Citizen journalism

Worldchanging has had a series a posts on how communications, and especially cellphones, can revolutionize media. The thoughts are amazingly similar to the Global Brain project that I am working on.

Organizations like Witness have been encouraging sousveillance since 1992 by supplying video cameras and communication gear to allow people around the world to document abuses of human rights, partnering with human rights groups in many different countries. Sousveillance is the opposite of surveillance, that is, to monitor things from the bottom through the people, rather than from the top through an elite group of a selected few. Finally, and not very late, Witness has realized that they need not supply video cameras to activists, because practically everybody now already has digital cameras and cellphones that can take pictures and record videos of their surroundings. Tools such ComVu are also available for live streaming of videos from cellphones. The daunting task that now lies ahead is to organize this information to present it well, plus to take care of security and privacy issues to prevent incorrect propaganda, all of which are the objectives of the Global Brain project. Technology can amazingly simplify a lot of such things in a decentralized manner. Witness has started a forum to discuss these issues. Here's a link to Jamais Cascio's article on the participatory panopticon that summarizes a lot of the philosophy behind all this. Other organizations with similar objectives are OneWorld TV, which hosts blogs about development activities in different countries and different languages; and OurMedia and Video Bomb, which are video blog sites where users can post videos, add tags, and collect RSS feeds on the tags. And the latest was the report of an African filmmaker, Aryan Kaganof, who successfully made a movie using only cellphone cameras!

Jamais then extends the same idea to what he calls the Earth Witness project, where he proposes to use cellphones to monitor the environment. This again, is exactly the same idea as what I am working on with wireless monitoring using cellphones! Interesting, researchers from UC Irvine have similar ideas with mounting stripped down cellphones on the backs of pigeons to monitor temperature and pollution data, along with photographs, all tagged with GPS locationing. More in a speech by Jamais.

And the applications do not stop here, but go into health care where SMSes can be used to alert people about disease outbreaks, information can be collected through Voxiva like mechanisms, aggregated into websites like globalhealthfacts.org, and even fed into project monitoring tools to prevent medical corruption. Sarah Rich, also from Worldchanging, reported about Garbagescout, which uses the same principles to create a Google maps mashup about recyclable waste or resale articles lying around in your garage or in the neighborhood.