I am occasionally asked by reporters interested in the Second Life Herald (where I’ve been an editor for two years now) what the appeal of doing journalism in virtual worlds is. In an attempt to locate a pithy soundbite for them, I sometimes say it’s like being a foreign correspondent without having to leave your desk (though this is not, in fact, the whole story; read on). So I was interested to spot this post by Ethan Zuckerman (via the Business Communicators of SL blog), which contains some thoughts on similar topics, inspired by a conversation with Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen for Dahlen’s latest column. Dahlen wonders whether the Internet is up to the challenge of providing information about places like Africa, since it looks like you can find a lot more detail on the Web about Buffy than about the Somalian Union of Islamic Courts, for instance. Which touches off a thought on Zuckerman’s part: “I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces while it’s shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that these new spaces — whether SecondLife, World of Warcraft, the culture of fanfiction or machinima — are far more coverable than many events in the real world.” While both those statements are true, to an extent, I’d argue that there isn’t the causal link between them that Zuckerman sees, or at least that that link is not as strong, and that there are more important factors at work.
To me, it’s not a zero-sum game. More coverage of virtual spaces doesn’t lead to less coverage of real places. Coverage of places like Africa has never been sufficient, and it has only dwindled in recent years, but that dwindling began long before anything like virtual journalism made the scene. I’ve been on both sides of this issue (having covered developing economies for years before I started writing much about technology; that’s me and my good friend Jon Marks above, in Abidjan) and can tell you that even ten years ago it was already harder to sell a story about Africa than it was to sell one about a tech company. Virtual worlds hardly existed, at that point, and marquee magazine stories about them were all but unheard of. They certainly weren’t the thing that was hampering coverage of Africa.
I’m not sure Buffy is what’s keeping us from knowing about conflicts in places like Africa, either, whether in print or on the Internet. In fact, I’m quite sure it’s not. As Zuckerman says in the Dahlen column, “If you’re writing ‘Buffy [the Vampire Slayer]‘ fan fic, you may not know the name of the third junior subvampire who showed up for one episode in season four. But someone does, and you can authoritatively build the Buffy index on Wikipedia.” By contrast, “We don’t know authoritatively who’s in the Union of Islamic Courts. And we probably never will.”
That’s not because there are more people interested in Buffy than in Somalia (whether or not that’s the case). That’s because the information on Buffy is easily available to anyone who cares to look, while much information on Somalian governments and rebel groups is jealously guarded by the people involved, usually with guns. There’s also a lot of apples-n-oranging going on here: fandom is not the same as journalism. Most of the people writing fan fiction, filling in Wikipedia articles about Buffy or blogging about what they got up to in Second Life last night are not making a choice between that and haring off to Somalia to risk their lives investigating the inner workings of various deadly political factions.
That said, some people (like me), do make choices that appear to be similar. If I wasn’t writing about virtual worlds these days, there’s a good chance I’d be writing about Africa and other parts of what was once called the “South,” which was an interest of mine for years and remains one today. (In fact, I still do get to write about those things occasionally.) But I haven’t stopped writing about those things in order to fill in Wikipedia articles about television shows. Instead, I’m now covering a part of global culture that’s growing increasingly important, as well as many of the ways in which we communicate and get our information today.
One of these ways is Google Earth. And if there’s any doubt that Google Earth can be a force for political awareness and possible change in countries outside the U.S. and Western Europe, this Washington Post article should lay it to rest. It’s about (among other things) a 24-year-old student in Bahrain who became clued in to what he says is an unequal distribution of land and wealth in the country by seeing images of Bahrain on Google Earth. That’s important access to information, and one of the reasons so many people are so excited about virtual worlds is that there’s the sense that they may be able to help broaden access to similar facts about the world. With an increasing amount of communication happening online, covering the workings and governance of such places is also important to helping shape what society will look like in the decades to come. The technology is still young and it’s probably too early to say just what good will come out of it, but it would be madness not to explore it and see where it could go.
So while I agree with many of Ethan’s individual points, I don’t think it’s fair to draw lines of cause and effect between them. If coverage of Africa is dwindling in print and broadcast media, and on the Internet, it’s not because people are setting it aside in favor of Buffy. There may well be more morally frivolous content rattling around the Internet than ever before, but the vast majority of it is newly created content, content added by users who weren’t creating anything before; it’s not content being created by people who were formerly creating more morally valuable content, for the most part. It’s true that Western society has little appetite for important stories about social conditions in far-off lands, but I don’t think that can be blamed on fanfic, virtual worlds or even television shows.
The great part about Dahlen’s column and Zuckerman’s comments comes toward the end, when Dahlen cites what Joi Ito calls the caring problem. “People won’t follow the news in a foreign land just because they think it’s important; they keep tabs on it because they have emotional investment in watching what comes next,” Dahlen writes.
Zuckerman names a few ways that people can get past the caring problem, and they center on building real relationships outside the U.S.– whether by working abroad, or travelling for long stretches of time, or even marrying into another culture. As Zuckerman says, “I find myself wondering whether deeper change comes from creating a set of postnational citizens — people who have friends and collaborators and colleagues all over the world.” In other words, we care about countries when we care about their people and their stories. And instead of watching in flashes of outrage, we’d cultivate a lifelong urge to follow along.
I couldn’t agree more. (Some would argue that with such a diverse population in Second Life — there are more Europeans at this point than Americans — it’s already having that effect.) 3pointD urges you all to start cultivating.