Twitter’s recent announcement that it had implemented a system which would let it withhold particular tweets from specific countries has caused a storm, with many decrying the move as one that aids repressive regimes more easily control information flows within the country. As the Guardian notes,

The company has insisted that it will not use the gagging system in a blanket fashion, but would apply it on a case-by-case basis, as already happens when governments or organisations complain about individual tweets.

The new system, which can filter tweets on a country-by-country basis and has already been incorporated into the site’s output, will not change Twitter’s approach to freedom of expression, sources there indicated.

The Guardian article flags the central concern over the new system of filtering tweets.

However, activists in countries such as Syria or China might be concerned that they would be unable to see information they need to know.

Emphasis mine. There is, sans any need for additional circumvention tools or proxies, a very easy way even within a country a tweet, or set of tweets are blocked, to access the censored content. And it comes in the form of a largely forgotten medium.

RSS.

In around May 2011, Twitter, for whatever reason, stopped RSS feeds from its accounts. But as an article from thenextweb.com it is still very easy to subscribe to an RSS feed off any Twitter account, simply by typing in,

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={USERNAME}

So to access the RSS feed of @groundviews tweets, you would enter,

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=groundviews

The resulting RSS feed loads perfectly, and is completely free of Twitter’s censorship even in-country. Twitter’s censorship happens after a tweet is posted, which by definition means that it cannot, even if it could and wanted to, block RSS feeds off a particular account. And this means that even in-country, using any RSS reader, you can read content off any Twitter account without going through a Twitter client or visiting its website.

Further, through thenextweb.com article states that Google Reader was unable to recognise the RSS feed, with the Groundviews account, it worked fine for me.

Click for larger image.

With a modern browser, you can read this RSS feed within the browser, and if you’re on a Mac, subscribe to the feed within Apple Mail.

Click for larger image.

Twitter’s RSS API is robust, and provides feeds of new tweets almost instantaneously. For activists seeking to disseminate information via Twitter and risk running afoul of Twitter’s new filtering regime, they can still tweet updates knowing that it’s accessible via RSS in their country, even if viewing their accounts are blocked (in its announcement, Twitter does not say that user access to accounts will be blocked – just that access to the account or specific tweets will be withheld). Further, as Twitter clearly notes,

Q: Do you filter out certain Tweets before they appear on Twitter?
A: No. Our users now send a billion Tweets every four days—filtering is neither desirable nor realistic. With this new feature, we are going to be reactive only: that is, we will withhold specific content only when required to do so in response to what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request.

This means that if and when content inconvenient to a repressive regime or powerful group is featured on Twitter, any resulting censorship of this content by Twitter will result in more eyeballs towards that account or tweet. Ergo, by requesting a tweet or Twitter account be taken down, those making the request open themselves up to scrutiny as well. In effect, this can serve to heighten, not reduce, the focus on repressive regimes and ham-fisted approaches to the control of dissent as well as give Twitter license to continue operating in a country that could otherwise have requested a far more detrimental carte blanche denial of access to its services.

Finally, the announcement by Twitter does not address retweets or modified tweets. If a tweet or account is taken down in a country, there is nothing in Twitter statement that prohibits others from re-tweeting the censored content or modifying the content, and posting it on their own Twitter accounts, which can be accessed in-country as well. In addition to the access by RSS, this also means that there is really no feasible way vital content by activists that needs to be heard, read, seen and engaged with can ever be completely censored off Twitter.

Update: My friend Jen Ziemke alerted me to this paragraph from an article published in The New York Times, which seems to suggest yet another way to bypass Twitter’s potential for censoring tweets and accounts.

The company identifies the locations of its users by looking at the Internet Protocol addresses of their computers or phones. But it also allows users to manually set their location or choose “worldwide.” Essentially that is a way to circumvent the blocking system entirely. A user in Syria can simply change her location setting to “worldwide” and see everything.

Delivered this speech in Sinhala at the Awards Ceremony of Agenda 14’s Short Film Festival 2011, held at the National Film Corporation Cinema. A PDF of the Sinhala version can be downloaded from here.

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Good evening.

In the time I have for this speech, which is around 10 minutes, over 6,000 new videos would have been uploaded to YouTube. That’s over 10 days of video content.  Over 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, or around a day’s worth of video a minute. A minute. Let’s pause for a moment and think about that. On 24^th July 2010, YouTube asked its millions of users to send in footage of their day. 4,500 hours of footage was submitted. That’s around 188 days worth of video content. Half-a-year’s worth of uninterrupted watching, produced in a single day. Oscar award winning director Kevin Macdonald made a 90 minute film based on this footage that was shown at Sundance Berlin and amazed audiences. It is now on YouTube, for free.

Many of you really aren’t gathered here to listen to a keynote speech. You are here because you are co-producers of this new content on the web, and because Agenda 14 has recognised your work as being more meaningful than shooting cute pets or home made music videos. The producers of the films recognised tonight live in a time of unprecedented change for film, and digital media in general. What drives this change, and what it means for all of us here in the audience is increasingly fundamental to exercise of citizenship, and democracy itself. Allow me then to take a few minutes to map out what I feel are important markers of an intersection between our digital content and physical activism.

Let’s go back to the YouTube video. Over half a year of footage submitted over a single day was produced not by acclaimed film directors or students of film school. For sure, some of them would have sent in their videos too. But most of the 4,500 hours of video was shot by ordinary people, using video cameras or their mobile phones. Two factors are at play here. One is the democratisation of technology to produce and disseminate video. From Windows 7 to Apple’s Lion operating system, from Ubuntu Linux to Nokia smartphones, video-editing software is now on all the major platforms that people use in their daily lives. Avid and FinalCut Pro are still used by professionals, but their basic features are now in the hands of billions. This of course doesn’t make any of one of us here a Spielberg, Cameron or a Coppola. But it does put in the hands of millions, including the illiterate, visual tools that can help them capture and tell a story. Most of these stories will be banal. A few will be good. Some will be great – haunting, horrific videos like the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan during the riots in Iran in 2009, captured on an ordinary Nokia, disseminated virally on YouTube, picked up by the White House and noted by Barack Obama. Video platforms like Witness.org now feature videos of human rights abuses captured by both torturers and the victims. Police brutality in London, the murder of protestors in Cairo, the tsunami in Japan – these are all captured on film and available on the web. The video cameras in our mobile phones, the web and digital tools are redefining the way we see our world, and the economics of video production. Shooting and producing video is no longer the pastime or prerogative of those who have the money to use studios and buy high-end hardware and software.  Every laptop, desktop and smartphone today is a studio.

