Musings of a Gora

I saw an interesting discussion on Twitter this morning(late night their time, remember I’m in India at GMT+5.5). A variety of #mediaagitators were discussing the term “voiceless.”

Here is a selection:

digidem “Tweets and Blogs: Social Media as a Voice for the Voiceless” @emjacobi invited to give talk at American University on community empowerment

SamGregory @DigiDem Is anyone truly voiceless? Or they are just being ignored if/when they use their voice?

audaciaray .@lksriv @SamGregory @DigiDem I really hate it when people are referred to as “voiceless” – so patronizing and disempowering

maymaym Yes! We’re not voiceless—they’re not listening. ♺ @audaciaray: Hate it when ppl are referred to as “voiceless.” Patronizing & disempowering.

emjacobi @audaciaray @lksriv @samgregory – i’ve been off twitter all day, but i agree completely that no one is “voiceless” & said so.

I fully understand that there is a distinction between being voiceless and being unheard or ignored. I am concerned that for the privileged, and lets be clear, anyone who has direct access to Twitter counts as “privileged” in my book, it can be problematic or worrisome to spend too much time discussing the semantics of our relationship to power and privilege.

Perhaps we can work toward an effective and meaningful definition of those we’d like to be collaborating with?

The primary issue I see with the term “voiceless” is that by defining someone you’d like to collaborate with as disempowered you have immediately created a power divide. You cannot help but stratify your relationship if you define your relationship as one based on their need and your support.

At Small World News we have primarily worked to see how we can use our privilege to support others to magnify their voice, to strengthen their broadcast, and, at our core, provide the skills and support that is asked for, and then get out of the way.

However, I’ve tried hard not to fetishize semantics such that I might exaggerate the capabilities of those with the least access. It can be equally difficult to help those who have never spoken for themselves to know what they have to say. How do we describe someone who does not know what they’d like to say, as a result of generations of disempowerment?

Today I am in India working on creating a loose network of Community Producers, social activists trained to be journalists who will help shed light on the disparate issues facing their communities that have, until now, never been accessible to the commons, to a wider community beyond a small geographic area. It is likely they have as much a need to be heard as to understand what they might say and how it might benefit their local community.

The willingness to listen and ability to have patience to a fault may be more important than trying to provide the tools for others to access the digital communications space.

Do you think the term “voiceless” is at all helpful?

Can we work together toward a more meaningful definition of those who lack access to the media commons, to the digital commons, who have never been listened to, and reflexively may at first appear to be “voiceless?”

PEOPLE. Right now we have a possible new solution to war in Afghanistan, a dramatic rise of the drone war in Pakistan, a collapsing state in Yemen, an opposition leader under assault in Sri Lanka, an election in Sudan that is on the verge of being delayed, a massive rewrite of the common understanding of the “genocide” in Darfur, an explosive situation in Haiti and the threat of a new war in the Middle East. All of these are bits of information I garnered from Twitter over the last few days.

But lets be clear, none of those are going to “change everything.” It will be this fab new gadget and a speech by Mr. Jobs that is going to mark a great turning point in modern history.

Its impossible to imagine that just before Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 the world would have been so obsessed with a gadget that would be accessible only to the wealthiest 1% of the world population that the international media would be more interested in telling the story of such a gadget than publishing the latest gossip about imperial machinations of various world powers.

Perhaps the issue is that we have to low a barrier to access and to high a barrier toward making a living. Shock and Awe marketing and the ability to one up the breaking news of one’s competitor takes precedence over in-depth, contextualized, and investigative reporting.

I’d be more excited about the latest gadgets and gizmos if more was being done to improve the lives of the bottom 10-90%. Imagine if Apple was combining a strategy to engage in social good and increasing access to the digital communications space with their massively hyped presentation of a shiny new object that quite possibly is contributing to war in the Congo and ongiong human rights or labor violations at factories around the developing world.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, part of my point is that there *IS* a wide array of information out there, but it’s being drowned in a sea of marketing, PR, and hype. The question I’d like to see answered is not only why are so many people interested in hype, but how can those of us interested in improving the visibility of important international affairs be more successful? How can we be more effective at drawing connections between the various conflicts around the world and the policies of developed nations, whether they be political, social, financial, or otherwise?

I will probably try to wake early enough to watch the SoU, though let me tell you, I don’t expect much revolutionary world-changing new perspective to be unveiled then either.