat stuck in Kabul to do? They paid the man.

The next day he returned with the dog and said “Let’s never speak of this again,” and with a jolly tune on his wagon he rode away…

Day two in Kabul was, fortunately, a day off. I have been running on steam since living India on a 4am flight to Doha last Monday. So the day began slowly, rising late, dealing with various outlying work, writing yesterday’s blog, etc. etc.

In the afternoon John Smock and I lunched in the courtyard of the Kabul Inn, the quiet beneath hovering storm clouds was quite relaxing. During our lunch of chicken burgers, and shockingly enough, a vegetarian burger for this writer, we were reminded we were in fact in Kabul and not some cheap hotel in a middle-of-nowhere hostel just once, as two large helicopters passed overhead.

The daylight hours were relatively uninteresting as I’ve said, interesting conversations with John Smock about his work and Small World News’ background, but nothing of note for the readers really. The day didn’t actually kick off until about 6:45pm when we left the Kabul Inn to walk to our friend Una’s guesthouse, to meet her and some friends for, that’s right, an Afghan rockshow.

As two bumbling foreigners on our second and third days in Kabul, we walked right past the alley to Una’s house and 2 more blocks before we realized our mistake. You see, Una’s place is “right behind the bread stand” but in Kabul there can be a bread stand on many a block, thus the error. Heading back to the Kabul Inn to regroup, we found the correct bread stand, and Una’s house just behind.

After brief intros to Hadi, Zaman, and Lea, we packed up and headed off to the Kabul Health Club. The Club is exactly that, a health club, which includes a bar and restaurant, and a few guest rooms for rent. However I have to admit that I didn’t see anything resembling workout equipment or anything to suggest it was more than a nice restaurant/bar for well-to-do Afghans and expats.

We were running late and after navigating a bit of confusion with security we found Kabul Dreams already well into the first few songs of their set. Like some combination of Jacob Dylan, Bob Dylan, and Nirvana, they were quite the sight. There were mixed messages about whether cameras were permissible, so John left his big fancy camera at home, and we each brought a mobile phone for assessment testing just in case.

It was clear soon after we arrived that cameras of any kind would be fine. During several songs the cameras  just in front of the stage nearly outnumbered the crowd. There were probably 50 attendees milling on the grass in front of the state, or a few more than that. Like many an indie show, they left a wide semi-circle of empty space in front of the band, which was soon filled by over-zealous journalists with all manner of visual recording devices.

I have mixed feelings about the impact of the show, it was loud and in an open-air courtyard in a populated residential area, meaning all the neighbors were subjected to loud indie rock well after dark. There were shishas to be smoked in the garden space after the show, and a highly overpriced (though well worth it) barbecue dinner. Oh and did I mention that it was held at Kabul Health Club, a pricey gym for Kabul’s other half? None of these things can be particularly good for encouraging local goodwill.

That said, a fun time was had by all, the band was an interesting mix of Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction meets something far less edgy, however they take themselves too seriously to be anything like pop-punk. Kind of like  if Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo met Kurt Cobain in Kabul and were listening to too much Death Cab for Cutie. Or something. I’m no music critic.

[h/t Tom Willard for the Death Cab for Cutie insight. Video coming once my slow Kabul connection gets it online. Check out http://brianconley.blip.tv]

I touched down in Kabul approximately 7:30am. Immigration and Customs was notably easy, my first mistake came when I realized I didn’t have the instructions for my arrival.

I left baggage claim for the area that, in a “normal” airport in a “normal” part of the world would be the area where your ride might pick you up, or you would catch a taxi.

Unfortunately in Kabul there is not only a parking lot A, for VIPs, but they go all the way up to C, which is where Afghans are able to reach. Eventually a helpful airport porter offered to let me use his phone and help me find my ride-for a fee of course.

Ahmed Shakib, a training assistant at Pajhwok Afghan News, and all-around-good-guy from what I can tell so far, finally found the porter and me standing around. It was an uneventful ride to the Kabul Inn, a hotel that is not much to look at from the outside, but has an appropriately gaudy garden and sitting room, complete with apparently “vintage” British rifles hanging on the wall.