Technology aside, it’s important to focus of who is producing these videos. Many more children, youth and women are making videos today than in any other time in history. All of them can increasingly directly upload their footage to the web.  Women don’t need the permission of men. Youth often do it in spite of parental controls. Children often use their parent’s smartphones to sometimes capture video better than many adults! In the ten minutes I speak, women from Kashmir will capture stories of life in conflict. Women from Sri Lanka will capture stories of gender-based violence. Youth from the Middle East will capture the heinous violence in Syria, and the Army’s oppression in Egypt. In South Korea, India and Japan, young children in schools are being taught digital filmmaking and media literacy. Sri Lanka is very far behind in this respect. But many here today, your friends, sometimes family, and colleagues are already producing a lot of videos. Each one has a perspective. Each is a story. Each captures life as you know it, and want to project it. Propaganda can also use the same digital media, but with growing access and use of video, it’s more difficult to convince people of the single-narrative. Inconvenient truths can’t be hidden easily anymore. You will capture them. You will disseminate them. You can hold governments and those in power accountable.

But how do we make sense of 6,000 videos, or over 10 days of continuous viewing, in the time I take to give this speech? Is too much information as bad as, or perhaps worse then no or little information? Is the deluge of karaoke videos and of cute kittens doing tricks with knitting balls drowning more vital video, voices and producers? How do we find and focus on what matters most to our fragile democracy, and issues of democracy, accountability and social justice?

These are tough questions. Whistle-blowers today – for example, someone with a video taken in the heat of battle that shows the torture and execution of a prisoner of war – can in fact upload their video to the web quite easily, and from almost anywhere in the world including the actual theatres of war. But their unique perspective and location can give their identity away even if care is taken to remain anonymous online. On the consumption side, there is simply too much of content out there, and without the skill to search for and determine the veracity of video content, videos like those showcased by Agenda 14 this evening will be largely lost, and will fail to reach critical audiences. Activists today need to know digital media skills. No longer is a picket on Lipton Circus enough, or a petition to the President’s office. Short form video plays a key role in advocacy campaigns, and yet, civil society in Sri Lanka is largely oblivious to its power. This has to change. I believe it will.

Finally, your story matters. In fact, it is what matters the most. Today, life in the slums of Mumbai can be captured in high-end digital cameras used for cinema. 2009’s Slumdog Millionaire became the first movie shot mainly in digital to be awarded the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. But there is another world of digital video. This is the world you in the audience hold the keys to, and are the best ambassadors of. I call it a new geography of perspectives – which reflects your ability to capture your world, and place it online for consideration by global audience. Resolution today matters less than perspective. No Sri Lankan here, possibly in their lifetime, can afford a 4K Red One camera. All of you, right here, right now, can capture me on film. Some of you, with a smartphone, can even capture me in high definition. The world of film is no longer contained in cinema or through a mere projection. It lives amongst us. No longer are we all passive subjects. There was always a choice between a just a voter and an informed, vocal citizen. Today that choice is mediated by how we all leverage digital media, and increasingly, short-form digital video. Many of you will choose to film the safe, the commercial, the profitable, the popular. A few of you will use technology as well as an eye for a good story to film the unpopular, the hidden truths, the marginal, the oppressed. Who we saw as victims of yesterday will shoot their own stories, competing with those here who make documentaries.

New voices, new video, new world. How you choose to engage is up to you. This evening, I am pleased to be in the midst of a few who show a larger public the power of film. I commend Agenda 14’s vision in creating a compelling platform to showcase these great short-film, and as importantly, create a space through its magazine to have a discussion about cinematography and its appreciation in a country that even post-war seeks to clamp down on critical perspectives.

As friend, colleague, diplomat, parent, lover, child, teacher, student, academic, worker, guardian, mother, father, sister or brother, I hope you all choose to bear witness to both what’s very wrong as well as what is good in our country. Technology already allows it. The choice is ours.

Thank you, and I wish you all a pleasant evening.

Thaththa’s subscription to National Geographic kindled this interest, vicariously at first. From its pages another world opened up – the power of photography to move the imagination, grab attention, capture the ephemeral and frame what would otherwise have been marginal, or forgotten. The incredible range of regions, issues, subjects, contexts and processes National Geographic covers is a testimony to the power of an image. During my undergraduate years in Delhi – a city that is a feast for any lens – I shot with abandon with Thaththa’s old Minolta, trying to satiate a pent up need to capture as much as possible with, at the time, little care for precision focussing or the politics of what I chose to focus on or included in my frame. I couldn’t afford a camera myself till much later, and in the years since I got my first digital camera, I’ve tried to learn the art of photography by observing the work of others.

Years later, admittedly I still can’t generally take a really good shot. It’s not the equipment. Too much of the inhibition to seize the moment, ingrained in childhood, remains. Good photographers, I’ve observed, are at once part of and separate from a moment. The greatest locate themselves in a photo even when it is only the subject that is seen. They are self-effacing, but in and through their focus, the politics of position, choice and framing is revealed. And so while a lack of confidence dogs my own photographic development, my appreciation of and belief in the power of photography to bear witness has grown. By bearing witness I do not mean only a record of what is wrong and corrupt, but also what’s worth celebrating, preserving and nurturing. It came home, literally, when I was emailed seven images of the conditions in Menik Farm on 15 August 2009. The photos were taken from a mobile phone. I received them on my Blackberry. I was in between meetings, but recognised their power. Though small, they showed conditions on the ground, after a day of incessant rain, that were, in the fullest sense of the word, hellish. This was at a time the Sri Lankan government proclaimed to the world and us that those interned in the camp were well looked after. The stark realities on the ground were largely unknown, because journalists weren’t allowed into the camp at the time. The photos were too powerful to not release. I asked the help of a trusted friend, now a professional photographer and journalist, to blow them up to a size suitable for the web. When I published them, I did so knowing that the immediate and vicious response from self-styled patriots would be that they were doctored. This accusation was as expected levelled, but the beauty of the web is that such claims can be easily verified, and if they aren’t, summarily dismissed. The images of completely waterlogged flimsy tents and shelters (with, lest we forget, thousands of Tamil citizens traumatised by unimaginable violence and had lost almost everything in life, other than their own) and of a little boy outside a makeshift toilet wallowing in mud and faecal matter were soon picked up by international media, and forced government to confront an ugly, inconvenient truth.

