Ethan Zuckerman: How to listen to global voices

I'm an American, which means, generally,

I ignore football unless it involves

guys my size or Bruno's size

running into each other at extremely high speeds.

That said, it's been really hard

to ignore football

for the last couple of weeks.

I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I've never heard before:

FIFA, vuvuzela,

weird jokes about octopi.

But the one that's really been sort of stressing me out,

that I haven't been able to figure out,

is this phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao."

If you've gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks,

you've probably seen this.

It's been a major trending topic.

Being a monolingual American, I obviously don't know what the phrase means.

So I went onto Twitter,

and I asked some people if they could explain to me "Cala a boca, Galvao."

And fortunately, my Brazilian friends

were more than ready to help.

They explained that the Galvao bird

is a rare and endangered parrot

that's in terrible, terrible danger.

In fact, I'll let them tell you a bit more about it.

Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird

native to Brazil.

Every year, more than 300,000 Galvao birds

are killed during Carnival parades.

Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation,

and it actually gets worse.

It turns out that, not only is the Galvao parrot

very attractive, useful for headdresses,

it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties,

which means that there's a terrible problem

with Galvao abuse.

Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvao.

And it's terribly endangered.

The good news about this is that the global community --

again, my Brazilian friends tell me --

is pitching in to help out.

It turns out that Lady Gaga

has released a new single --

actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell --

titled "Cala a boca, Galvao."

And my Brazilian friends tell me that

if I just tweet the phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao,"

10 cents will be given

to a global campaign

to save this rare and beautiful bird.

Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank,

and actually a very, very good one.

"Cala a boca, Galvao" actually means something very different.

In Portugese, it means "Shut your mouth, Galvao."

And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno,

who's the lead soccer commentator

for Rede Globo.

And what I understand from my Brazilian friends

is that this guy is just a cliche machine.

He can ruin the most interesting match

by just spouting cliche again and again and again.

So Brazilians went to that first match

against North Korea,

put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign

and tried to convince the rest of us

to tweet the phrase: "Cala a boca, Galvao."

And in fact, were so successful at this

that it topped Twitter for two weeks.

Now there's a couple --

there's a couple of lessons that you can take from this.

And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one,

is that you cannot go wrong

asking people to be active online,

so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase.

So as long as activism is that simple,

it's pretty easy to get away with.

The other thing you can take from this, by the way,

is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter.

There's more than five million of them.

As far as national representation,

11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter.

That's a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K.

Next to Japan,

it's the second most represented by population.

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks,

and you didn't realize

this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it,

you're like most of us.

Because what happens on a social network

is you interact with the people

that you have chosen to interact with.

And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy,

you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys.

And you don't necessarily have the sense

that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space.

It's also extremely surprising to many Americans,

a heavily African-American space.

Twitter recently did some research.

They looked at their local population.

They believe that 24 percent

of American Twitter users are African-American.

That's about twice as high as African-Americans

are represented in the population.

And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users,

but it shouldn't be.

And the reason it shouldn't be is that on any day

you can go into Trending Topics.

And you tend to find topics

that are almost entirely African-American conversations.

This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas

and Martin Wattenberg,

two amazing visualization designers,

who looked at

a weekend's worth of Twitter traffic

and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics

were basically segregated conversations --

and in ways that you wouldn't expect.

It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation,

that cookout

is a mostly black conversation.

And what's crazy about this is that

if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter,

it's literally a quick click away.

You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation

with different people participating in it.

But generally speaking, most of us don't.

We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them,

where we see the people we already know

and the people who are similar to the people we already know.

And we tend not to see that wider picture.

Now for me, I'm surprised by this,

because this wasn't how the internet was supposed to be.

If you go back into the early days of the internet,

when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte

were writing big books like "Being Digital,"

the prediction was that the internet

was going to be an incredibly powerful force

to smooth out cultural differences,

to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another.

Negroponte started his book with a story

about how hard it is to build connections

in the world of atoms.

He's at a technology conference in Florida.

And he's looking at something really, truly absurd,

which is bottles of Evian water on the table.

And Negroponte says this is crazy.

This is the old economy.

It's the economy of moving these

heavy, slow atoms over long distances that's very difficult to do.

We're heading to the future of bits,

where everything is speedy, it's weightless.

It can be anywhere in the world at any time.

And it's going to change the world as we know it.

Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things.

He's totally wrong about this one.

It turns out that in many cases

atoms are much more mobile than bits.

If I walk into a store in the United States,

it's very, very easy for me to buy water

that's bottled in Fiji,

shipped at great expense to the United States.

It's actually surprisingly hard

for me to see a Fijian feature film.

It's really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music.

It's extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news,

which is strange, because actually there's an enormous amount going on in Fiji.