After a quick shower-read cold water over my head-it was off to Pajhwok to begin meeting my new colleagues. Pajhwok Afghan News is an all Afghan news agency based in Kabul, but with reporters in 23 of Afghanistan’s 34 states.

After my first day I can say with assurance that Kabul may not be much to look at, but its charm is certainly present in its people. Everyone I met at Pajhwok was friendly, earnest, and welcoming. Consciously straying into the cliche I can say that these are, by and large, salt of the earth people. Similar to many(any?) Central Asian/Southwest Asian/Middle Eastern countries there is an air of fatalism and a feeling that things will get done, after some time.

I’m here working to expand Pajhwok’s adoption of multimedia and online/mobile media technology in their reporting. I will also be doing training in video production as they take steps to build out a video service prior to the upcoming parliamentary elections. Its going to be an interesting ride if the first day is any evidence. There is much to be done and I’m only here for about three weeks this trip.

After work we took a short trip to a supermarket in the neighborhood, that was as well stocked as any bodega in Manhattan or Brooklyn, barely providing any acknowledgment of its true geographic locale. I’ll try to take some pictures on the next visit, it should make its own interesting post. Also of note, supermarkets are apparently good places to exchange dollars if you’re in a hurry and need to combine grocery shopping with money changing. Just one of many interesting tips to a successful life in Kabul that I’m sure to learn in the next few weeks.

Last night John Smock and I caught up with Una Moore who has been living here about as long as I have been based in India. She took us to dinner at a restaurant called simply, “Sufi.” There were many foreigners there, and English appeared to be the primary language of culinary extracurricular activities that night. I’ll have to admit that we didn’t stay long at the restaurant. Your intrepid Kabul tour guide came down with a bit of what I like to refer to as the “travel bends.” That’s a combination of lack of sleep, stress, extreme amounts of travel and drastic dietary change that mimics much worse actual travel illnesses, and is a common experience for yours truly.

Una knew just what to do, she called the trusted “kidnapper-free” taxi service “Zuhaak” and we were whisked away back to the lovely Kabul Inn. The cooks at Sufi were so efficient they’d even finished cooking our meal and wrapped it for takeaway! Dinner ended up on the floor of my hotel room, John, Una, and I chatting the night away, Una regaling us with various stories of the bizarre life of a Kabuli expat in 2010.

The night might have gone shorter had the internet not gone out and I been able to call my wife and daughter who are currently roadtripping in the United States. It appears that Kabul Inn turns off the net access after a certain hour, something I’ll have to look into, as it is totally not cool when you’re working 6 days a week, 24 hours/day! The night finally ended with some World Cup action, turning out the lights just after seeing Mexico’s first goal against France, truly it is a global world.

It’s now day two in Kabul, having started uneventfully in the hotel, but tonight I am looking forward to my first Afghan cd release party with local indie heartthrobs Kabul Dreams.

So I’m in Dubai enroute to Kabul. I’ve left my full-time position at Video Volunteers which will hopefully leave a little more time for blogging and working on my book, among other things.

Just wanted to post a few pics from here, I’m not doing much interesting, just picking up a visa to go to Afghanistan, leaving tonight!

Recently I brought up the possibility that Google’s goals on the internet resembled a latter-day panopticon. This is obviously a bit of a dire prediction, so I’d like to offer another, more hopeful possibility.

As social networking and the distribution of media, social or otherwise, become more and more advanced, so do the tools for reaching an audience and for gathering information about that audience. A single individual, with a well-formed strategy and access to the time to implement is gaining more and more potential to fulfill a role in society once accessible only to massive multi-million dollar media corporations.

According to wikipedia,

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

What I’d like to propose is that it may soon be possible for this situation to see a reversal of sorts. It’s seeming more and more likely that it might it soon be possible for a seemingly omniscient aggregator to gather all human knowledge in one measurable, quantifiable database. However, this brings with it another possibility, that connecting all of these users is making it more and more likely that it might someday be possible for a piece of media to at least appear, if not be, omnipresent.

