Writing with a distinct voice that allows her personality to shine through, Belton rarely leaves the readers wondering what she's really thinking.

"Big Sis sent me this story Friday and my head almost exploded from the sheer ignorance of it," she wrote about on the Louisiana judge who refused to marry an interracial couple.

Belton is equally up-front about her personal life, recounting her failed marriage, her forays into fashion and on being bipolar. Here is the former print reporter in her own words.

How would you describe your blog and when did it start?

The blog started in August of 2007, but then it was just a personal blog and not what it is today. I would describe what it is now as a political, pop cultural blog with a satirical tilt. It can be serious, but most of the time I like to poke fun at the day's news and find a lighter way of dealing with heavy issues.

Can you tell us about the name?

The name started out as a joke-meets-a-message. The idea was that I am an intellectual snob who was shunning, i.e. poo poo-ing, some of the less savory aspects of black culture, and endorsing the more artistic and high cultural side. In reality, I'm not much of a snob, nor I have I ever been, but the name is very catchy and memorable, which was another reason why I chose it.

**Who is your audience? **

My audience is primarily African American, mostly female, but [there's]a significant portion of men. The men don't always comment even though they make up more than 40 percent of the readership. I also have a significant white and conservative readership, despite the fact that the blog has a Liberal slant. I'd like to think that's because I don't engage in demagoguery, so they feel safe in commenting on the site.

What is your goal?

My goal is to continue to grow the site until it becomes a blogging-meets-news-meets-social networking hub for like-minded individuals, aka, "snobs" of all types. I'd like to bring on more writers and editors and really create a full service news site with a strong, seriously funny slant.

What are you proudest of?

I most proudest of how far the blog has come, from a little blogspot site to what it is today, and what it's potential could be. I'm still amazed that people are drawn to it, and that it resonates so well in the web community as well as in the media. I'm very humbled by how fast I've grown.

You started out working in newspapers, do you still consider yourself a journalist?

I do. I feel that as long as I work in some form of the media I'm still a journalist and must adhere to journalism ethics. I think that is another thing that makes my blog a tad different. There is some element of quality control and news judgment that goes on. I don't post a lot of rumor and hearsay, I try to get even basic gossip sourced somehow. It's important to have standards.

How do you get your news?

I read a lot of blogs, newspapers and magazines and I watch a lot of television news. I'm a voracious consumer of news. I love it. I've watched 60 Minutes almost every Sunday of my life since I was about nine years old.

Any thoughts on the future of news?

I feel that things are change very rapidly right now, and it's been a tough adjustment for newspapers. People can get the news at such instantaneous speeds that stories break and die before people can even get the chance to fully understand them. I think traditional media will eventually make the adjustment to this, but I'm still concerned how newspapers, regional and national, will be able to make money when a majority of people online believe news should be free.

What blogs do you read?

I read Salon.com, Slate.com, Huffington Post, Gawker, "Wonkette"http://wonkette.com/, Jezebel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jack and Jill Politics, AverageBro, Se7enMagazine, Awesomely Luvvie"www.awesomelyluvvie.com/, Politico, Racialicious, Angry Asian Man, TPMMuckracker, Crooks and Liars, The Negro Intellectual, What About Our Daughters, What Would Thembi Do, Michelle Obama Watch, and many, many more. I could go on forever.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?

I think through groups like Afrosphere and gatherings like "Blogging While Brown": http://www.bloggingwhilebrown.com/ show the ability of the black blogosphere and its potential. There are just so many great writers doing amazing things who have organized amazing things... like Gina McCaul of What About Our Daughters, who spoke out on the Dunbar Village case and called leaders to task when they came out in support of the perpetrators, but not the woman and child who were attacked and brutalized. There is a strong activism streak among many black bloggers on everything from anti-tasering campaigns to campaigns to improve (or marginalize) BET.