At both the American Centre and the Fulbright Centre, professional Sri Lankan photographers complemented what I noted in my own presentation, which looked at how a combination of technological development and increasing access to and ownership of cameras was changing how we see our world. I can and will never be a professional photographer. Few of us can. But my son, who will soon turn five, has already taken more photos than his grandparents could or would in their lifetime. He is already comfortable with taking a shot through an iPhone, and looking at him do this, it’s almost like this skill is hardcoded in the DNA of a generation called ‘digital natives’. In a single day, more photos are uploaded to the web than can be seen by anyone in their lifetime. How we capture, what we choose to capture, how we enhance, distribute, comment on, redistribute and archive photography is in flux, and there are hard questions to each aspect that we don’t even have answers to yet. For example, while papyri from antiquity are still preserved and legible, there is no one who can guarantee the existence and accessibility of photos taken today even a few decades hence (a problem of storage as well as archival format).

For a while, I have been interested in locating these larger questions in a country that’s post-war, but beneath the veneer of an enforced peace, still holds and encourages a lot of violence. As a parent, I don’t want to stifle the innate confidence of a five year old to go up to anyone, anywhere, and hold up a device that captures that moment. As he grows up, I also want to, along with his mother, talk through what he takes, to hone technical skill as well as a sensibility conscious of photography’s power in the use and abuse of image. Personally, I am fascinated on the one hand by technological developments like the recently developed Lytro camera, which takes images that after downloaded to a computer, can be refocused at will. But the geek tendency aside and more politically, I am on the other hand interested in digital photography’s use in social unrest and dissent. I celebrate the camera phone as a device that has allowed, for example, the capture of street and village level dissent through the eyes of women, who as subject have often been portrayed to lack agency, and as photographers have often not had access to cameras. There is of course room for a lot of academic debate here, but I’m far more interested in what’s now called ‘sousveillence’ – understood as an idea that reflects an increasing number citizens, not all of whom are political activists or human rights defenders, who take photos that as single shots or as part of a larger mosaic, threaten violent authority, question propaganda and hold those in and with power accountable. It’s not unlike a repressive government’s use of CCTV to monitor and quell dissent, but in the hands of millions of citizens used to nurture and strengthen democracy. The hardest challenge isn’t technical. That hurdle’s already crossed, with an incessant local and global demand for digital cameras as well as mobile phones with built-in cameras (increasingly rivalling in terms of quality high-end cameras used by professionals). The challenge is fostering a citizenry that, despite attendant dangers, uses photography to capture facets of and moments in life around them. I believe that the resulting photos, when disseminated amongst, observed and used by a larger public, help in democratic reform and dissent.

It’s an interesting time for photography. Unlike my own childhood, my son’s generation will associate photography with language, as just another medium to communicate. Twitter and Facebook are leading this revolution of photography as a social conversation, which in turns fuels a new appreciation of how we frame our world, and how ill-equipped an older generation is to deal with a tsunami of visuals that capture much of what they would like hidden and out of sight. Along with this comes, obviously, more sophisticated propaganda and digital manipulation. I am not for a moment suggesting that this new age of photography is an automatic guarantee of a stronger democracy. But with more women, children, youth and men using thumb or index finger to snap a shot of what they are moved by, we are inhabiting a country and world that is a living and evolving geography of perspectives.

We are only just beginning to realise what this means and how it will play out in our fragile society.

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Published in The Nation on 4 December 2011.

Prezi presentation on ICCM 2011 by Geeks Without Borders

Last week I delivered a keynote address at the 3^rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers held in Geneva, an annual meeting of the practitioners, academics and some of the best minds in the world involved in shaping the future of humanitarian aid and post-disaster relief work. My involvement and enduring interest in this field is accidental. At the time of the Boxing Day tsunami, I used a programme called Groove Virtual Office to support a political initiative called One Text that brought together actors in, what at the time was the peace process to thrash out issues in a virtual, mediated environment. Groove was to PCs of the day what Mihin Lanka is to our economy, a beast that sucked dry every available resource and gave little in return. But what it did was, at the time, unprecedented. It offered key actors and their proxies – some of whom could not be seen together, many of whom were out of Sri Lanka – the ability to in real time or asynchronously, communicate ideas, conduct discussions, upload documents for review, jointly edit them, map out positions and interests of political parties and non-state actors, flesh out and debate public stances and be informed by a range of decision support tools, including a library I curated with resources on peacebuilding. When the tsunami hit, the local and international networks connected via Groove were in a matter of hours turned into a decision support system for relief and aid work. At its peak, over 300 national and international entities, including the Prime Minister’s Office, Sarvodaya and even the US Southern Command, involved in relief efforts in South East Asia, were part of the Groove workspaces set up in Sri Lanka. Unsurprisingly, my laptop, which hosted most of the content, summarily crashed and was only resuscitated at the Groove Headquarters in Boston, days after the disaster, during an internship planned before the tsunami entered our vocabulary. The workspaces had situation reports from UN agencies, eyewitness reports, media updates, video, maps and other geographical information like map layers, photos and other documents. Two or three weeks after the tsunami, the Sahana Disaster Management System was, from scratch, coded into a platform that helped coordinate aid work and included modules for missing persons registration, volunteer and camp management and matching requests for aid with offers for help. Nothing of the sort existed, and programmers in Sri Lanka had not attempted a venture of this nature and scale before the tsunami.

