Given the scale and frequency of lies the Sri Lankan Central Bank puts out, this is perhaps a minor issue.
I was looking through some of our economic data and was surprised to note that the Central Bank has no clue as to how many Internet and E-mail subscribers there are in Sri Lanka. We can also safely guess that their method of ascertaining this figure is so primitive that they still only count PC’s with wired or wireless connections as a ’subscriber’.
And why is the Central Bank conflating email subscribers with Internet consumers? Surely the two are wholly different metrics – a single Internet subscription can serve a family of email accounts, and one ICTA nanasala can serve a village of email accounts? When will our key policy making institutions wake up to common sense?
Taken from Selected Economic Indicators, December 2008
Small wonder then that ICTA and the President can’t agree on the numbers either. More importantly, what are the yardsticks the World Bank uses to judge the effectiveness of the millions of dollars it gives to the government for ICT development?
One hopes it is not Central Bank, ICTA or Presidential statistics.
The end of foreign correspondence?
March 30, 2009
Taken from Fi & Bryn’s Big Trip
Is the role and relevance of the foreign correspondent now defunct or is it evolving?
Foreign correspondence, I explained, is not as foreign as it used to be. “There, not here,” is over. It is a momentous, overlooked shift in the world: Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else. In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places, and the reported-on are among the most avid consumers of what we report.
Read this particularly revealing and thought provoking story in the New York Times for a snapshot of how the web is really transforming journalism.
The Times Machine
March 30, 2009
In Old News is Good News, I covered the efforts of Google to digitise old newspaper archives. The New York Times has a comparable exercise in the form of its Times Machine, which contains 70 years of the NYT’s archives from its first issue on 18 September 1851 through to 30 December 1922.
It’s just amazing. Even though the archives in paper form may well outlast the archives in digital form, digitising this information brings it to those of us who will never have the chance of reading or just seeing them otherwise.
Inspiring change through social media
March 30, 2009
Global Voices has an inspiring story on how 90 American, Armenian and Azerbaijani teenagers aged 14-16, participants will use online tools such as blogs to “create socially conscious media that will impact communities across the U.S. and the Caucasus.”
Read the story here and visit the related blog here.
Is this a strategy that can also work in post-LTTE Sri Lanka?
Data loss whether you backup or not…
March 30, 2009
“The point here is simple. Data loss creates and exacerbates conflict. In a context of violent ethno-political conflict and with many fragile peacebuilding processes at play, data loss can often not just be catastrophic, it can be positively life threatening.” (Excerpt from Whipped cream and data backups)
I have for nearly a decade grappled with the challenge of digital information loss in peace processes. This is not a challenge getting any easier. We already know that we are losing more information than we are archiving. Despite personal efforts to archive vital information online, I know that due to personal negligence and / or the through the actions of a repressive regime, civil society will face catastrophic data loss on a regular basis.
Two new sites for dissent
March 29, 2009
Came across two new sites for dissent and critical perspectives in Sri Lanka have cropped up recently.
Forgotten Diaries was started in June ‘08 and only has a handful of posts. However, the content in these posts is very thought provoking, though judging by the paucity of comments, it is unlikely that this blog is well known.
Just Dissent is brand new. Begun in March 2009 it already has content in English and Sinhala which is largely linking to wire reports on the web. The latest post at the time of writing, I am a Traitor, challenges apathy and encourages pro-active participation to strengthen democracy.
The idiom in Just Dissent is more immediate and visceral, whereas the prose in Forgotten Diaries, which features content from In Mutiny, is more measured. Both however offer new sites for debate and discussion for those connected to the web and interested in civic identity, nationalism, democracy and conflict transformation.
That’s two more valuable spaces in a context where independent media and the freedom of expression are almost non-existant.
Online dissent and the future of extremism in Sri Lanka
March 29, 2009
“… Thus while the government is trying to position Singapore as a Media Hub for the fast-growing new media technology and development, home grown talent often face harsh official harassment. Singapore’s netizens are moving to redefine the terms of the island state’s political discourse – whether the government welcome them or not”.