It's really very exciting and fascinating. People underestimate the power of black bloggers, but they're on the come-up and they've made things happen. The Jena 6 was almost exclusively something that was pushed by black bloggers and black radio before it made it to the mainstream. It's really rather incredible what people can do with a little internet real estate and a voice.

The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how citizen media can best be implemented in the field of HIV/AIDS. Many of the project proposals we've received at Rising Voices have been related to spreading awareness about the pandemic. We wanted to learn from those proposals - and also from existing citizen media initiatives - to better understand how new media tools can be used most effectively to spread awareness and encourage discussion about HIV/AIDS-related topics. We also wanted to better understand some of the risks and obstacles facing bloggers who are HIV-positive, or who regularly write about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

Three online chats brought together people from all over the world, and from a wide range of fields. In addition to the creation of this guide, the participants of the chats collaborated on the creation of a map-based directory of HIV-positive bloggers who bravely defy stigma and discrimination to communicate their situation to the rest of the world.

To celebrate the release of the Blogging Positively guide, which has been two years in the making, today we begin a one-week campaign to update our map of HIV positive bloggers. If you are a positive blogger, or if you have suggestions for links to add to the directory, please send a message to Global Voices Public Health Editor Juhie Bhatia.

The Blogging Positively guide was authored by Janet Feldman of the Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group and ActAlive, which encourages the use of the arts and media to address HIV/AIDS and other human-development challenges. Additional contributions were made by Solana Larsen, Sahar Romani, and Juhie Bhatia. Daudi Were coined the term "Blogging Positively."

The importance and impact of this guide depends on our collective ability to get it into the hands of activists, and to encourage their contributions to the global conversation that is curated and amplified everyday on the Global Voices website. Please consider sharing this with your network of friends and blogging about it. If there are HIV/AIDS organizations and support groups in your region, please send them a copy of the guide.

Finally, if you would like to learn more about what bloggers around the world have to say about the AIDS pandemic, don't miss our Conversations for a Better World series which has so far featured commentary about HIV/AIDS from bloggers based in Africa, China, Cambodia, and the Middle East & North Africa.

Photo of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Hillary Clinton by Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon, a Monrovia-based American journalist who was involved in a training workshop for Liberian bloggers, notes in an article for Time Magazine that the United States government has given Liberia over $2 billion since 2003, "the highest number of aid dollars spent per capita anywhere in the world."

Most of the news articles about Clinton's visit to Liberia focus on the basic facts about Liberia. Writing for Xinhua News, the Chinese government's official news agency, editor Li Xianzhi observes:

Liberia is a country on the west coast of Africa, bordered by Sierra Leone, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire and the Atlantic Ocean. The history of Liberia is unique among African nations, notably because of its relationship with the United States, according to Wikipedia."

Few, if any, of the articles quote Liberians or describe what everyday life is like in the capital city Monrovia. For that you will need to consult Liberian bloggers.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is writing a book about Liberian refugees living on Staten Island in New York. Rather than simply writing about the refugees, however, Ackerman wanted to help them tell their own stories. With a small amount of funding from Rising Voices she started Ceasefire Liberia, a blogging platform for Liberians living in Staten Island and Monrovia. Much to her surprise the Monrovia-based Liberian bloggers have so far contributed more content to the website than their New York-based peers.

Nat Nyuan-Bayjay, a Ceasefire Liberia blogger in Monrovia

Writing from Monrovia, Wellington Railey has described the life sentence handed down to 23-year-old Nigerian Chuku Diwl Afika who was convicted of murdering a Liberian youth after a scuffle outside of Apple Night Club. Nat Nyuan-Bayjay, Ceasefire Liberia's project manager in Monrovia, posted his photos and observations of two opposing protests related to Liberia's controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Describing the pro-TRC group of protesters Bayjay writes:

The demonstration, widely believed to be a state 'stage-managed' demonstration was held under the auspices of the National Consciousness Movement of Liberia (NACOMAL), a pro-advocacy group and well organized as hundreds of people flocked upper Broad Street downtown Monrovia where they assembled as they were transported from various suburbs of Monrovia in arranged commercial buses.