There's a coup government. There's a military government.

There's crackdowns on the press.

It's actually a place that we probably should

be paying attention to at the moment.

Here's what I think is going on.

I think that we tend to look a lot

at the infrastructure

of globalization.

We look at the framework that makes it possible

to live in this connected world.

And that's a framework that includes things like airline routes.

It includes things like the Internet cables.

We look at a map like this one,

and it looks like the entire world is flat

because everything is a hop or two away.

You can get on a flight in London,

you can end up in Bangalore later today.

Two hops, you're in Suva, the capitol of Fiji.

It's all right there.

When you start looking at what actually

flows on top of these networks,

you get a very different picture.

You start looking at how

the global plane flights move,

and you suddenly discover that the world isn't even close to flat.

It's extremely lumpy.

There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected.

There's basically a giant pathway in the sky

between London and New York.

but look at this map, and you can watch this

for, you know, two or three minutes.

You won't see very many planes

go from South America to Africa.

And you'll discover that there are parts of the globe

that are systematically cut off.

When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible,

and we look at what actually happens,

we start realizing that the world doesn't work quite the same way

that we think it does.

So here's the problem that I've been interested in

in the last decade or so.

The world is, in fact, getting more global.

It's getting more connected.

More of problems are global in scale.

More of our economics is global in scale.

And our media is less global by the day.

If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s,

35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news

on a nightly new broadcast.

That's down to about 12 to 15 percent.

And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world.

Here's a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk.

Alisa's the president of Public Radio International.

And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map

based on what American

television news casts

looked at for a month.

And you see that when you distort a map based on attention,

the world within American television news

is basically reduced to

this giant bloated U.S.

and a couple of other countries which we've invaded.

And that's basically what our media is about.

And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news --

which is dreadful, and I agree that it's dreadful --

I've been mapping elite media like the New York Times,

and I get the same thing.

When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media,

what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations

and the nations we've invaded.

It turns out that new media

isn't necessarily helping us all that much.

Here's a map made by Mark Graham

who's down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute.

A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia

that have been geo-coded.

And you'll notice that there's a very heavy bias

towards North America and Western Europe.

Even within Wikipedias,

where we're creating their own content online,

there's a heavy bias towards the place where

a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based,

rather than to the rest of the world.

In the U.K., you can get up,

you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session,

you could read a newspaper from India or from Australia,

from Canada, God forbid from the U.S.

You probably won't.

If you look at online media consumption --

in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet --

more than 95 percent of the news readership

is on domestic news sites.

It's one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than [the U.K.],

because we actually like reading your media,

rather than vice versa.

So all of this starts leading me

to think that we're in a state that I refer to

as imaginary cosmopolitanism.

We look at the internet.

We think we're getting this wide view of the globe.

We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese,

and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built

to connect us to the rest of the world.

And we forget that most of the time

we're checking Boston Red Sox scores.

So this is a real problem --

not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year --

but it's a real problem because,

as we're discussing here at TED,

the real problems in the world

the interesting problems to solve

are global in scale and scope,

they require global conversations

to get to global solutions.

This is a problem we have to solve.

So here's the good news.

For six years, I've been hanging out with these guys.

This is a group called Global Voices.

This is a team of bloggers from around the world.

Our mission was to fix the world's media.

We started in 2004.

You might have noticed, we haven't done all that well so far.

Nor do I think we are by ourselves,

actually going to solve the problem.

But the more that I think about it, the more that I think

that a few things that we have learned along the way

are interesting lessons for how we would rewire

if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world.

The first thing you have to consider

is that there are parts of the world

that are dark spots in terms of attention.

In this case -- the map of the world at night by NASA --

they're dark literally because of lack of electricity.

And I used to think that a dark spot on this map

basically meant you're not going to get media from there

because there are more basic needs.

What I'm starting to realize is that

you can get media, it's just an enormous amount of work,

and you need an enormous amount of encouragement.

One of those dark spots is Madagascar,

a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film

than it is actually known for

the lovely people who live there.

And so the people who founded

Foko Club in Madagascar

weren't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country.

They were doing something much simpler.

It was a club to learn English

and to learn computers and the internet.

but what happened was that Madagascar

went through a violent coup.

Most independent media was shut down.

And the high school students

who were learning to blog through Foko Club

suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience

about the demonstrations, the violence,

everything that was going on within this country.

So a very, very small program

designed to get people in front of computers,

publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media,

ended up having a huge impact

on what we know about this country.

Now the trick with this is that I'm guessing

most people here don't speak Malagasy.

I'm also guessing that most of you don't even speak Chinese --

which is sort of sad if you think about it,

as it's now the most represented language on the internet.

Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this.

