I haven’t found a citation to verify this myself, but I’ve been told by quite a few people that when Alexander Bell was trying to promote his latest invention, the telephone, he assured anyone who would listen that this new communication technology would bring about world peace. Rather than engaging in destructive and costly wars, he argued, leaders of nations would now simply pick up their phones and discuss their differing opinions. That was at the end of the 19th century. Other technological inventions like the machine gun and atom bomb would contribute to the 20th century becoming the deadliest and most destructive century our planet has witnessed.

100 years after Bell’s telephone a similar enthusiasm has surrounded the internet and the tools it has enabled like blogs, podcasts, and online video, which have expanded exponentially and internationally over the past ten years. These tools, many claim, will democratize communication in a way that facilitates the best content to rise to the top regardless of who creates that content. By removing editorial gatekeepers citizen media connect individuals and encourage real empathy. If the telephone didn’t lead to world peace at the beginning of the 20th century, then new media would surely do the trick at the beginning of the 21st century.

We have many reasons to be hopeful. Groundviews.org, a Sri Lankan citizen journalism website, empowers everyday Sri Lankan citizens to cover under-represented stories related to peace and conflict resolution. The Orizonturi Foundation in Campulung Moldovenesc, Romania is using citizen media to empower mental health patients to speak for themselves to a potentially international audience. And we have already seen how the HiperBarrio project in Colombia and Foko project in Madagascar have used new media to create global campaigns to support disadvantaged members from their communities.

However, in the case of the recent conflicts in Georgia and Palestine, we have also seen how citizen media can be used by both sides of a conflict as propaganda tools to win international support rather than engage in meaningful dialogue.

Whether we are talking about the birth of the telephone at the start of the 20th century or today’s ever-expanding Twittersphere, it’s not the technology that matters, it is what you do with it.

Rising Voices aims to encourage deep thinking about how we can use today’s citizen media tools to affect positive social change. We all agree that the current conflicts in Sri Lanka and Gaza are bad, but how can we use communication tools to help make things better? We know that every two weeks that we lose another language forever, all of humanity has lost a special part of its heritage. But how can we use new media to preserve and honor our endangered heritage? We understand that AIDS and TB are destructive, but can we use new media to spread awareness about health issues and empower those who are affected?

Not only does Rising Voices aim to encourage deep thinking about these questions, but we want to put the answers into action. We are currently accepting microgrant proposals for citizen media-related projects up to $5,000. I hope that everyone on this mailing list considers applying. And please help spread the word. Applications are due no later than Sunday, January 18, 2009. The five selected grantees will be announced in early February.

In March 1886, nearly forty years after the California Gold Rush, legend has it that Australian gold miner George Harrison stumbled across a rocky outcrop of gold in what was then the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. Says Wikipedia: “Ironically, Harrison is believed to have sold his claim for less than 10 Pounds before leaving the area, and he was never heard from again.”

That 10-pound claim soon transformed into a mining village called Ferreira’s Camp, which today we call Johannesburg.

The above-earth portion of the gold reef (’rand’ in Afrikaans, for which the South African currency was named after) discovered by Harrison has since become the most profitable source of gold ever found on earth. 40% of all gold mined on earth comes from this single reef.

And, as we discovered 3.5 kilometers below ground on our tour of the TauTona gold mine, that gold reef continues pretty far underground. Here’s a video of our tour:

The mine, in fact, is so deep that were it not for the ice cold air conditioning pumped down from above, the temperature would be around 55°C. When electricity outages hit South Africa last year the mine was forced to close down for nearly a week.

I was impressed by the obsessive focus on safety throughout the mine. Still, as John noted even before our trip, being a miner at TauTona remains a dangerous affair. (More than four people die in South African gold mines per week.) During the introductory presentation at the mine we were shown a graph of TauTona’s improving safety record over the past ten years. There was, however, a slight increase in deaths last year. A new part of the mine vulnerable to seismic activity was causing a flurry of ground fall and resulting deaths. The mine executives decided to cease mining there once the death rate reached a certain threshold. Still, I could picture in my mind someone coldly calculating the potential financial profits in one column and the loss of human life in the other.

We were told that, depending on the price of gold over the next couple years, AngloGold Ashanti plans on digging the TauTona Gold Mine even deeper - perhaps all the way to five kilometers beneath earth. The funny thing about economic crises is that they tend to be good for gold mines as investors hurry to exchange weak dollars for solid gold. While the rest of the world slumps, it’s boom time for gold towns like Battle Mountain, Nevada. So, as long as the global currency markets stay weak, expect TauTona Gold Mine to get deeper and deeper.

I have seen a city besieged by itself; a town commit suicide, and a island under terror. So I don’t have as bright a view.

Worlds end. All the time. Southern California may seem very different from any from these places, but sometimes a scratch, not even that deep, reveals what is roiling underneath the surface. You don’t have to listen that hard to hear the sound of different histories crashing and colliding.