Why should this not just be a topic of interest for the motely array of individuals who inhabit the IT industry, or relief world? To be sure, relief and aid work involves hard, physical work. No amount of or advance in technology will negate the need for search and rescue teams who risk their own lives to rescue those trapped in the completely chaotic hours and days after a large-scale disaster. And yet, from the vital updates via SMS sent after the tsunami hit Sri Lanka to the development of Sahana, from the Ushahidi map after Haiti’s devastating earthquake to the compelling Lord’s Resistance Army Crisis Tracker website, ordinary people, with no prior humanitarian experience including those affected by a crisis or disaster and volunteers thousands of miles away from the centre of the devastation or crisis working for little or no money are bearing witness to ground realities and offering their assistance, knowledge and expertise to relief and aid organisations, including the UN. Increasingly entering the domain of humanitarian aid are also serious programmers. Advances in mobile technology, the web and the Internet propel much of this.

Why is this important, why must Sri Lanka embrace it and what challenges confront us in doing so? The shift is important globally because it represents a fundamental change in the culture of humanitarian aid, from conception to on the ground delivery. Technology is tearing open a conservative, conventional domain, allowing those affected by a disaster to bear witness to not just the devastation around them, but also the actions of humanitarian aid workers. The same technologies that under-pinned the Arab Spring are those that are helping aid workers better coordinate their work, within and between agencies. The same mobile phone that captured the dying moments of regimes in the Middle East are those able to capture those alive under rubble, missing children, damaged buildings, map critical infrastructure after a disaster, help identity safe passage and refuge, match on the ground needs to aid in-flows and help make humanitarian aid agencies more accountable to those they serve, and are funded by. That last point is a sticky issue. Technology is embraced when it helps efficiency and effectiveness, but shunned when it opens the log and financial books of aid agencies. This is where this shift is important locally. Civil society, which is critical of government, as well as government, often virulently critical of civil society are increasingly open to scrutiny by the ubiquity of technologies that capture and disseminate performance indicators both would love to hide. From undelivered food supplies to poor quality rations, from camp conditions to government bureaucracy, from the waste of aid agencies to the gender discrimination in aid delivery, those once considered mere victims have an increasingly powerful voice and media to air their concerns. This trend will continue. Embracing it allows Sri Lanka to become more responsive, agile and accountable. If and when the next large scale natural disaster hits Sri Lanka – a flood, tsunami, a burst dam or bund or landslide – those who are best placed to alert aid agencies of ground conditions will be those affected by the disaster, and not relief workers who go in post-disaster. This is a seismic shift in how we plan for, generate and deliver humanitarian aid. It means that governments and aid agencies can potentially plan better, deliver and store without waste vital supplies, and even prevent, in some cases, a larger disaster. Ordinary citizens, and not just humanitarian aid workers or industry experts, are not just part of this new aid paradigm as victims or those in need of relief. They are the ones guiding logistics, providing on the ground information, shaping aid agendas, holding those responsible for relief accountable, re-engineering what has for decades been a system closed to outside input or scrutiny. How can this help in Sri Lanka?

Even a cursory scan of mainstream media over the past couple of years clearly flags that aside from the war, widespread flooding, landslides, erosion and drought have cost hundreds of lives, devastated livelihoods and laid waste large tracts of land. Technology isn’t going to stop any of this in the near future, but giving citizens the power to alert, advise and action risk reduction strategies, at a community level, leveraging the power and reach of mobiles phones and the Internet, can save lives that through centralised and opaque planning and relief plans are often lost. This is recognised in the crisis mapping movement globally, where technology’s focus is on empowering the field level, right down to the affected persons. This is a major shift from the “headquarters knows all” attitudes of the old guard of aid workers, who saw themselves as saviours of helpless communities. It is now these communities who are helping the aid workers, and keeping an eye on them to boot. And yet, the popular coupling of technologies for regime change elsewhere impedes their promotion amongst communities in our country facing the greatest danger, from coastal areas to those living with riparian risk. We are losing out on a global trend, and an exciting opportunity to offer our communities access to innovations in technology that can not just help them save their own lives, but assist in the saving of others, in others parts of the country, the region and beyond. By giving into the fear of political instability and not recognising or supporting the potential of citizens to help themselves – api wenuven api sans the bovine blather it is usually framed by – our government undermines its own efforts at disaster risk reduction, early warning, community resilience and disaster management plans. By not harnessing local knowledge – there are for example platforms today being developed at the UN that by aggregating, analysing and visualising hundreds of thousands of hunches and recording inklings are able to generate risk maps that contribute to early warning – governments, civil society and aid agencies who continue to believe that centralised planning and control is best able to save lives will actually contribute to lives lost.

And even if they don’t comply, these technologies will find their ways into the hands of citizens, compelling change, driving reform. When the flooding earlier this years inundated almost a third of Sri Lanka at its worst, a map created by a colleague on Google Maps – a free, web based mapping platform – generated thousands of views overnight. Anyone today is able to create a map no different to what was employed in Haiti by Ushahidi to map relief work and needs on the ground after a disaster. Tools like FrontlineSMS provide even the remotest communities the ability to record what they see, hear and need, in addition to what they get, how they get it, and when they receive it. These are all free, web based, mobile friendly tools. There is today a global movement involving over 180 countries, and tens of thousands of people – including from UN – engaged in discussions on how a new wave of virtual volunteers are joining forces with seasoned aid workers to protect civilians from violent conflict as well as help them after a disaster. Our own Sahana’s not caught on to the degree I thought it would in Sri Lanka, but the idea and movement it helped inspire is much larger, alive and growing today. We are now faced with increasing opportunities to leverage our tragic and long experience with disasters and crises into a valuable asset through technologies that connect us to other disasters outside of our country or immediate community. Driven by technological advances, this new paradigm – whether we are an accountant, university student, stock-broker, journalist, C++ coder or hacker – gives us an opportunity to be part of processes that save lives. It is, ultimately, about using tools a generation before us didn’t have in Sri Lanka to help ourselves, and others in distress.

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Published in The Nation newspaper on 20th November 2011.

I made this presentation at the American Centre in Colombo yesterday, at the invitation of Nooranie Muthaliph, Project Lead of the interesting Rotaract Shutterbug competition organised by the Rotaract Club of Panadura. I was asked to

1. Create awareness of these powerful mediums used by different communities and people in bring about change and,
2. Generate interest of people in Colombo/ Sri Lanka to explore these tools and use them for change.