Furthermore the entrance barriers for usage of these tools are collapsing, they are already nearly free in many parts of the world and will likely only continue to decrease in cost while increasing in power. In a way it is beginning to look like there may be some type of analogue to Moore’s Law within social media and the dramatically increasing capabilities of mobile devices.

What this means is that citizen media, if properly harnessed, is gaining more and more capability to have an impact, to reach an audience. In my analogy of social media as a reverse panopticon, rather than an omniscient observer/guard, aggregating all knowledge and observing and quantifying the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humanity’s “prisoners, quite the opposite happens. The access to social media, and its ever increasing potential reach means that a single “broadcaster”/storyteller, rather than “aggregator”/guard has the potential to push the images of the oppressed, the voices of the developing world, to an increasingly large audience.

In some ways, the potential omnipresence of “content” takes the place of the “guard” and the wealthy, privileged, educated, and members of the developed world, with their access to broadband and mobile data tools, might become “prisoners” of a sort, awash in the “hegemony” of the developing world’s social media onslaught.

It has been pointed out perhaps countless times that we are “only limited by our capability to dream.” Margaret Atwood (correction, Mead-thanks Steve & Meghan!) said, “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizen s can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

Mrs. Atwood Mead and I don’t agree on that point. I would counter that although that may or may not be true, you should also add, “and men with guns.” However, the more I experience the possibilities of ICT for Development, the more I begin to believe that though it may not have been true before, it is becoming true.

Information and Communications Technology, digital media tools, and mobile computing is becoming ever more accessible in the developed world, but in much of the developing world these tools are still years away from being widely accessible to local people. It is only with the intercession of concerned, privileged citizens of the developed world, using their access to capital and agency to support the promotion and distribution of the stories of the developing world, that we can hope to assist in making a difference, possibly even staving off the collapse of fragile states.

Consider the impact that CNN and the onset of 24 hour news coverage made on the media industry and the policies of States in Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo during the 90s. Someday soon we will have the technological capability to empower the citizens of communities in crisis, fragile states, conflict areas, thand the developing world to speak to us themselves, to tell their own stories and ensure they are seen.

I know many will consider me a dreamer, an idealist, or a naive optimist. But consider our success in Iraq, Mexico, Gaza, Iran, and Afghanistan, where we used freely available technologies to help local people tell the world the stories of their existence in dire situations, conflict, and war.

And today I am in India, working with Video Volunteers to create a rural newswire encompassing nearly every state in India. We’re going to do it, and we are in the middle of strategizing a social media plan to distribute the content far and wide, as organically as possible. We may be a few years or even decades ahead of our time, but I have no doubt that, in the proper hands social media could turn the tides of institutional complacency and apathy toward the dangers facing fragile and developing states all over the world.

With the release of Buzz, and the much hyped privacy disaster coming so soon after rumors that Google was talking with the NSA< one has to ask whether or not Google really is trying to kill privacy.

An unfortunate thing about privacy, in the online space, is that privacy there is directly connected with access to anonymity. There is essentially no anonymity online, without taking active measures yourself to ensure anonymity. As there is no anonymity, there is little or no true privacy.

It’s probably important to understand why there is no anonymity. A brief explanation, when you are surfing the web you have a unique IP address, whether it is one address distributed to many sub addresses connected to a home or office router, or your computer connected directly. This IP address is noticed by the website you arrive at, which can now also gather the url you arrived from and the url you depart to. Utilizing “cookies” which are small pieces of text your web browser stores locally, websites can gather more information about you and your browsing habits. When you connect these with personally identifiable data like Amazon.com or Facebook, or even iGoogle accounts, you start to see how your anonymity dissipates.

It is precisely because of the need to move from more anonymous data to less anonymous data that companies like Facebook are doing so well, and companies like Google are exploring how to get into the social media game. Unfortunately for Google, they underestimated the importance of “privacy in context.”

I’m not sure I agree with Helen Nissbaum’s thesis in overall, but I do agree with this:

The nuts-and-bolts of my theory says that privacy depends on the social context of information being shared and what’s appropriate for those contexts.