The belief that one can live separate from one’s ancestory is an invention that emerged from the “discovery” of your continent (or as Derek Walcott more elegantly put it: “Amnesia is the history of the New World.”) Plus you are in California, my friend, where selves are constantly being recreated. But don’t be fooled — you’re not, are you? — you’re very much still on this tragic planet.

- Jose Manuel Tesoro, 1971 - 2008

The last email I got from Joel was exactly a month ago. He wanted to continue this conversation. What will happen to all these global networks of communication we’ve created when there is no longer money to keep them going? When we all have to take much closer looks at our budgets, will we still be willing to pay $100 a month on our cell phones and $50 a month on home internet access? Will we still care about what’s happening half way around the world when our priority is putting food on the table? Joel wanted to talk about all these things. And in person. He was tired of online communication. Me too. But now, this is all I have.

Joel, a constant over-achiever, was one of the founding editors of Global Voices. After having worked as a staff writer for Asiaweek and then publishing a book, he decided to become a lawyer (at Harvard Law School no less) while working part-time on Global Voices. I don’t think I ever enjoyed arguing with anyone as much as I enjoyed arguing with Jose. Over the years he left dozens and dozens of comments on this blog, always slightly wittier and more authoritative than my response could ever be.

He was firmly part of the community of this blog when this blog still had a feeling of community. In January of 2006 he had a dream about El Mas Chingon:

In my dream, he was a midget with a huge head and that we were communicating only through IRC on our respective laptops. The reason I think my brain thought he was a midget is that my only image of him is his head on his gravatar and my brain could not imagine his voice, hence the IRC.

But our lives crossed offline many times as well as they tend to do when you dig deep enough. His wife, another former barista, went to my same university. And today, I receive Lapham’s Quarterly for an xmas present and remember that Joel once had Lapham as a professor in college: “He lifted from my final essay and used it in his Harpers column. True story.”

It’s so strange to look back at all those comments and to realize that we only met once in person. Sparshles, Steph, and I met up with him for dinner. I still haven’t met Paloma, his daughter, or Tania, his wife, despite our repeated efforts. I thought it would finally happen in less than a month.

Joel and his daughter Paloma. Photo by Boris Anthony.

Today I was telling my friend Heather that I think it’s time to bring back the Catalog of Pop. Volume 5 never materialized last year. Volume 4 was sent out as a CD. Joel, as always, managed to turn it into a joke.

One of the things that Joel and I talked about frequently was our mutual addiction to and skepticism of travel.

Travel is an addiction. And you, my friend, are a junkie. Not the functioning Of-course-I-can-quit-any-time addict. Nope, my man, you’re the hollow-cheeked lotus-eating kind. The far gone. The unredeemable.

I recognize the signs very well. Because I, too, was a user. So I know those highs: the enervating unfamiliar city, the excitement of the unintelligible, and the artificial promise of another self. And like all highs, they are temporary. So that’s why you start looking for them again.

Joel ended up getting married to a beautiful woman and having a beautiful daughter. He broke the addiction. So it’s a cruel twist of fate that he passed away while in transit at Hong Kong Int’l Airport (where I just was last week). Far crueler that Dopplr still says he started a trip to Jakarta today.

Wherever he may be, may he rest in peace. May he be remembered for all the thousands and thousands of words he’s left us. We’ll miss you Joel.

More homages at Walk This Way and Tesa Celdran.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities in the developing world. Please visit our current list of grantees for project examples.

The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices. Grantees are expected to host regular workshops to train participants how to start and maintain a weblog, upload and share digital photographs, and produce basic videos. Grantees are also required to post regular project evaluations and updates to the Rising Voices website.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, January 18. Please submit your completed application on the Rising Voices apply page.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org.

Some of my warmest memories from the past year are from Medellín - especially hanging out with the kids from HiperBarrio. This Saturday evening they’re hosting a party to raise funds to finish building Suso’s new house.

So inspiring.

If you’re feeling charitable, you can donate $10 to the cause by pressing the donation button at the end of this post on Rising Voices.

Happy Holidays.

The drive, it starts out like this, a quiet coasting down Leucadia boulevard with a thin strip of silvery marine blue always on the horizon.

Leucadia, with all her Greek gods and goddesses, settled by spiritualist quacks at the end of the 19th century, overtaken by nouveau-riche surfer yippies at the end of the 20th century. Its eccentricity, a perfect melding of both.

I would arrive to work at 5:50 a.m., as would José, always right on the dot. He’d be blasting Maná. I always started the day with KSDS.

- ¿Qué onda pinche guero!!?
- ¿Qué dices puto? Tu mamá te manda saludos!