I am never convinced of the civic consciousness of Sri Lankan audiences, especially when you call upon them to bear witness to, as best they can and as much as they can, structures and forms of violence, or even just examples of good governance. Nature, colours, scenery, wildlife, still-life and portraits for example remain the domains most photography in Sri Lanka reflects, sans any real connection to or interest in framing more contentious, marginalised yet critical facets of peoples, society and life beyond. This was acknowledged by a photography teacher of over 20 years present in the audience, who said that creating this bond between society and photography was both vital, yet exceedingly difficult.

I guessed the audience to be in their mid to early 20s, a time ripe for activism and mobilisation. Sadly, the largely enervated response to my own presentation, and the excellent points made by blogger and friend Dinidu de Alwis – who unlike myself, is actually a professional photographer – suggested to us both that this was not an audience who  would risk a shot that endangered their precious equipment. Though understandable (professional grade body, lens and other equipment costs are astronomical in Sri Lanka, leave aside insurance) therein lies the rub, for without a drive to bear witness, having the best equipment dangling over hip or shoulder is more fashion accessory than tool for social change.

Sri Lanka needs more look at this! photos instead of look at me! photographers.

In my submission, I traced the origins of bearing witness to social upheaval, from painting to the birth of photography. I noted that in painting historical events, much like the colour of dinosaurs, the final product on canvas did not in fact depict any real ground truth, and was often a product of many narratives, including fiction, often spun or recalled by the victors, if it was a revolution or war depicted. The primary distinction with photography was that though framed and partial, a photograph (we didn’t get into the ethics of airbrushing or digital image manipulation) did in fact depict truer colours, and with greater immediacy and veracity, events and people who weren’t always part of the winning narrative.

I showed some iconic paintings of the French revolution and the American civil war, plus one of Goya’s masterpieces on the Peninsular War, and compared these with equally iconic and moving images from this year’s uprisings in the Middle East. I then briefly looked at what’s changed in the economics of creation, the technologies used and the manner in which images were produced and disseminated.

I then posed the question, for open discussion, as to whether professional photography (e.g. war photographers) were, no pun intended, a dying breed. Flagging the courage, conviction and work of Chris Hondros, a photographer from Getty killed in Libya, I asked whether the paradigm of bearing witness through photography had now shifted radically to citizens, and within that group, activists in particular.

Anchored to a quote by the American photographer Chase Jarvis, I looked at the evolution of mobile phone based photography, and the fact that the most popular ‘camera’ on Flickr is actually the iPhone 4. Through the next series of slides I explored what this confluence of professional photography and activist photography via mobiles and other point-and-shoot cameras meant for activism. I used the example of the horrific first images of Menik Farm, Vikalpa’s photojournalism in capturing political activism, the compelling high definition productions by the photographers involved in the Moving Images initiative, the compelling use of photography to communicate poverty research in Sri Lanka,  TED Prize winner JR‘s use of photography for social and political activism and the use of Twitter in the dissemination of in situ photography.

I then touched on how in a post-PC world, mobiles and tablets were re-shaping, radically, the way photos were taken, manipulated, disseminated and consumed. The day before the presentation, I coincidentally had a great Twitter conversation with senior journalist and professional news photographer Amantha Perera. The title for this blog post comes from one of my responses to him. In my presentation I went on to show how young people, for little money, using off the shelf equipment and standard point and shoot cameras, were changing the way we saw the world, and changing how their immediate neighbours and communities engaged with their environment. I talked about the challenge of curation and sense-making when there’s a ton of photographs to sift through, and finally how tools like Microsoft Photosynth can change the way we see and engage with the world.

I ended on a non-technical note. Showcasing the iPhone app of Groundviews, I said, not without some vexation, that the greatest challenge to activism today, in Sri Lanka and many other places, was not so much the technology to bear witness, but the willingness of citizens to do so. Without that spark, that inner calling to stand up for what is right not because it is a fad, popular or because of fame, no D-SLR, smartphone or even the amazing Lytro will result in the kind of social, cultural and political reform this country so desperately needs, post-war.

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This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

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Citizen Media Experts Interviews: Sanjana Hattotuwa

‘Citizen Media is Vital for the Global Population to Move Forward in the 21st Century’

The Ashoka Changemakers Citizen Media Competition (sponsored by Google) has attracted the attention and support of leaders in the citizen media space. One of the competition judges, Sanjana Hattotuwa, has dedicated himself to the complex (and often risky) field of citizen media in war-torn Sri Lanka. Now the founding editor of Groundviews, an award-winning web based citizen journalism platform, Sanjana (SH) took a moment to speak with us about his work pioneering efforts to leverage web based media to strengthen democracy, human rights, and a just peace.

Interviewed by Evagelia Tavoulareas (ET)

(Transcribed from audio clip at http://www.changemakers.com/blog/changemakers-judge-sanjana-hattotuwa-citizen-media-vita)

ET: Welcome to the citizen media expert interview series. Ashoka Changemakers with the support of Google launched Citizen Media, a global innovation competition to find solutions that use media to catalyse participatory citizenship. In this series we will connect with media experts from around the world to explore major trends, obstacles and what lies ahead.

Joining us today we have Mr Sanjana Hattotuwa, Founder of Groundviews, an online citizen media platform supporting social justice efforts, Sanjana is also one of our judges for the Google supported Citizen Media competition. Sanjana, thank you for joining us.

SH: Thank you!

ET: Tell me a bit about yourself and your current work – what is on your plate at the moment and how does it relate to Citizen Media?

SH: I started the site called ‘Groundviews’ in late 2006 and I have been curating it over the past couple of years. In late 2009 I was joined in my efforts with a co-editor. We’ve gone through some difficult times in the country in which Groundviews is located, which is my home-country, the country I was born into – Sri Lanka. We didn’t know at the time we launched but it turned out to be a fairly tumultuous time in the political and social history of the country where we went through an extremely violent period. Having said that, in May 2009 we also saw an end to a 30 year old war. So there are no outright hostilities at the moment. But there are very serious questions that endure about just how exactly that war ended.  And these are issues and questions that we continue to ask on the platform.