A view down Broad Street in Monrovia

Nyuan-Bajay also published a post on Clinton's visit titled "Clinton Reaffirms US Support To Liberia: Pledges US$17 Million But Wants Action on Corruption." Most impressive though has been Nyuan-Bajay's investigative reporting on issues like Bushrod Island's recent water shortages. He also routinely collects opinions from ordinary Liberians on issues ranging from the death of Michael Jackson to Independence Day celebrations.

So far Liberians living in New York have shown less interest in text-based blogging, but are enthusiastic about video. Garretson produced a 4-minute video about his son on his way to school. Some of the members of Ceasefire Liberia in Staten Island belong to the hip-hop collective Genocide which performed at Park Hill Day last month. Their manager Liz shot this video of their live performance. You can hear another Genocide track on the most recent Ceasefire Liberia video of a celebration of Liberia's Independence Day in Trenton, Jersey.

Stay tuned to Ceasefire Liberia to learn more about Liberian realities on both sides of the Atlantic.

But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner.

So in all seriousness, in the era of twittering and crowdsourced journalism, are journalists themselves still relevant? Obviously I am not the first person to ask this - or to piss people off by asking it again. But it needs to addressed squarely and honestly. And it has nothing to do with the importance of the profession and the need for quality reporting and information. Rather, it has to do with the benefits of collective reporting. Going back to James Surowieki's supposition in the Wisdom of Crowds, the decisions made by, by a diverse group of people is better than the the decisions made by the smartest "experts" in that group. Applying that to journalism it means that journalists, as the smartest or most informed of the investigating group, will provide less accurate and useful information than an aggregation of the input of spectators and citizen journalists. It's the same principle behind statistical analysis and surveying - the bigger the sample the more accurate the results.

Obviously journalists are already using Twitter and a plethora of other social media tools to gather information and accumulate a larger sampling of insights and information. But why couldn't we simply develop a smarter aggregation and filtering tool to replace journalists altogether? Wouldn't that ultimately remove the biases and limited experience that reporters have on a particular subject? One could even argue that journalists are perhaps the least qualified to report on an issue because of a lack of relevant expertise or direct experience. So why not let the crowd, including far more knowledgable experts, chime in to get us the best possible information?

Let's use an example. On a college campus the rumor mill churns out a constant "feed" of stories about who did what, who is sleeping with whom, etc. Those spreading the rumors without having had first hand knowledge, much like uninformed journalists, are getting it wrong. But by tapping into the collective intelligence of many students, some with relevant information and some without, a richer and more accurate story can emerge. Facebook and other social networking and information aggregation tools (i.e., Truemors) are a very rough move in this direction.

As the next generation "smart" or semantic Web comes online, with much of our individual and collective information made publicly available, one would assume that the need for human aggregators and interpreters becomes less and less useful. And in fact crowdsourced information becomes much more reliable than any one individual perspective, be it from interviewing a handful of experts or bystanders, or not.

Is there still a need for vetting and fact checking of stories. Absolutely. But isn't that something a machine, building off our collective intelligence, could be trained to do far better than any one human or editorial staff? Of course this ignores the fact that machines aren't good at storytelling or understanding the nuances of human emotions and interactions - that which makes for good reporting and journalism. But maybe that's something the machine could be taught as well? Maybe even doing it better than the tired old formulas used in most mainstream reporting?

In the meantime, and although I hate to say it, it is likely that journalists will see their jobs flittering, or rather Twittering, away.

If Craigslist killed the classifieds, its not unlikely that Twitter and its ilk could just as easily put another nail in the coffin of professional journalism.

P.S. Feel free to Twitter any responses to plamb.

Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both videos were uploaded to YouTube at the same time, in the middle of April. But 1.1 million views is still an impressive number for this genre, even if we subtract the several hundred thousands of views which belong to the musicians' friends and relatives.

