Digital Divide

Can the internet be a tool to connect Northern Ugandans with American high school students?

Digital divide is a term that is used to refer to the gap between those who have access to the information technology and those who do not. In the context of our project, I use the term to compare the internet usage in Uganda and the United States.

Please take a look at the following charts. The first one shows the distribution of the internet usage in Uganda and the second one shows the one for the United States. Since the Invisible Children’s headquarters is located in San Diego, I included the statistics for California as well.

Response from Julie Okot Bitek

One of my friends used to live in Uganda and one day when we were having a lunch together she talked about a poet whom she met at the African Symposium on March 25th at UBC.

Thank you to my friend, our media team was able to connect with Julie, who is an award-winning writer who was raised in Uganda, graduated from UBC with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art and currently lives in Vancouver. It turns out that she has worked with professor Baines and they are friends on Facebook as well! Sometimes the network of people surprises me.

As in the following email, Julie got to know about our project through professor Baine’s Facebook post. The impact of the social media is evident. It is intriguing how SNS are working as the hub of information exchange for the professionals.

IC's voice uncensored

Friday night, end of term (or rather early saturday morning).

I finally overcame my 1001 technical issues, and my computer seems to have responded to my verbal threats of getting rid of it as soon as the semester is done.

Given that it is pretty late, I will make it short and sweet.

visible people's T-shirts are ready

Today we got together at Meredith’s chapter room and made our own T-shirts. One by one, each white T-shirt was gracefully spray painted in gold by Myriam and we put our heads together to think of messages to write on our T-shirts. What kind of words would challenge the commodification of personal stories for the sake of advocacy? Each member in our group will be blogging about each T-shirt so please keep visiting our blog!

The message on my T-shirt is: “Am I a-wear-ivist?”

Social media 2: Facebook

The wall of the Invisible Children’s Facebook displays an incredible number of posts by IC’s supporters. It was especially astonishing to see the real time updates on the number of people who “like” IC’s page. For example, take a look at the updates from the following days:

March 24, 2011

9:50pm: 358,849 people

10:15pm: 358,873 people

11pm: 358, 911 people

March 25, 2011

9:50pm: 359,500 people

10:15pm: 359,514 people

11pm: 359,532 people

aWAReness4IC

So we were having our regular Friday afternoon meeting, just like Asuka said in an earlier post. I went over to our Twitter to see if we had any new followers. We had been pretty psyched that @Invisible (IC's Twitter) had been following us the week of our interview with Jedidiah.

Alas! They stopped. =(

Link them all - where would social media take us?

So here we are at a Boulevard café on Friday afternoon as usual.

First hour passed by in a relaxed atmosphere as we chatted away about our progress and action plans for the up coming week. We will be writing up a script for our film and even making our own logo T-shirts! Please keep in mind though, we are critical about the merchandising aspect of the Invisible Children's project -what do their T-shirts speak about the people in Uganda? How is Visible People's T-shirts going to look like? Wait and see.

Social media 1: Twitter

March 21^st is a special day for 2 reasons:

First of all, today is an International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Second, today marks the 5th anniversary of Twitter!

Thinking about SNS: offline and online identity

Social Networking Sites.

In many respects, the social media/Social Networking Sites (SNS) are changing the ways in which we communicate and acquire information online. The social media created a new platform, or a public digital space that affects how we interact with one another. The increasing popularity of bite-size information seems to reflect the progressive changes in our concept of time, lifestyle and how we consume information.

Compared to a more personal style of online interaction through emails, SNS uses the online space for people to communicate publicly. As noted by Jedidiah, although there are debates as to whether online communication can substitute face-to-face interaction, what is interesting about SNS is that people can “see” what other people are talking, even if you are not directly involved in the conversation.

Of course, SNS is a great social tool to keep in touch with friends or acquaintances. But in addition, I think the potential and the effectiveness of SNS lie in the speed of real time updating of the information and the way it can be a great resource for like-minded individuals to share/collect information and collaborate towards the same goal, whether it be planning parties, school related events, or even politically related actions. The possibility of SNS depends on their users.

I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract, but I think SNS users live in 2 realities: one offline and another online. Once you log into your SNS account, you are consciously or subcontinuously making a switch between two identities. My point is not to argue that these two identities do not always coincide, but I just wanted to note that the SNS user’s online posts shape the identity of the user. And what is peculiar about SNS is that whatever the user posts online is visible to the rest of the SNS users who are connected to the user as a “friend” or a “follower” and the user also has a choice to make it visible to anybody with access to the internet.

This is probably enough from my rant on SNS – how does this all relate to the work of Invisible Children?

My thoughts started to spin around because of an answer I got from Jedidiah about a question I asked:

“When did Invisible Children started to use SNS and why?”

His answer was “from day 1” that IC was founded and he perceives SNS as a “manifestation of personality of the people who work here”.

In response to my other question about who updates the IC’s SNS, Jedidiah explained both the difficulties of coordinating the “level of cohesiveness” in representing the voice of IC [because the IC has multiple staffs who have access to their SNS account] but also the opportunities in using the SNS strategically to “be something that does not exist” by personifying the organization to give it a more human quality to the organization.

What does this really mean and how does it work? For the next blog post I will be exploring the theme of SNS in more detail, by analyzing the following SNS used by the IC:

· Twitter

· Facebook

Hope you are getting excited about our Visible People Project’s progress as we are!

Got a Twitter account? Follow or Tweet us @ visible_people :)