What Google forgot is that, even though any n00b privacy activist will tell you that email is not private without encryption, people feel anonymous and feel private with their email. Just as an individual might be empowered by wearing a mask, that same individual can be empowered by email to engage in activities they wouldn’t otherwise.

The question of anonymity online, full anonymity, is rarely considered by many outside of threatened human rights activists and privacyphiles. The feeling of anonymity or privacy however is taken for granted.

When first Facebook, and then Google Buzz suddenly began broadcasting information about users to the world, in Facebook’s case to everyone and in Google’s case “following” everyone you email or chat with regularly based on some unknown algorithm known only to them, these users came face to face with the latter-day Panopticon.

Some readers may think I’m at risk of drifting into histrionics here about the rise of a security state or the NSA tracking your computers location via internet latency measurements, or the FBI wanting access to your browser history. This is not what I am attempting to suggest. I see the Google Buzz accident as an event that demonstrates the desire of Google to eliminate the idea of privacy, so that we become not just happy existing in a digital panopticon, but so that we recognize its there, and then forget.

Under such a lens it makes sense that Google would ask the NSA for help, or that they would so greatly underestimate the potential backlash from Google Buzz.

According to NYT, Sergey Brin of Google said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure.

In the same article, something perhaps more blatantly reminiscent of a Panopticon comes from Facebook:

“We don’t aspire to be just a Web site where people connect and share with friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network and a former Google executive. “We want to be the underlying technology people use to connect with friends wherever they are on the Web.”

Google wants to kill anonymity. So does Facebook. Their business models depend on it. They want to kill anonymity more than privacy, but if they continue to kill privacy context, people will continue to be up in arms.

Unfortunately, you should be more worried about access to anonymity and the increasing interconnection of your everyday actions with a searchable, aggregatable, quantifiable database that is the Internet.

Jeremy Bentham could perhaps not have imagined a world where closed circuit cameras turned “public space” into its own panopticon, where shoppers and citizens alike could never know who was watching them, monitoring their movements, keeping an eye whether they were acting for good or ill. Such power could surely only be reserved for an omniscient/omnipresent being the threat of whose observations, lets be honest, were the actual precursor to the Panopticon.

The increase in sociality some have begun talking about also tends toward the potential for increasing the reach and capabilities of the State. It’s yet another reason that we should continue to push for access to anonymity online. If privacy is effectively killed, and your every online habit can be broadcast to an infinite number of “guards” sitting at their own little “observation posts” ie web browsers, it won’t be long until most of us begin to ignore the internet Panopticon as much as we do the one at Walmart, our office job, or the local shopping mall.

That’s not a future I’m anxious to see. What are your thoughts? Please comment!

First a caveat, this is in no way a scientific or well-researched commentary on the state of the Indian media. This is a post based on what I’ve heard from Indians, Indian media professionals, and what I’ve experienced firsthand after living in India for one month.

During my first week here I met VK Shashikumar from newsX and we discussed the state of Indian media, as well as how the national “stringer network” works with most national TV news outlets. First of all, his contention, supported by several other Indians I’ve met, is that some 70-75% of the news cycle is dedicated to Delhi/northern India-centric stories.

The stories that are not Delhi-centric are provided via a stringer network throughout India. The reality of this network is that it is primarily Brahmins, which means the majority of India is not represented properly, due to the caste/class system in India. Furthermore, these stringers are tasked primarily with selling subscriptions and advertising, which is clearly a conflict of interest with their role as “independent journalist.”

It is in this climate that Video Volunteers will endeavor to create a network of “community producers” activists turned journalists who will be producing stories from their communities about life in India. The focus will be on life and issues that affect these communities directly, but with an attempt to frame the content for an international audience.

I feel we can say that Vividh will be the first “truly” national news agency because our focus is on telling the stories of *all* Indians, not only the privileged Indians, Brahmins, or Indians considered to be important or whose stories are easy to sell advertisements against. If we can produce stories from a local context, that have watchability, I think our success is assured.