Ms. Boyle's sensational success is explainable: She was a show-biz heroine supported by the British and global television, and her story is based on contrast. Contrast of any kind. It's all clear. But there is so much to discover with YouTube's recent experiment in building the international orchestra: first appealing to the musicians in any wired corner of the world. Then choosing the best performers with the help of the Grand Jury (noted musicians) and ordinary users.

Over 3,000 participants submitted their videos -- and 90 musicians made it to Carnegie Hall. Some were absolutely homemade recordings with dogs barking in the background. Some were recorded in kitchens with boiling tea kettles whistling. A trumpeter performed in a horror-movie plastic mask. And on the stage on 57th street a musician played automobile circular plates.

It has been the most democratic musical contest in the history of music. No language or gender or age barriers and both professional and amateur musicians were allowed to compete. Among the winners were doctors, lawyers, and even a poker player from San Francisco.

The Russian Winners

To musicians in the most remote corners of the world the web is now giving great opportunities to reach out.

"To participate in the contest, there were only three things needed: a computer, a web camera and the ability to play a musical instrument," says Alla Zabrovskaya, PR Director of Google Russia. "And now, after the success of the Orchestra, there is no doubt that any talented person can get famous quickly and at no cost on the web."

There have already been some cases in Russia of stars using YouTube to establish themselves. The singer Peter Nalitch became instantly famous when his 'Guitar' video attracted over 100,000 viewers in April 2007.

I spoke with the Russian winners at CoffeeMania, a café by the P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the centre of Moscow, which is very popular with musicians and the creative crowd.

"Well, at first I felt a bit uneasy about bringing my recording into the open," said 24-year-old Anna Shumik, a violist and student of the Gnesin Academy of Music. "If my playing wasn't perfect, anyone could hear it. But I risked it and made the recording in the special studio in Moscow (which contracted with Google for the purpose), and uploaded it on YouTube."

Now Shumik is an avid web user: she watches archive rehearsals at YouTube and downloads the music sheets. She says the web gives her great opportunities to find one-time gigs by surfing through the listings. Apart from studying, she works in the Cinematography Symphony Orchestra, which records music for Russian movies, and sometimes plays at weddings.

Alexey Zavgorodnyi, a 23-year-old violinist studying at the Maimonides State Jewish Academy in Moscow, works in a drama theater. Zavgorodnyi admits that before participating in the contest, he wasn't a frequent web user. He had to register at YouTube for the first time to upload the video and asked his friend to help him with mashing the bio-video.

He also helped another participant, Anna Shemyakina, starring in her video as the guy turning the pages while she plays. Back then, Zavgorodnyi couldn't imagine that in four months he would be hosting TV crews that had come to interview him in his home.

"I doubted I would win," he said, smiling, "as I didn't meet the requirements in the second lap. I played none of the pieces which were offered to the musicians by the organizing committee, and performed the cadence at my choice." Well, people at Google appreciated Zavgorodnyi's creativity and audacity. And they might have liked his YouTube profile name -- cdefgahb -- the musical note scale.

Now the young violinist has a Facebook profile, and it's a great way, he said, to communicate with those numerous international musicians whom he met in NYC and with whom he performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15. Before getting to know each other in New York, the winners established a closed online community where they discussed the program and details of the coming concert. Everybody was inspired to meet up; the musicians sounded better offline than in recording, because some of them hadn't used high quality video cameras to film their videos.

Music Breaks Down Language Barriers

The virtual auditioning brought very positive results. Objectively, the most talented players were selected. All the winners -- and those were from countries all over the world, including Romania, Ukraine, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Hungary, etc. -- were high professional. Guided by a virtual conductor on the screen in their homes, empty concert halls, doorways and in the yards by their houses, they all tried to perform at their best.

