16 May 2002
by Anuradha Vittachi
A mainstream broadcaster once asked me what my dream was for OneWorld. I said it was to get grassroots voices online -- and she looked at me as if I were off my rocker.
Grassroots voices -- online?!? When barely 5% of the world's people had access to the Net -- almost all of them in the North; 80% of the Web was in English; and hundreds of millions of people at the grassroots were illiterate?
Her scorn was icy -- and, it must be admitted, based on some pretty devastating facts. Whereas my dream was based on. on what? Just a feeling, a yearning for justice, a belief that there could never be global justice until everyone had the opportunity to be heard.
The old media, which the broadcaster believed in, had undoubted merits -- but also severe limitations. They were one-way disseminators of professional voices, produced by media professionals and distributed according to the preferences of professional gatekeepers. They were top-down media that gave those who already had institutional power even more power over the rest of us.
What we, the people, didn't have was a medium that gave us power. Not power over anyone else, but power to pull down whatever content we wanted; to become producers of whatever content we preferred, and to be distributors of it to whomever we wished. A horizontal, circular, inclusive medium that empowered all of us in a global human network.
And I just couldn't see how that could ever happen without people everywhere having online access.
Amazingly enough, just three years on, the dream of a connected world doesn't seem so crazy after all.
China now has the second largest number of Internet users in the world, after the US: There are 56.6 million people online in China, according to Nielsen//NetRatings; compare that with Japan, which has 51.3 million users, Germany with 32.2 million and the UK with just 29 million. The Chinese Ministry of Information says that Internet subscriptions are increasing at a rate of five to six percent each month. If this rate is sustained, home Internet use could reach 257 million by 2005.
But even where there is little connectivity, poor people are getting the information they need from the Internet, in their own language. How is this possible?
Perhaps it is because people are ingenious creatures; our ability to think outside the box should never be underestimated. It's also because the Internet is a network -- and networks, I am discovering, also operate in strange and mysterious ways. We shouldn't underestimate the potential of either networks or people.
Here is a story that hints at a little of each.
Pakkialouchme is a 24-year-old Dalit woman in India, not the sort of person one immediately thinks of as being online. Being a woman and being a Dalit woman should be enough to exclude you from such elite male pursuits! But each morning she goes online at a public telecentre in South India to collect data from a US Navy space satellite that measures wave heights, which predict storms at sea. Then she voices the gist of this data, in Tamil, onto the Internet -- and every afternoon, at the time the fishermen sit on the beach to check and mend their nets, her storm warnings pour out through a series of loudspeakers planted along the shore.
I asked someone at the telecentre whether Pakkialouchme's efforts had made any measurable difference to the fisher families. "Well," he said, mildly, "there used to be five to 10 deaths each year from drowning. But in the two years she has been doing this work, there have been no more deaths."
Many of us would be glad to be able to say we had made that much difference in our whole lives.
How many times have I heard Northern experts championing one technology or another as the politically correct technology for poor Southerners? It has to be low-orbiting satellites, or radio, or mobile telephony. Imagine if the fishermen had been stuck with one of these bores!
Luckily for the fishermen, everything from loudspeakers to space satellites had been incorporated into Pakkialouchme's technical network. She would probably have added a Brillo pad, or a hearing aid, if they had helped.
And as a result of this promiscuous ingenuity, she had enabled a group of fishermen who were neither rich nor literate to get the information that was up-to-date, highly relevant to their lives, in the language they spoke, at a time and place that was convenient to them, at no cost -- and which came from the fanciest state-of-the-art satellite technology in existence.
But of course Pakkialouchme hadn't saved the fishermen's lives alone: she too was part of a network. There was the NGO that had set up the telecentre -- the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. There were the people who managed the US Navy Web site. There were the people who managed the space satellite. And one of the most intriguing aspects of the people linked in this global network was that most of them on it didn't know that they were part of this network. Did the people managing the satellite know they were playing on Pakkialouchme's team? Probably not. Did it matter? Not a scrap.
When you throw a pebble into a pond, you don't know where the ripples will spread or with what other ripples they will intersect. All you do is throw your pebble, and it generates all kinds of unintended consequences. We can't predict them: all we can do is celebrate them.
Or, as Jean Cocteau said: "Since these mysteries are too complicated for us to understand, let us pretend we are their organizers."
We have experienced this network effect at OneWorld too. Seven years ago, in January 1995, we opened up a small space on the Internet: like a little pond where all kinds of people could throw in their pebbles and see where their ripples intersected. To our astonishment, the ripples looped and swirled all over the world. And now there are hundreds of partners and millions of readers, all sharing their thoughts and ideas with one another to make the world a better place.
One set of intersections gave birth to OneWorld-TV. OneWorld-TV is a way of using television that de-professionalises it. It enables anyone who has access to a digital video camera to enter a large or small piece of footage into a global video-bank. You don't have to have the professional skills you need to produce a 20-minute broadcast quality programme. If you can just take a 20-second clip -- say, if you walk down the road and spot a corrupt policeman beating up a streetchild, you could send that in. Added to all the other citizen-produced pieces of evidence about brutality to streetchildren, you could be doing the children a real service.
The point is that you, the citizen, are no longer doomed to being a passive consumer of other people's TV productions: you are a producer now, sharing the truth of the world as you see it -- as it matters to you, adding your individual meaning to the global memory bank. OneWorld does this with radio too, joining up locally-responsive community radio stations around the world. It's a radio pool, rippling out.
These are just a few of many, many examples from people's efforts all over the world. The point is that none of us has to rely just on our own isolated efforts any more. To amplify our power, there is the blendability of the new digital technologies, the multiplying power of networks, the interdependability of human beings -- and, most important of all, the boundless power of goodwill.
So maybe we could occasionally risk a blast of scorn from those sensible people who are so sure that our innovative ideas and good intentions will amount to nothing more hopeless, impossible dreams. If our experience is anything to go by, you don't need to be a hero with big boots to make a difference. Small feet will do.
Anuradha Vittachi is director of OneWorld International Foundation.
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