The Fabric of Our Lives

"The Internet is the fabric of our lives"

Manuel Castells*

Ingrid and Caren were able to give a voice to their lives through the use of technology. They can now be heard around the globe because of the Internet. For them, technology holds the potential for liberation.

Ingrid and Caren participated in the Women's Electronic Network Training (WENT) Digital Story Telling workshop held in Durban, South Africa, in 2007. WENT was organized by APC Africa-Women, the regional program of the Association for Progressive Communications Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP), and the digital story workshop was conducted by Women'sNet, a South African feminist grassroots organization founded in 1998 that works to advance gender equality and justice through the use of technology. Their videos were posted as part of the 2007 Take Back the Tech Campaign, that runs yearly from November 25-December 10, and is organized by APC WNSP.

The videos produced by the participants contain powerful stories. They are another form of journalism that is usually ignored when we talk about "citizen journalism." These stories have been mostly abandoned by mainstream professional journalism. The Ethics Group leader of the Poynter Institute, Kelly McBride, said by e-mail that these accounts are "absolutely journalism. It's different than professional journalism, but it works. It tells a story, one that's not being told by professionals, for the most part." The Poynter Institute is a school for professional journalists based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The focus of Women'sNet's digital storytelling project, as described in their site, "is on the story tellers' control over the medium, choice of words (narration), pictures and music so that the process is as powerful for the story teller as the end product is to the listener." They explain that:

Because Women'sNet is committed to challenging traditional approaches of developing media which appropriates women's voices, misrepresents us, and disempowers us, our approach to digital stories is one of empowerment, of women's control over their voices and stories, and respectful of process and product.

Ingrid narrates how as a child she had to dig a hole in the garden of her house to escape the brutality of seeing her mother being abused. Hers is a story of violence, generational bonds between women, survival, resistance, pain, and love. It is a raw journalistic piece that explores the complex dynamics of domestic violence from the perspective of a child who sees and lives through her mother's painful experiences, and who, as we can gather from her narrative, also is a survivor.

It is safer to be in the garden. And then I went inside again. Do you think it is a weak woman who can walk back inside?

The participants and facilitators of the WENT workshop also recorded their thoughts and experiences in a blog. While reading their posts you can almost feel the sense of euphoria that these women had after and during the workshop. Ingrid says: "What we are silent about, what we cover up and leave unspoken, festers, like a covered sore. Speaking and telling, in that process, takes the sting away, erupts the volcano beneath, and it has no power left." Isn't journalism also about uncovering, revealing, empowering the people through information? Of course there are ethical concerns surrounding citizens and the practice of journalism, as there are with professional journalism. McBride sheds light on this issue:

The biggest concerns are truth, fairness and accuracy. Although professional journalists often fall short, they are always striving for these values. Because a professional's loyalty is with her audience, she is likely to take many steps (like interviewing opposing sides of a story, multiple sources and experts) as she strives for these values. A citizen has a different loyalty and different motives for telling her own story. Often that makes it very powerful. But the downside is that a citizen story-teller speaks from a distinct point of view that can be distorting. That's not a bad thing, but it changes the landscape of information.

In the last six months, Women's Net, located in Johannesburg, South Africa, has trained 130 men, women and girls (10 to 18 year-old) in the use of technology. For their citizen journalism project they have trained more than 20 people on how to produce digital stories, blog, use the e-mail and the Internet. The organization's executive director, Sally-Jean Shackleton, explained in an e-mail interview that "Women's Net takes a three-prong approach to its work - we build capacity, while producing content and empower for networking for addressing gender inequality. I'll use the example of our Digital Stories work: We train women to use computers to tell their stories (capacity), at the end of the workshop we have developed short movies (content), this content is used to change perceptions about gender violence and advocate for change, and they are used in human rights training programmes." The most common topics covered are HIV/AIDS and violence against women. She added that this form of grassroots journalism can advance development by:

...increasing public participation in the media, making media more accountable. Increasing the diversity of voices and issues heard, and alerting citizens to problems and potential solutions.

As a part of its digital storytelling project, Women'sNet collaborated with the global network Just Associates (JASS) in the workshop called "Telling Our Stories", held in Johannesburg, South Africa, last May. Esther Sheehama, a participant from Namibia, recounts in a video how she was sterilized without her consent after having her child because she was HIV positive. The participants' videos were uploaded to YouTube. This is Esther's story:



Women'sNet offers a wealth of information in their site, such as tips for non-governmental organizations on technological planning, research on technology, news concerning gender issues, information on HIV/AIDS, violence against women, the economy, education, reproductive health, and facts about their campaigns and advocacy projects. Members of the staff have blogs, and they have a group on Flickr.

The South African feminist scholar Helen Moffett argued in an e-mail interview that once the "foundation stones are in place" -which are access to technology, literacy, and training- the use of communication technologies by marginalized groups can be very powerful.

...there is something very heady about having an 'instant voice', and ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) offer this. It's also very hard to censor email and Internet communications, which means (for instance) that the only completely 'free' speech in Zimbabwe at present is via the Internet. Pictures and other information and data can be downloaded and communicated very swiftly, and this applies to any oppressed community experiencing extreme strictures on freedom of speech and information.

Erika Smith, communications coordinator of the APC WNSP and one of the founders of Mexico's local Internet service provider LaNeta dedicated to social justice issues and offering service to civil society organizations, stated in an e-mail that in the workshops she has been involved in, the participants "talk a lot about language and voice, and making sure that internet is the ultimate expression of diversity that it can be, and not controlled by one white, male, English-speaking consumerist-capitalist voice." Smith explained that the women she has worked with, mostly Latin American women, have an "urgency" to communicate. This urgency was evident in the videos produced by women who attended the digital storytelling workshop at the Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) held in November in Cape Town, South Africa.

In separate interviews, Smith and Moffett agreed that most of the people currently engaged in citizen journalism are from the upper/middle class. But they said that non-profit organizations in many countries are working to narrow the "digital divide" that exists between classes, ethnicities and genders. An expert in citizen media and journalism in the United States, Dan Gillmor, said that "there are more people involved in the middle class and upper class, it matters on who has computers at homes." He said that, even though he does not have the full data on this topic, he believes the digital divide is "disappearing" and it is being reduced in the United States.

Information technologies and the Internet are not the solution to all of the world's problems. Many of society's ills are also reproduced throughout the Internet: crime, exploitation, violence, inequality. But the Internet also provides a space for people around the globe to communicate in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. It is a place where anyone can have a voice: a voice that can be heard, seen, and listened to by many. These are voices that journalists should also listen to.

See the Google map presentation that highlights the cities where some of the interviewees live and work.

*Manuel Castells is Professor of Communication and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, at the University of South California, Los Angeles. He is a world-renowned theorist on the information society and the Internet.

Photo published with permission of Women'sNet.