And so the day would start. The first thing you do is brew the coffee. ‘Cause the same five customers are always going to be there at 5:55 a.m. no matter how many times you tell them you open at six. We took turns: hosing down the patio, cleaning the bathrooms, prepping the kitchen, cleaning the espresso machine, putting out the pastries. There was no division of labor, no hierarchy, no script. It was all jazz, improvisation, two musicians who know what chord is coming next.

Jose

I’m quiet in the mornings, nearly mute, until I have my first cup of coffee. Then José and I would begin our wit fest, laughing and cracking jokes at the expense of un-caffeinated yuppies who didn’t understand our strange sailor’s spanglish and the inside jokes that develop over years and months of such early morning proximity.

On weekends we would sometimes work the night shifts, drinking beer and serving coffee until midnight. Then we’d go next door to the struggling Mexican restaurant and José would drink another beer while I sobered up before driving home. Only then would we sometimes have conversations resembling anything serious.

- What are you going to do with your life? he’d ask me, wondering why anyone with a university degree would still be working at a coffee shop.
- I dunno, work in restaurants, factories, on farms, on trains. One day I’ll write a book. Until then I’m just gathering material.
- Pinches gringos, guey.

One Saturday night, after finishing a night shift, José went to go meet Jared, a mutual friend, at the Leucadian, our local dive bar where middle aged beach bums and young indie hipsters would pretend that they belong together.

The next morning Jose and I were to open shop. I’ve written this story before:

I’ll never forget - it was about a year and a half ago - when Jose and I were supposed to be working together at 6 in the morning. Then at 6:30 he comes in and he’s bleeding and there’s bits of glass poking out of his forearms. I’ve never seen a face so expressionless before.

He was out the night before with another friend of ours, Jared at a local bar, the Leucadian. Neither one of them should have been driving - but after having a burrito at Juanitas to sober up, Jared said he was ok to drive. It was already 3 in the morning. Jared was driving Jose’s new white Honda Accord, which he had been saving up all his tip money for. At a notoriously unsafe dip on Vulcan Avenue the car bottomed out and then flipped over landing upside down on the sidewalk. Jared died immediately. Jose was unscathed except for some minor cuts by the glass. No bruises, no broken bones. He was asleep and when he woke up the car was in midair and when he realized what had happened, Jared was already dead.

A couple months later Jose’s wife gave birth to their first son, Jared. Neither one - at least at the time - could pronounce his name correctly. Jose wanted his son to be a doctor or engineer. He could never understand why someone like me, with the opportunity to get a college degree, would want to work in factories and on farms. In fact, he told me I never would, that it’s not what middle-class White Americans end up doing.

José and Jared

Of course, he was right. But on days like today, waking up at 5:25 a.m., I try and fail to figure out how I’ve come to this point. How the ball of yarn unravelled.

It was exactly five years ago that I first started this blog. Those words read like they belong to someone else. I can’t relate to their author. I wonder if it will be the same five years from now.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered by story, I need them more than ever.

But Eugenides, through the voice of the unforgettable Callope Stephanides, does find the right words. Over and over again.

The artichoke heart of the 500-page-plus novel only gets going after page 400. It’s as if Eugenides thought of a clever story to tell, but then decided to prepend it with 400 pages of prologue. 400 pages of very enjoyable prologue. In the end he’s able to weave together a tapestry of events that begins in Turkey before it was Turkey, takes us to the birth of the automobile era in Detroit, puts us into the passenger seat for some prohibition bootlegging, into the heart of the Nation of Islam before Malcolm X even existed, into folk tales of Chinese princesses and silk worms, and ends with transgendered underwater sex shows in San Francisco.

And, yet, what we’re talking about here is a hermaphrodite’s coming of age story in the epitome of American suburbia, Grosse Point, Michigan, where Eugenides himself went to a private prep school just like Calliope. Much of the book can feel like drawn out suspense until the moment when he finds out she’s a he, but throughout the story there is a build-up of allusions to the book’s most central thesis: that how we decide our gender, just like almost everything else, is both biological and social. Sure, some of us have Y chromosomes and others do not, but that’s not the sole determinant of our gender identity. (And if that sentence has you scared that this is required reading for feminazi classes at liberal arts colleges, it’s not that kind of book.)

What impressed me the most about the writing is its gender neutrality. Despite the fact that the author of the book is male - as is the narrator - I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself - like Cal - somehow transcended the very concept of gender. This is one of those books I’d like to give 4.5 stars, but since I’m feeling charitable we’ll round up.

I also argued that Global Voices is often a space for the preservation of culture and heritage. For example, Taiwan’s flying saucer houses:

The destruction of Old Damascus:

And, the destruction of Luanda’s Kinaxixe Market:

A couple of days ago, walking around Taipei with Leonard, we saw some street art of a rat and I asked him if he had ever heard of Banksy before. He hadn’t, but as bloggers are prone to do, he looked him up online and then pointed me to Bbrother, describing him as “Taiwan’s Banksy.” Check it out:

Check out his website for more. There is also a feature piece on Bbrother in the English-language Taiwan Journal.