The platform itself is fairly straightforward. Publishers, content in text, audio, video form as well as photography using a range of narrative styles on issues, questions, aspects, facets of life in a country where mainstream media will not or cannot publish or produce, so in that sense it’s almost an outlet for people to tell their stories that would otherwise go unheard and to put issues on the map for discussion in the country as well as internationally and in that respect we get a lot of people coming in to the site to discuss and debate the content that is posted up. We had the country’s first presence on Facebook – it has a Facebook fan page. We also started one of the country’s first Twitter feeds, we have two curated feeds of other Twitter users as well, in addition to our own which is followed by 1,500 and on Facebook we see a weekly growth of about 100 fans and we have right now I think about 10,680 fans. So it is quite large for an initiative which doesn’t have any commercial backing.  So we have interested ourselves in the growth of our content, particularly because it is critical of those in power and seeks to hold them accountable for their actions.

My plate at the moment is quite full as you can imagine dealing with these issues, curating them, moderating discussions – making sure they are according to our moderation guidelines which for example eschew hate speech and violent diatribes in favour of more progressive dialogue even if we agree to disagree. We also do quite a lot of new media experiments, we like to really push the boundaries of what is possible using new forms of story-telling, merging photography and audio for example or new narrative forms, you know, ways of writing from satire to the straight-up long reads, type essay that we put up online which, is simply not possible in mainstream media given the market economics and underpinning.

So we really have a diverse range of content, style; we have right now I think about upwards of 400 contributors who contribute to the site, all of them citizens (of Sri Lanka),  most of them at least, with no formal background in journalism. And our readership extends to both  readers within the country and I think we get an average of about 60% of readers from within the country, as well as increasingly now from the diaspora as well, who are looking at the country post-war with greater interest than they did during the years of war, with a view to engaging. And for some, also with a view of returning back to the country to do whatever. So that’s basically what I’m doing at the moment in addition to teaching which I love. I teach at the  Sri Lanka College of Journalism and I teach new media strategy and digital literacy, which I think are skills that are vital for Sri Lanka’s youth and you need a global population to kind of  grasp as we move forward in the 21^st century.

ET: You’ve dedicated your life, particularly professionally, to creating safe spaces for journalists in Sri Lanka to tell compelling stories and call attention to human rights violations. How have people responded to these efforts both from the positive and negative sides?

SH: Well, it depends on the time and the person I would imagine, so it’s difficult to give a straight-up answer to that. Obviously you have people who are appreciative of the fact that there is a safe space, so there ARE ‘safe spaces’ – I suppose it’s a question of safer spaces and Groundviews and other digital media initiatives that have had a hand in producing or putting on the web have encouraged open discussion on some really tough issues. These are really emotional issues; there are divided camps often violently so, posed for around the discussion on for example, human rights, violations, war crimes, accountability issues – they are tough to not just put up but also to curate because people come with emotional baggage and it’s tough to unpack what you believe is to be true – and that goes for us as well, that goes for me as well in addition to the people who seek to engage.  We find it sometimes very difficult to moderate the comments that we get because of the nature of the issues involved.

Having said that, people are appreciative, they do like the space that is there for engagement, because there is so little of it in this country. And the negative comments or feedback we get, often come from people who don’t want to see this kind of open discussion. Let me say that in terms of my own writing, I certainly have a viewpoint  to anchor a certain world view that I espouse, but on Groundviews we seek to create a site where there  is no one capital ‘T’ truth. But, through engagement we hope that there is a better truth and if possible a better perspective to everybody concerned that is possible and that is what we seek to engage. Not to give privacy to one world view but to say or suggest that in a democracy, there are many world views.  And that a co-existence of this world views in competition, but non-violently, is actually what creates a vibrant democracy. Unfortunately we don’t see that timber of democracy in this country and our efforts to create those safe spaces through lively debate and discussion are sometimes taken to very unkindly by people who would rather have ignorance and a general population that doesn’t seek to question or hold accountable those in power.

So the discussion itself is powerful. It’s also its own power to have those discussions and its intention is that those issues that are open for discussion are also very powerful to have. So the response depends very much on whether you want to have open discussion or not. I don’t need to name the parties but it’s a global phenomenon as well. I mean you take Assange, you take any other country – there are those in favour of a democratic debate and there are those who seek to have ignorance in place of it.

I fall, fairly and squarely in the camp of those who want to have debate but understand on some occasions why there would be people who don’t want to have that debate and why ignorance is power.

ET: Now, do you find that those who are typically opposed to having that debate? Are the citizens and consumers of the information or are they mostly the parties who have the least to benefit from the conversation?

SH: Both I would imagine. We are a deeply divided society and I think what happens in protracted conflict is that you grow up with ignorance but you don’t know it as such. And what you find for example in a country such as ours is a very high literacy. Lots of people can read and write. We have an upwards of 90-95% literacy, which is one of the highest in the region in South Asia, which compares very favourably with statistics around the rest of the world.  What we don’t have however and what is sorely lacking, is media literacy. People believe uncritically what they consume, and this can be very dangerous. We have seen the effects of Radio Milles Collines for example in Rwanda and its contribution to the atrocities on a mass scale that happened there with the genocide. Of course in Sri Lanka the situation isn’t as bleak, but unfortunately we don’t have the people who can critically question even the media that they agree with. So what you have is often propaganda often parading as news and believed to be true and factual. That is extremely dangerous. Because if you have this literacy rate and you have a population that cannot understand what they consume, you then have politicians take advantage of that fact and use propaganda to manipulate public opinion in support of their parochialism and that can be extremely dangerous, particularly also because, it’s those very same policies that led to a 30 year old war in the first instance and we certainly don’t want to revisit that.

So the animosity and the opposition to the content that we put up comes both from those sections in government, not all, but also from citizens who sometimes feel that we shouldn’t be asking and debating and raising and flagging the issues that we put up because we are post war now and these are moot issues – these are not issues that we should be talking about, we should be talking about other issues like  – I don’t know – development and tourism for example. These are also issues that we are interested in, but we are also interested in the deeper systemic issues that continue to persist and to bedevil our democratic progress. So the opposition comes from both the citizens who do not understand that it is important to have these debates as well as obviously, sections of government who finds these issues and debates to quote Al Gore’s book  ‘Inconvenient Truths’

ET: Very interesting. Do you think that there are any technologies in particular that you think have a greater potential for impact than others?

