Ethan Zuckerman is concerned about U.S. myopia, our failure to see and engage with the rest of the world. The suppposedly global Internet hasn’t necessarily fixed the problem, and the citizen journalism practiced by bloggers is still restricted to a technocratic elite, mostly white and mostly within the U.S., who lack a perception global diversity and global perils. In an excellent interview by Alex Steffen at WorldChanging.com, Ethan talks about potential solutions.

Blogging is an elite technocratic culture. My guess is that just being on the Internet doesn’t turn us into global citizens, that we need a different kind of conversation. We need people who can build bridges between that culture and the situations in which most of the rest of the world find themselves, which are very, very different. We need to identify individuals, help build up their own blogging communities, and get them meaningful coverage from folks like you guys on the outside who can tell their stories. Once we get to the point where the majority of the top 100 bloggers on Technorati aren’t Americans, we’ll be ready to have an entirely different conversation.

Those folks aren’t out there now. We need to help find them. And it’s going to require a more concerted effort than just sending out a lot of email and looking at a lot of websites and hoping that someone shows up. It takes advocacy work to get the tools into more hands, and tool work to make sure the right tools are available, and community work to make sure that someone is listening when they talk.

Ethan Zuckerman is concerned about U.S. myopia, our failure to see and engage with the rest of the world. The suppposedly global Internet hasn’t necessarily fixed the problem, and the citizen journalism practiced by bloggers is still restricted to a technocratic elite, mostly white and mostly within the U.S., who lack a perception global [...]