Shumik and Zavgorodnyi were both born in the Northern part of Russia and had moved to Moscow in their adolescence, as they found out when meeting each other for the first time in Google's Russian office. Last April, they both visited the U.S. for the first time in their lives. Beside having a wonderful tourist experience, they also mastered their performing skills by participating in master-classes.

"We were rehearsing from 10 am to 10 pm," said Zavgorodniy, "Working hard. And there were no language barriers: we speak the same language -- forte, piano, iminuendo, ritenuto..."

All the musicians signed the poster which is now hanging on the wall in the Carnegie Hall.

Both musicians became local celebrities at their colleges and received congratulations from their deans. "In New York we felt we were making history," said Zavgorodniy, "It was also the only concert where spectators were allowed to take pictures."

Back in Moscow, Shumik watches the videos submitted by other violists who participated in the contest. Though they didn't win, she says, it's great to see how different musicians are playing the same musical part. It's like distance learning.

Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs.

But what about the folks that are not at and will likely never be at the table for such discussions on "democracy" and "information needs" of local communities. I'm talking low income and underserved communities. How can their issues be addressed in the frenzied and brave new world of media and information technology? Does it take more citizen journalists, more Google mapping projects, and other top down, technogeek solutions to bring everybody in? Or do we need a new bottom up approach that empowers local communities of every flavor and socioeconomic status to identify and develop their own tools and information needs?

I'll admit it. I am as guilty as the next talking head that attempts to speak on behalf of the so-called "voiceless", even though I like to think that many of my ideas (like Locobeat) have been inspired by what I have learned living and working in and around low income communities.

But that's not good enough. If we are really serious about democracy for EVERYONE, each community must speak for itself, design (technology tools) for itself, and have relevant conversations about and among itself.

So the questions then become...

How can we support (and understand) community-based empowerment without a top down, "let me help you" approach? One that's respectful and not condescending?

And how can we get creative tools and resources in the hands of people who can and will use them to directly answer the question of local information needs?

I don't have any great answers, but lots of great projects are already happening in an attempt to address these challenges head on. Things like Global Voices. And this is just the beginning. IMHO the next step is to let go and have communities themselves decide what their information needs are, who and how they will addressed....as well as how they can be sustained without handouts. Frankly, this will take a lot more than blue ribbon panels. and and more "commission" reports.

The tools and commitment are already here. The business and management models are not quite yet figured out. but the call to action has arrived and all of us - and I mean all of us - need to respond. So let's figure it out, together!

p.s. Some really cool mobile tools are emerging in the community empowerment space, many of which will be on display at this month's Netsquared conference in San Jose, CA.

As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table.

As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner, it's not even in the kitchen."

Two reports posted on the same day serve to remind us that the news industry has ignored diversity at its own peril.

In a bit of irony, in one case the very technological innovation the newspaper turned to in order to better connect with its readers gave a graphic illustration of just how out of touch the paper was to some parts of its communities.

On March 12, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released findings that showed that less than half the population would care if their local newspapers disappeared. That same day a post on the Neiman Journalism Lab site about The Baltimore Sun's decision to live-stream its weekday story conferences inadvertently gave us clue as to just why that might be.

"As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community 'a lot.' Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available," the Pew study says.

In his post for the Nieman Lab about the Sun's live-streaming experiment, Tim Windsor said about observing the story meeting, "...for those who do watch -- especially those who haven't been able to attend or participate in an actual news meeting -- the visit can be eye-opening."

Actually, the screenshot alone was eye-opening, though in a sadly predictable way. There we saw 13 people gathered around the table charged with putting together a newspaper in a city in which the majority of the population is African-American. At that particular table, on that particular day all were white and most were male.

Newspapers Out of Step

To be clear, when you look at the figures from previous ASNE workforce surveys it's obvious that the Sun is not the only newspaper out of step with its community.
According to the last year's figures [PDF file], people of color make up a bit more than 13 percent of the professional staff in the nation's newspapers. There is little to suggest that the picture will be vastly changed when the new figures are released.