SH: Well it depends very much on content on what you seek to communicate and with whom. Without that in mind it is almost impossible to answer that question. We use a spectrum of technologies that ranges from the web/blogging platform. Groundviews is based on WordPress to one of the first sites in Sri Lanka to be mobile-friendly sSo that we can actually engage with the content from any mobile phone, not just a smart phone. We also use, as I said earlier, Facebook and Twitter  and even on the web we use a range of means – we use photography, audio podcasts, video so that we always try to engage with, two things – one new audiences, new readership – our readership is basically from 18-34 as Facebook tells us. And that age group is a telegenic face and a group which has a shorter attention span, so we keep that in mind as well. But we also try to buck the trend, we introduced a section called ‘Long Reads’ earlier this year, which is long form essay type articles which is more reflective and more in-depth, they ruminate, they have better writing style. We have the space for about 7-8000 words to really go in to the nub of the issue. So we have a range of styles and we use a range of technology platforms to reach out to and to engage different age groups and different readerships.

ET: What I mean by the technologies having the potential for impact is that when you look at internet vs mobile or mobile vs radio or even the types of newer architectures and emerging communication technologies,  are there any of them that seem to be more useful than others in connecting, in your particular context? Sri Lanka for example?

SH: The mobile phone is globally the phenomenon that’s showing year-on-year a growth that’s mind-boggling, that ITU would have that in our lifetime, for the first time in human history, we are going to what I call ‘an addressable humanity’ where man, woman or child, IDP or citizen of New York, you are going to have a mobile number either in your own name or within walking distance. We have never had that in human history before. And that single fact makes every one of us potentially, from anywhere in the world, both an information producer but also a consumer, on an individual basis. So we don’t really know what kind of future that has for journalism as we know it today, citizen or mainstream where anybody anywhere can produce information but also consume through text messages. That has seen an incredible growth in my own country both during war and certainly post war. In areas where it was ravaged by war, for example you now have 3G telefonie and they seem to have leap-frogging the areas that had connectivity, so the areas for example that were war ravaged are now getting very good wireless 3G services that took years for us in Colombo to get. So they are completely leap-frogging into wired broadband and then to wireless connectivity which is great because then it encourages people on the ground to create their own content in time and to consume content that has been produced for them by their own identity groups in the country and also from the diaspora. So it just creates this very rich pot, melting pot almost, of producers and consumers.

So the mobile phone is really powering this, but let me also add that one of the interesting things we have seen in the country post war in particular, has been the growth of local language blogging. Couple of years ago this was limited to an urban elite who would use and consume content in English. Now you see the burgeoning of the local language content – it’s just absolutely fantastic. In my country there is Sinhala and Tamil. Sinhala is spoken only in Sri Lanka, Tamil as you know is spoken in many parts in India plus by also a much larger disapora worldwide. So Sinhala has had technical problems. We had problems in rendering the font and typing it in but these are slowly but surely being addressed and it’s really nice to see that content blossoming as well. And one of the things that I have started about 3-4 years ago is the Sinhala equivalent of Groundviews called ‘Vikalpa’, you won’t be able to read it because you won’t have the font or understand the language but there is a growing readership of that site and the YouTube videos that they produce in Sinhala, who also engage in Sinhala. So it is really fantastic to see that kind of growth as well. And that is happening on the web and that is also happening on the mobile phone as well.

On the mobile phone, let me end by saying that it is also very interesting because although the Sinhala fonts have been developed for mobile phones, very few use it. They use instead a ‘Romanic’ Sinhala. They type Sinhala in English and that’s how they communicate even though there are built in Sinhala fonts for the Nokia phone that you buy in Sri Lanka. So you are seeing new emergent ways of people using both, their own language plus also English, and pcs and mobile phones to both produce content and also to engage with. I think that is really, really rich texture for civic media and citizen journalism initiatives to take root, grow and be part of my country’s post war democratic potential.

ET: Very interesting things to consider here, particularly the local language blogging and this seeming line between the use of Roman language characters and local languages, would be really fascinating to see how that grows.  So moving forward a little bit about the conversation of how this functions at the local level, what are the more daunting or even common challenges that citizen journalists face in your context in Sri Lanka?

SH: There is digital media literacy and people know about Facebook and Twitter and people use it for personal communications, you know, ‘I had coffee here’’ ‘my dog died’, ‘my cat is with a knitting ball’ or ‘I just broke up with my girlfriend’ kind of thing, which is great. But what we seek to encourage is the more serious discussion, the more serious engagement with polity and society as a citizen. As a country we have voters but we have a very embryonic notion of citizenship because we are so fearful of engaging with government for fear of what that would entail to self, family and loved ones. We are, unfortunately, still a very violent society and democratic dialogue very often has very real life/physical consequences for those who ask inconvenient questions.  So that fear, anxiety, fright – a combination of all of those three, keeps people away from having the discussions and debates we would like to see far more on social media, web media platforms, even though they are growing phenomenally and mind blowing year-on-year, most of it is not for political discussion. So that’s a fundamental problem that we have across all media. When it comes to web it is an issue of connectivity – our connectivity is really good and is getting better year-on-year, so I think in the next 5 years or so, wherever you are in the country, you are going to have internet access and broadband.

Then it’s just a matter of creating the media literacy which again is across media to help citizens create their own media, that’s meaningful to their own community. So they don’t have, for example, Colombo telling a district or a province miles or hours away what they should be consuming. I see no need for that at all. Sometimes the US calls it the ‘hyper local media’ but I think that is also hyped too much but I think it’s a healthy interaction between the two who I think stands to benefit the most from– the people on the ground – content that they produce and that which they are interested in from the local their local vicinity, locality and neighbourhood, province and district coupled with the broader national perspective and the international perspective that larger media houses can bring.

So I don’t see it as an either/or proposition, I think that civic media can and should co-exist with mainstream media and the both can grow from the growing ubiquity of web based platforms that aid the dissemination and production of content for both, as well as I said earlier, the ubiquity now of mobile devices here in the country.  There are challenges still remaining with local language productions, for example as I said earlier, Sinhala language is only spoken in Sri Lanka we still have some issues about producing the script on a web browser or on a computer but, these all technical problems that are slowly being addressed.