Depending on how you count, this was my third or fourth visit to South Africa and the country has become, like Mexico, Medellín, Buenos Aires, and Christchurch, a sort-of second home. I would love to return next year for Highway Africa and the year after for the 2010 World Cup.

Our trip was paid for by Brand South Africa, a government-funded initiative to improve South Africa’s image abroad in the hope that doing so will attract more tourism and foreign investment. It’s called country branding and its big business. On the US side of things it was Renee Blodgett who organized the bloggers and the marketing of the trip. She has done a similar trip to Israel and I believe she plans on organizing many more in other countries that want to elevate their national brand among the connected digerati. It’s a good strategy and I have a feeling that Renee will have many more clients over the next couple years.

Throughout our trip, however, my mind kept drifting back to the above-photo from the !Khwa ttu photo exhibit, “The San and the Camera”. Who should be recruited to build up South Africa’s brand? A bunch of American bloggers or South Africans themselves?

I asked Simon Barber, who is in charge of the Brand South Africa Blog. He thinks that South Africans are in the best position to tell their country’s story, but that it will take some time before adoption rates of digital tools are anything near what they are in the US. Right now he’s asking South African Twitter users to use the hashtag “amazwi” when they have something good to say about their country. I assume he’ll be collecting these anecdotes for a summary post on the Brand South Africa Blog.

I’m happy to say that on one of our last days of the trip I inspired Simon to try a new strategy to his documentation efforts. Rather than shooting a video himself about our hiking with an Outward Bound group of youths from inner Johannesburg, he handed his camera over to Lesego Mlambo from the Braam Fischer section of Soweto and taught him how to make a video. (Which includes a very embarrassing clip of me nearly naked.)

Inviting American bloggers to your country is a nice way to gain some Web 2.0 exposure abroad, but imagine if the South African government had instead invested the money in teaching people like Lesego how to make their own media. The problem, of course, is that it wouldn’t reach nearly as many people. But what about some hybrid model? What about inviting six high profile bloggers from the US to train six locals how to blog and make videos and then tour around the country to document all they see?

I am thinking about all of this because I just finished translating a column written by Laura Vidal in Tal Cual about the Nari Jibon project. One of the things she notes in her piece is how the project challenges many of the stereotypes that Venezuelans hold about Bangladesh. They are, essentially, helping build up their country’s brand. With future leaders like Taslima and Afrin how could you not want to invest in the country?

Coincidentally, I just saw on Rezwan’s blog that Bangladesh has just started its own country branding process. After the laser show at the expensive hotel was over, however, all it amounted to was a single logo. If Bangladesh wants to build up its national brand it could learn a thing or two from Brand South Africa and start involving its own citizens.

Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside. Photo by Sam Nzima, 1976.

My good friend Sameer at WITNESS is leading an online conversation in commemoration of today’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s the question: What image opened your eyes to human rights?

Last week, as part of the We Blog the World tour in South Africa, we visited the Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West, Soweto. If you have never cried at a museum before, here’s your spot.

Street behind Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum.

Hector Pieterson was 12-years-old on June 16, 1976 when he joined his fellow students to protest Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the South African townships. As they were singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, refusing to stop their approach, police open fired. Today it is known that Hastings Ndlovu was, in fact, the first student gunned down by police, but it was Hector who became the martyr and icon of South Africa’s liberation struggle because he was captured in the above image by photographer Sam Nzima.

Nzima wasn’t the only person to take photographs that day, but he was the only one to get them out without being confiscated by the police. (He stuffed the rolls of film in his socks.) His photographs were immediately published in The World, which led to widespread riots and protests all over South Africa. Hector Pieterson was, largely, South Africa’s Rosa Parks. Just like the Civil Rights Movement in the US didn’t begin with Parks, neither did South Africa’s liberation struggle begin with Pieterson. But both icons mark the tipping point when built-up pressure exploded into movements that would never step back.

I highly highly recommend that one day you make the trip to South Africa and spend at least an entire day in Soweto. There is nothing like being there, surrounded by all its history, for yourself. When we were outside the museum our guide pointed to a woman walking down the pathway. It was Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, the very same person screaming in Sam Nzima’s famous photograph.

Antoinette Sithole walking through Orlando West, Soweto.

It’s amazing to see such history walking around in real life. But … in the meantime, Babak and Ismail have put together a truly incredible map mashup of the events that took place on June 16, 1976. Before you start clicking around on the map, however, I’d recommend that you read through their blog as well as the online book, “I Saw a Nightmare …” Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick.

Bonus: Check out this video by Ray Lewis of Graeme Addison, a South African journalist who was on the scene at the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976.