By contrast, people of color make up 33 percent of the general population. The disconnect shows.

Content audits continue to demonstrate that people of color are over-represented in stories about crime, entertainment and sports and under-represented in stories about business, lifestyle and everyday life.

For the most part, the contributions, the rich vibrancy and the mundane aspects of the lives of people of color are no more present in the printed pages of our daily newspapers than are the people of color around the Sun's story meeting.

With a growing number of websites run by and for people of color it should not come as a surprise that increasingly people will turn to a source that depicts their lives in all of the complexity, and not solely concentrate on the pathological.

Overall trends show that in general people are getting their news from the Internet rather than from newspapers, according to a study from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. "The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news," the Dec. 2008 study said.

As newspapers struggle to keep their footing and retain their place in our democracy, there has been increasing talk about the need to give the public courses in media literacy. The thinking behind this movement is that if people truly understood the role the news media plays in the public discourse they would understand the danger to democracy if papers vanish.

The problem with that solution is that it ignores the fact many feel that news organizations routinely paint a stereotypical and one-dimensional picture of their lives. In those cases, many people believe mainstream news organizations detract from rather than add to the public discourse around issues important to their lives.

For the public to be moved to truly rally to save the media, the media must first fully cover all aspects of our communities.

Looking at the picture painted by the Baltimore Sun's story conference, ASNE's census figures and content analysis findings, it seems that the media might benefit from public literacy more than the public needs media literacy.

It's something I've wondered about for years...why people are willing to accept a constant barrage of bad news? And not just recent Chicken Little reporting about the economic meltdown, but the endless reports on murders, shootings, natural disasters, bombings, etc. Not that we should ignore the real state of affairs in the world, but if you read any newspaper or watch the nightly news it would appear that we live primarily in a chaotic and violent universe with little to be hopeful about. And there is a fundamental (some would argue unhealthy) bias in presenting a primarily "we are doomed" worldview.

So maybe it's time for some good news? Literally, media outlets specializing in hope and inspiration as a mainstay. Or a section of the regular news called "the good news". I know you probably won't sell as many newspapers by replacing a headline like "Bomb blast in Mosul kills 50" with "Teacher inspires 3rd Grade class to help family in need". But I have a hunch there is a sizeable appetite and market for good news even beyond the current period of national despair. You only need to look at the massive (and lucrative) businesses built around positivity gurus like Tony Robins, Eckhart Tolle, and Wayne Dyer to see the revenue possibilities. Oprah's TV and follow up online interviews with a diverse group of positive-oriented spiritual leaders in January of this year attracted a global audience of millions. And these weren't even well known or mainstream religious icons.

Check out The Happy News for one example of "always positive" reporting by citizen journalists. Here's an appeal for a new social network called totally good news.

Watch more Sharkle.com videos on AOL Video

Can folks suggest others?

I wonder how negative reporting in the U.S. compares with that of other countries, and how that reporting impacts the national psyches of respective countries? Has anyone ever done a study of this?

Maybe mainstream media could benefit from a little pick-me-up, benefiting both our collective mood and the bottom line? Like many I can't wait for a little good news.

We may have to struggle to achieve through digital tools what was accomplished by a previous generation of the readers, writers, and editors of the African-American press. Part of the challenge has to do with the ways that our current framing of participatory culture values freedom over equality or diversity. Part of the challenge has to do with the challenges of expanding access to the digital world and empowering citizens of all ages and class backgrounds to become full participant in this emerging cyber-society. Some of this has to do with the challenges of the interface between the digital world and the realm of our face to face interactions.