Perhaps, may I end by being slightly politic? One of the underlying problems we have in this country is two-fold; one is that we have very limited awareness of open source technologies, about stuff like Ubuntu which can be as helpful as MS Windows in many instances and also because it has better language support  out of the box. The problem with a lot of propriety software, licensed software is precisely that they are licensed! With that in perspective of MS Windows plus Office license in Sri Lankan Rupees would be more than the price of a computer. So if you are buying a brand new computer, you have to spend the same amount, if not more to get your license software and that is not a viable proposition. That leads to software piracy and even though the police and the government and the large software corporations  are clamping down on piracy, you really don’t have a choice as a consumer, much as you would like to respect the law, to economically purchase that licensed software. So I think that awareness of open source technology, tools and operating systems is vital for any country to encourage their citizens to be mindful of the law and yet reach their digital media potential. So it is not one way that they can go, but there are also lots of free tools out there. I think that awareness of free tools also needs to grow in any country, particularly in my own if we are keen to see our citizens producing more and more content.

ET: What do you think it will take to really propel the field of citizen media forward? I know this is a large question but is anything in particular that would be really helpful to citizen journalists, anything that is missing to facilitate that story-telling process?

SH: I think it is the story-telling itself. I think there is this conception or notion that citizen media is one thing or the other but it is a wonderfully rich spectrum of how you tell a story!  And that story can be a single photo with a powerful caption; that story can be an audio podcast of an illiterate person who has a story to say and who has borne witness to something very interesting that nobody else has or has a unique perspective on it; that story can be a series of photo essays done by a professional, narrated by somebody on the ground; that story can be an HDV video or a camera phone video; that story can be written as an essay or as a poem or as a satirical piece.

I think the rich spectrum, the diversity of story-telling of which, we have a very rich aged tradition and indeed a global tradition, needs to be reflected into technology. Very often we speak about technology first and story-telling second. I choose the other way around.  I seek to first understand ‘what is the story we want to tell?’ That can be a hard story; that can be a human rights violation; that can be the allegations of the most horrific acts of war imaginable, and it can also be a good story. It can be the government official who refuses to take a bribe; it can be the teacher who comes to school on time and stays after school every single day, unappreciated with no salary increase for a quarter century; it can be the bus conductor who actually gives a ticket instead of just pocketing the money that gives rise to corruption; it can be the public official who stood up against corruption and got acid thrown in his face.

It’s not just about opposition to government. It’s also about celebrating that which in government works despite all odds and figuring out with our rich tradition of story-telling, how you can communicate this to a broader audience with the technologies that we as a generation have today that our former generations didn’t even a couple of years ago. I think if we start there, the technology becomes less of the issue and then the problem then becomes as to what stories you actually curate and how do you tell them.

To get this into the minds of people is the toughest challenge I have faced as a teacher. It’s in a sense, opening up their imagination, opening their eyes and making them realize that they do have stories to tell and it’s about how you tell the stories and not so much as to how you produce them and put them up on the web that’s most important.  I think that is the greatest challenge because what war does to many people, including myself to a great degree, is that it makes us fearful of telling stories.  Our stories are of Hansel and Gretel and Alice in Wonderland. We have rich stories of our own that are stories of my own cultural heritage that I grew up with. They are no longer told. They are no longer transported into digital media. But there are also other stories – stories of bombs in the night and white vans that have come and taken and broken families away.

There are plenty of stories around. No country, no region, no peoples, no culture is devoid of stories. Civic media for me, is about the potential to a) get those stories to a wider audience and b) to capture those stories for posterity.  Please note that I am not asking necessarily for what many in the global media call for as ‘regime change’, I think that is a facile notion that stories published can lead to an overthrow of a government. It can, in some instances but it’s very, very rare. I am more interested in stories for their own value, their own worth, not just for us but for a future generation. So that we have a richer history and when we have a richer history, my working assumption is that, we have a richer citizenry and that can only benefit democracy.

ET: Beautifully stated and so much to think about. Sanjana, thank you so much for taking the tie to share your thoughts with us and we are so excited to have Groundviews and yourself on board for this competition and really the amazing things that come out of it. Again, thank you so much for your time.

SH: Thank you very much.

I took up the invitation to speak because these students are our future. Sri Lanka’s education system – placing great emphasis on learning by rote and simple regurgitation – is an enemy of critical thinking, the basis of media literacy. Without media literacy, no amount of new media content production and dissemination alone with result in a stronger democracy. If only these students are inspired to continually – from every person and every media – ask ‘Why’, and based on the answers or silence in response, create their own media, I’ll be happy.

The original post appears here and runs for around 24 minutes. For a complete transcript of the interview, down by my friend Jeevani Fernando, please click here.

Evagelia asks some excellent questions, pegged to just how far civic media is able to help strengthen democracy and justice post-war, just what impact we’ve had, why there is an enduring need for civic media initiatives given role and reach of mainstream journalism and the continuing dangers of producing and disseminating critical content online.

I flag the absence of media literacy in Sri Lanka as a major stumbling block for democracy taking root after war, with consumers of media unable and often unwilling to critically question and engage with even the media they like, much less engage with media they disagree with in order to gain a fuller appreciation of issues. Though this essential passivity and resignation almost in the consumption of news and information could in time be addressed by a more pro-active and reactive generation of content by citizens in online domains and fora, the challenge of strengthening media literacy in this context becomes even more pertinent.

In the interview I flag the danger of propaganda going online, long before the likes of Milinda Moragoda, supported by the father and son duo Rohan Samarajiva and Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva, created a new media campaign for a Mayoral candidate that is about as sophisticated propaganda, disinformation and misinformation dissemination has got in Sri Lanka to date. The campaign’s (mis)use of new media I’ve outlined in Milinda Moragoda: The gap between promise and reality, but more importantly, Hacking mayoral campaign promises deals with how new media engagement can actually hold those like Moragoda and his advisors more accountable and open to public scrutiny, even when they choose to censor inconvenient content and airbrush their online personna.

Content aside, we also talk about the technologies undergirding civic and citizen media – from blogs to mobile phones in particular – the growth of local language (Sinhala and Tamil) content, how expensive software licensing models (e.g. Microsoft Windows and Office) actually encourage piracy and demonstrate the need to shift to open source platforms and tools, how civic journalism – from the hyper-local to the national – can complement mainstream media and what the future holds for citizen journalism.