There's been a recent hype of using mobile technologies to
"empower" people to submit reports "from the field", take
action and change the course of society...

Somehow, just like we were promised that TV would educate people
and that the Internet would free us all, we've heard it all
before, yet we have to see it happen.

Can blogging about war, sharing experiences "from the field"
stop a war? Before thinking about technology, we need to ask
the questions: "where do wars start?" and "where do they end?",
and most important: "can wars be stopped at a different place
from where they start?". Wars do not start because of public
opinion and it is very unlikely that any war will stop because
of public opinion. In any case, deployment of technology does
not equate, or even necessarily facilitate, social processes
and structures that enable social engagement and civil
participation in the making of decissions regarding matters
of state and national and international security. Even in the
USA, with decades of a strong Civil Rights movement and wide
media coverage of constant activism and protests, it took years
for the government to pull out of Vietnam.

Technologies do not liberate people, and even if they enable
people to do things, that doesn't mean they will. This idyllic
notion of "the field" is no different from our own environment
and daily lives. Would you blog about the annoying lack of
parking space around your favorite gourmet supermarket, traffic
congestion when kids are picked up at the local school or the
rising prices of gasoline? Probably not, although these are
crucial aspects of your life as a member of a developed community.
It is likely however that younger people will blog about traffic
congestion at the mall and any attempt to raise the now standard
US$0.99 per song fee for digital music. Or perhaps you do blog about
those things. Yet, things don't change because you blog about them.
They won't change even if a million people blog about them.

The media produces hundreds of daily reports on war, seen by
millions of people, yet the world is not only still at war,
but new wars are started all the time. Reuters produces extensive
investigative unbiased reports on war, poverty, economic development,
stakeholders, change makers and the experiences of common people
around the world. I see then every weekend from my temporary home
at Trinidad and Tobago, so I guess that millions of people from
Argentina to Vanuatu do too. They are so much more interesting
than the repetitive newscasts from the 6 o'clock news and even
more appealing than some of my favorite Comedy Central and
Animal Planet programs. Yet, for all the attention, the world
keeps turning and people continue to suffer hunger and hardship,
kill each other and hate someone else's gut even more with each
turn.

Will those "in the field" blog about their hardship? I doubt it.
They are busy surviving, just like you're too busy trying to beat
the rush hour traffic and make it home in time to spend some time
with the family. There is no such thing as free time afterwards
with back to back episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart
and the Colbert Report.

Granted, some will blog. Most likely those who are already active
trying to denounce the situation and a few more who will discover
that they too can raise their voices now. But without positive
results coming out of the activity or, technically speaking,
proper incentive, most people will not or will get tired rather
quickly of doing it. If you blog and nothing happens, chances
are you will not insist in that time consuming, fruitless activity
when you can be doing something more fullfilling and with more
impact, say throwing stones and molotov cocktails to tanks...

Blogging works in developed communities because of the social
aspects involved. Kids and grown-ups enjoy and crave for
attention and recognition. People blog not to keep a journal of
their thoughts or to share them with the world, but because they
want to be read and seen and known and commented and forwarded.

In underserved communities, the situation is quite different. Most
of your peers don't have access to Information Technologies and
will not for years to come. They may be getting cell phones, just
like everyone else but they're not using them to browse the web,
and even if they did, there is a very slim chance that they will
browse to your blog page.

We are again making the failed assumption that by deploying
Information Technologies we can replicate a social phenomena
and dynamic from developed environments to underserved communities
and that they will take advantage of it.

We need to ask ourselves if the results of enabling these people
to report "from the field" is just to amuse us, be thankful for
our luck of not living among barbarians, or even remind us that
we must do something about the problems that take place somewhere
else. We will certainly read this modern-day instant "Anna Frank's"
diaries from half a world away, fresh "from the field". Perhaps we
will even ask if we can adopt one of these bloggers, just like we
can adopt whales or cute little Andean kids or starving African
children for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day. We've
been fighting poverty that way for decades...

Technologies will take us only as far as existing social processes
allow us. Without them, we're just deploying toys and generating
revenue, for the telecommunication and technology corporations,
often by taking money out of the poor people's pockets.
Nearby Mon Jul 31 10:51:30 2006