There are certainly limits to the potential which cyberspace offers for representing and empowering minority expression. Consider, for example, a site like YouTube. On the one hand, it is an open platform which allows all kinds of groups to submit content and circulate it within little or no gatekeeping unless, of course, you use obscene language or deploy copyrighted materials you don't own or otherwise violate the terms of service. For examples of what happens then, check out YouTomb, which keeps a running record of the various ways that speech gets regulated and contained through this platform which is owned by a company that once promised to do no evil. But more fundamentally, the site operates according to mechanisms of user-moderation which could not be more democratic in their conception: the public votes through its traffic (or in the case of other web 2.0 sites, through actual votes) to determine which content has the most merit with the result that content that attracts majority interest gets greater visibility. John McMurria did a post in Flow several years ago showing that the videos which got the highest visibility on YouTube were those by white adolescent males. I recently tried to discuss this issue with some technically oriented friends and they offered some predictible counter-arguments:

"Maybe white adolescent males represent the statistical majority of users on the site." Yes, that's likely the case, but then this only proves my point that there is a majoritarian bias built into the technology. John Stuart Mills told us a long time ago that the value of democratic institutions rests in the mechanisms they put in place to protect the rights of minorities at least as much as those that they create to insure majority rule. And in any case, we need to ask why this gap in participation exists rather than assuming that minority users simply aren't interested in producing and sharing videos.

"Yet minority content still circulates on these sites." True enough, and this goes back to the distinction I made in my earlier comments about the difference between "hush harbor" discourse within a minority community and discourse intended to reach a majority audience. Yet, unlike earlier kinds of "hush harbors," YouTube is highly porous with content fully accessible, for better or for worse, to those outside the core community, making it a risky site for fostering "black voice". That risk is personified by the comments posted on YouTube which are at best snarky and at worse hate speech. This brings us back to the Wright videos which were posted initially by those wanting to spread his message but got highjacked and decontextualized by other groups.

"Each user can set their filters anyway they want and thus can receive the content they desire." This falls back on a now aging rhetoric of "personalized media," which ignores the need to spread messages beyond your own community and overlooks the fact that digital communications exist in the shadow of still powerful forms of mass communications which insure that some messages reach everyone in society while others only reach those people who know how to find them. In that sense, the mechanisms that shape web 2.0 are forms of marginalization, not censorship, since they do not silence minority users, but their visibility depends on the whims of majority users.

Some will argue that YouTube was never intended as a platform for activism, critique, or pedagogy. It is simply a form of entertainment which allows more people to disperse content. And it is certainly the case that we have a much more diverse culture with YouTube in it than we would have in its absence. That's not to say, though, that those of us who care about participatory culture should not be critical in examining these new platforms as they emerge to make sure that they support as much diversity as possible. Nobody is talking about intentionally racist design, well, at least I'm not, yet in all technologies, there is a law of unintended consequences, which sometimes means that what you build gets picked up and used in ways you never imagined but may also mean that there may be hidden effects of the design which make it harder for some groups to deploy than others.

But let's look elsewhere to what would seem to be a much more promising venue. BlackPlanet.Com is an affinity portal which was established to serve the needs and interests of the African-American community. According to HitWise, it has the fourth highest traffic of all social network sites (following FaceBook and MySpace, etc.) and attracts a membership of more than 16.5 million users. We can compare that with your claim that specific black newspapers reached "hundreds of thousands" of readers and we have some sense of the potential impact of such a web portal. BlackPlanet reaches a larger segment of the black population of this country than ever read a black newspaper, so why is its political influence on the public sphere so much smaller?

I just got through reading a very strong dissertation written by an old friend, John Campbell, for UPenn: Campbell certainly finds on BlackPlanet and similar sites real potentials for community building and critical discussions, but also notes that they are run by companies which are pursuing their own economic interests that are not always aligned with the interests of their memberships. So, there is a push towards a greater focus on black celebrities or dating or personal improvement than there is on social critique and political debate.

Of course, the historic black newspapers were also commercial ventures and needed to make money in order to survive, but it is unlikely that they made that money by collecting and selling data on their user-bases, say. They would have been organizations which were at least as committed to their political causes as to their bottom line. And in your earlier examples, some of the most important sources of black critical perspectives came through publications that were sponsored by civil rights organizations and thus were funded more through political contributions than through advertising.

