[UgaBYTES] Technology's Power to Narrow Our View

[lugalama edward]

Much has been made of the convening and mobilizing power of today's technology. A person inspired by a cause can blog about their outrage and plot a response on Facebook with other similarly animated people. While any single congressional district might not produce a groundswell to demand a halt to global warming or killing in Darfur, a virtual community unmoored from geography can deliver a critical mass. And once converted, advocates are far better informed than a generation ago. They can hear the personal tales of aid workers over Skype. When the Western press steers clear, they can access and share local media reports. Thanks to what Chris Anderson called the "long tail," far more documentaries are available than when movie theaters and video stores catered only to the most popular side of the market. Netflix carries close to 7,500 documentaries, allowing people already immersed in a cause to deepen their knowledge and commitment--and enabling proselytizers to attract
 new adherents.
   
  For many of us, though, technology has actually lowered the odds of bumping into inconvenient knowledge. If I had been setting up a Google alert in 1989, mine would not have been for "China" or "human rights." In 1992, I certainly would not have asked for stories on "concentration camps." When I'm abroad these days and have to go without my newspaper, I often turn to the most e-mailed stories on news websites, which are generally opinion pieces (rather than news stories), from which I cherry-pick arguments or facts that comport with my pre-existing views. Reading this way, I rarely stray from the familiar and soothing.
  Amid the hoopla over new media, it is worth considering the costs of the personalization of news. Sure, viral YouTube videos of global conflicts and tragedies will occasionally find an audience, and movements may grow up around iconic new-media images as they did around the old. But while the long tail ensures once obscure documentaries remain available, citizen advocacy may have a short tail, causing the number of viable causes to get winnowed to a handful of megacauses. Burma may achieve the requisite market share, while Burundi fails to penetrate at all.
   
  Further, the screen on which people view the world will narrow. Spared the burden of considering multiple parts of the world at once, single-issue advocates may have a hard time seeing the relationship of one foreign policy challenge to another. Viewing issues à la carte, they might be unable or unwilling to prioritize. To be fair, if young advocates fail to see the way Guantánamo has undermined U.S. efforts in Darfur, they are being no more tunnel-visioned than the Bush Administration. But they are the ones we are counting on to help turn things around.
   
  Lugalama Edward
  Buwama Multipurpose Telecentre