If you're using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site,

you notice this really cute box at the top,

which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese

and very quickly at a mouse click

will give you a translation of the page.

Unfortunately, it's a machine translation of the page.

And while Google is very, very good with some languages,

it's actually pretty dreadful with Chinese.

And the results can be pretty funny.

What you really want -- what I really want,

is eventually the ability to push a button

and have this queued

so a human being can translate this.

And if you think this is absurd, it's not.

There's a group right now in China called Yeeyan.

And Yeeyan is a group

of 150,000 volunteers

who get online every day.

They look for the most interesting content in the English language.

They translate roughly 100 articles a day

from major newspapers, major websites.

They put it online for free.

It's the project of a guy named Zhang Lei,

who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots

and who couldn't believe how biased

American media coverage was.

And he said, "If there's one thing I can do, I can start translating,

so that people between these countries

start understanding each other a little bit better."

And my question to you is:

if Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people

to translate the English internet into Chinese,

where's the English language Yeeyan?

Who's going after Chinese,

which now has 400 million internet users out there?

My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say.

So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese,

there's no guarantee that we're going to find it.

When we look for information online,

we basically have two strategies.

We use a lot of search.

And search is terrific if you know what you're looking for.

But if what you're looking for is serendipity,

if you want to stumble onto something

that you didn't know you needed,

our main philosophy is to look to our social networks,

to look for our friends.

What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it.

The problem with this is that essentially

what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock.

You end up flocking with a lot of people

who are probably similar to you,

who have similar interests.

And it's very, very hard to get information

from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world

where people getting together and talking about their own interests.

To do this, at a certain point,

you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock.

You need a guide.

So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices.

She has one of the hardest jobs in the world.

Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors

from killing each other,

she has to figure out

what is going to interest you

about the Middle East.

And in that sense of trying to get you

out of your normal orbit,

and to try to get you to pay attention

to a story about someone who's

given up smoking for the month of Ramadan,

she has to know something about a global audience.

She has to know something about what stories are available.

Basically, she's a deejay.

She's a skilled human curator

who knows what material is available to her,

who's able to listen to the audience,

and who's able to make a selection

and push people forward in one fashion or another.

I don't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process.

I think what's great about the internet

is that it actually makes it much easier

for deejays to reach a wider audience.

I know Amira.

I can ask her what to read.

But with the internet, she's in a position where she can

tell a lot of people what to read.

And you can listen to her as well,

if this is a way that you're interested in having your web widened.

So once you start widening like this,

once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots,

once you start translating, once you start curating,

you end up in some really weird places.

This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog,

which is AfriGadget.

And AfriGadget is a blog that looks

at technology in an Africa context.

And specifically, it's looking at a blacksmith

in Kibera in Nairobi,

who is turning the shaft of a Landrover

into a cold chisel.

And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going,

"Why would I conceivably care about this?"

And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you.

This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference.

He goes by the moniker White African.

He's both a very well known American geek,

but he's also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya.

He is a bridge figure.

He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds --

one in the world of the African technology community,

one in the world of the American technology community.

And so he's able to tell a story

about this blacksmith in Kibera

and turn it into a story about repurposing technology,

about innovating from constraint,

about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials.

He knows one world,

and he's finding a way to communicate it to another world,

both of which he has deep connections to.

These bridge figures, I'm pretty well convinced,

are the future of how we try to make the world wider

through using the web.

But the trick with bridges is, ultimately,

you need someone to cross them.

And that's where we start talking about xenophiles.

So if I found myself in the NFL,

I suspect I would spend my off-season

nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth --

possibly recording a hip-hop album.

Dhani Jones,

who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals,

has a slightly different approach to the off-season.

Dhani has a television show.

It's called "Dhani Tackles the Globe."

And every week on this television show,

Dhani travels to a different nation of the world.

He finds a local sporting team.

He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them.

And his reason for this

is not just that he wants to master Muay Thai boxing.

It's because, for him,

sport is the language

that allows him to encounter

the full width and wonder of the world.

For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food.

For a lot of us it might be literature or writing.

But there are all these different techniques

that allow you to go out and look at the world

and find your place within it.

The goal of my Talk here

is not to persuade the people in this room

to embrace your xenophilia.

My guess -- given that you're at a conference called TEDGlobal --

is that most of you are xenophiles,

whether or not you use that term.

My challenge instead is this.

It's not enough to make the personal decision

that you want a wider world.

We have to figure out how to rewire

the systems that we have.

We have to fix our media.

We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education.

We have to fix our immigration policy.

We need to look at ways

of creating serendipity,

of making translation pervasive,

and we need to find ways to embrace

and celebrate these bridge figures.

And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles.

That's what I'm trying to do. I need your help.

(Applause)