Kalinga Seneviratne, Asia Media Report 2009
Kalinga’s sentiments are resonant in Sri Lanka as well, in this our official year of ICT and English. Over the course of 2009 alone, I have been informed of and visited over two dozen websites and web based social networking initiatives that highlight facets of the war and humanitarian concerns in Sri Lanka. They are all very well designed and most of them are compelling narratives that, at first, do not at all appear to be what they essentially are – partial narratives serving parochial ends. A select few are show signs of emerging as effective platforms for engaging the unlike-minded online. For example, a few readers may know Pissu Poona, an anonymous identity on Facebook – one of the world’s best known and most used online social networks – that has befriended nearly 200 individuals at the time of writing and regularly points to content on the web that critiques and analyses the Sri Lankan conflict. Pissu Poona is a site for some interesting debate and as a post which generated a lot of responses noted,
“just a reminder that this space is our space for debate and discussion. it is to challenge you (and me) to think about issues and perhaps question our own beliefs and prejudices. Let us not lose sight of the fact that our communities are polarized now more than ever and unless and until the dialogue is started again the mistrust and suspicion will continue to grow. Pissu Poona is an attempt to re-initiate the dialogue that war has cost us.”
On the other hand, as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Dayan Jayatilleke recently noted,
“Pro-Tiger Tamil students, mainly from Canadian campuses are walking from Toronto to Chicago in order to get on the Oprah Winfrey show. Now that’s a pretty neat gimmick. They have a well designed website. The Sinhala students who have the sophistication to pull something like this off are uninvolved in the struggle because they are alienated by the elements that tend to dominate equivalent networks, while those who are heavily involved in the “patriotic” struggle do not make the most Oprah-friendly material.”
Given that the peaceful negotiation of conflict and amplification of critical dissent on and through the web is an area of significant personal interest, I found Dayan’s encapsulation of the current growth spurt of web based pro-LTTE advocacy very interesting. Ironically however, for the pedestrian apparatchiks of the Rajapakse regime as much as the trade unionist fighting for her rights, the human rights defender, the traditional journalist and the Tamil nationalist vehemently opposed to the LTTE yet unequivocally committed to the equal treatment of all Tamil peoples – the web poses a real challenge. Equally and for all of these types, the web is alien terrain. Its unfamiliarity breeds hubris, which in turn leads to the gross under estimation of the web’s potential for transforming polity and society, for better or worse.
Read the full article in my Sunday Leader column today.
Identity and suicide on blogs
March 29, 2009
Came across two good examples of conversations engendered and sustained by new media that traditional print and electronic media would, especially in the context today, be unable and unwilling to support.
The first is a narrative of award winning Sri Lanka novellist David Blacker’s experience at a Police checkpoint. We all know that (a certain class) of Tamils are looked upon and treated differently at most checkpoints. The default is that they are terrorists, who have to prove their innocence. David’s post, from the lens of personal experience, has fostered a rich dialogue on issues of identity and ethnicity in Sri Lanka today.
On the same lines comes this post from The Whackster’s Lair. Spinning off from a comment left on Blacker’s post and touching on issues like civic education, the original post has spun off a number of discussion on a Sri Lankan identity, with input from some of the blogosphere’s leading voices.
How can the Fourth Estate and electronic media, provided it attributes this content, strengthen their own publications and programming by featuring and using content on the web such as this?
As the New York Times reports today, a vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama. While the story itself is fascinating, what’s interesting is that the accompanying NYT graphic which flags countries where the spying operations has infected computers quite clearly indicates that Sri Lanka is one of them.
As noted in the article,
The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no warning or even reaction to this story on the TechCERT homepage.
Plaigarising our content: How should bloggers respond?
March 26, 2009
Echoing a post just three days ago on the Daily Mirror’s plagiarism, this post on Chuls Bits & Pics blog does not come as a surprise. The author notes that the photo accompanying the story on the Sunday Times here was published without any attribution. As the author notes,
Infuriating was a mild term to describe how I felt, cheated is more like it, considering this photograph was taken by me during a short stop in London in 2008 when this statue was on display at the British Museum. I had made a special visit to the British Museum for the sole purpose of seeing this statue, take this photograph and write the story.
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