The perils of interactivity

Tuesday I went to a talk put on by BoldeReach, a Boulder-based women's charitable organization that supports groups that provide services to women and children in need. While listening to the talk, I realized that some of what the speaker described relates to current digital journalism practices and concerns. So I decided to write about it here on my graduate-student-in-journalism blog.

The talk was presented by Revi Sterling, a PhD candidate in technology, media, and society at CU's ATLAS (Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society) Institute. Sterling worked for 10 years at Microsoft, where she eventually was part of a team whose purpose was to write new programs for the poor and disenfranchised (my words, not hers). She said that eventually she realized that writing killer apps for the third world wasn't gonna do it. Computers can't help people who lack adequate food or shelter, or can't read and write. So she came to ATLAS to pursue her doctorate, researching how to develop appropriate technology to help women in developing countries.

Sterling found that much of sub-Saharan Africa has community radio that serves as the main news and entertainment media for areas that have few other amenities. Since telephones are rare, and cell phone service not yet available, the radio is a one-way medium and mostly broadcasts male voices and perspectives. Because she focuses on gender-related use of technology, Sterling wanted to provide women a way to participate in community radio, enabling them to voice their presence in society. Her solution was to work with Kenyan women's work collectives, to design and use devices that hold up to 30 minutes of a voice recording, which is then transmitted to the local community radio station.

The women who have access to the device are now able to respond to programs aired on the radio, or provide news items for broadcast. There are some interesting parallels between their new-found radio interactivity and our Web interactivity, particularly with regard to citizen journalism and public commentary.

How do the radio stations determine what is fact and what is gossip? Have there been cases of misrepresentation, error, or libel? Is anyone responsible for checking the facts or correcting misstatements? Or, like with the Web, is one lousy error replicated so quickly and widely that it’s next to impossible to eradicate?

Does the fact that most of the women are readily identified, rather than anonymous, dissuade them from spreading lies or rumors? If that is so, should we reconsider the anonymous nature of Web blogs and comments?

Who determines what is important information and what is not? Sterling asserted that 80 percent of the women’s “broadcasts” are used, and the 20 percent that is not used is generally uninteresting content such as songs. How does she know that? The editors are mostly male broadcast technicians—are they accountable to the women, whom they may never meet? How does this relate to editing and censoring of Web comments?

Lastly, the delay between uploading the women’s content and broadcasting it can be up to a week. If timeliness is intrinsic to new-ness, at what point does comment become old hat, stale, BORING?

No answers, just more questions! I’d be intrigued to see if any lessons can be learned from the Kenyan women’s experiences that speak to some of our Web communication difficulties, or vice versa.