Even so, there would seem to be real potentials for sites like BlackPlanet to serve as mechanisms by which new forms of "freedom discourse" and alternative critical perspectives could emerge, if only because of the sheer number of users of color which are attracted there. Of course, we then have to confront the reality that there are significant class and race divides in terms of access to these digital technologies in the first place. There is of course the digital divide which has been discussed for the past twenty years. The digital divide has to do with limited access to the technologies. And we've responded to that concern through wiring schools and public libraries. But, then, as soon as they were wired, a series of moral panics have instigated more and more restrictions on how public-access computers can be used: mandatory filters which restrict certain kind of content (we ran into this recently because we discovered that many sites dealing with Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby-Dick, were being blocked on school library sites, because it used the word, "dick," hrrm, hrmm, in the title.), blocks on access to YouTube and other videosharing sites, and potential legislation always hanging over us that would block access to social networks (such as BlackPlanet) and blogging tools.

But at the end of the day, the obstacles are not simply technological: they are also social and cultural. This is what I mean by the participation gap. Some people feel welcomed into cyberspace and others feel excluded. Some have access to an informal network of folks who already know what they are doing online and can offer advice when you hit a wall, as happens to most of us on a regular basis, while those who know few who have spent time on line don't know where to turn for such advice, become frustrated, and walk away. The ability to participate still depends not only on having disposable income but also disposable time. And so forth. I would argue today that limited opportunities in the digital realm, in most areas of the country, have as much or more to do with this participation gap as with technical obstacles to access.

It must sound like I woke up in a really gloomy space this morning. Despite all of the above, I remain very optimistic about the ability of all kinds of minority groups to overcome some of these issues and to form powerful networked publics on line. I do believe that such new cultural institutions and practices can form the basis for strong critiques grounded in the "freedom discourse" tradition and that they can provide both opportunities for communication within and beyond the black community.

I would argue that as our world more and more embraces ideals of collective intelligence, as I discuss in Convergence Culture, then there is an absolute necessity to insure diversity of perspectives within the knowledge community. Collective intelligence starts from the premise that the more diverse the imputs, the more open the processes, the better the outcome. A society based on principles of collective intelligence can't just "celebrate diversity" every February, but needs to actively recruit and empower minority participants towards the common good. Yet, it is also clear that there need to be spaces where minorities can empower themselves through their own collective intelligence processes, identifying the best new ideas as well as the common interests and concerns of the community, without being swamped by other competing perspectives.

Some of this involves learning to deploy the tools and platforms that are already available. Some of this involves developing alternative institutions which reflect your own needs. And some of this involves the redesign of existing platforms to insure that they meet the needs of more diverse sets of users.

For the past few decades, there's been lots of talk that implies that digital platforms and tools are inevitably devices for democratization of our culture. Rather, they still need to be sites of critique and struggle if we are going to deploy them in ways that insures social justice.

The critique above is meant to help us to identify some of the key characteristics we might require if these platforms are going to support the formation of a counter-public where new critical discourses are to be formed and dispersed through black America. First, these platforms need to actively embrace diversity and not simply participation. We need to reject a tendency to talk about what the majority wants to see as if "the best content rises to the top." Instead, we need to think about alternative mechanisms which might insure that for any given topic, all of us have access to a diverse range of different perspectives.

We need to insure that we have platforms which support community use rather than individual expression, given how much the blogosphere can fragment rather than connect people.

We need to insure that at least some of the platforms get sponsored by groups who are not primarily motivated by economic interests but who also have political and social stakes in insuring access to the broadest number of people. (For example, we should be looking at how the construction trade unions you mention above might be supporting alternative platforms and institutions which might function as collective bargaining units within the digital realm.)

We need to couple the development of new tools with educational initiatives which help more Americans cross over the participation gap. And we have to insure that the platforms themselves are designed to entice and welcome new participants rather than remaining under the control of the most active and visible members of a community.

We need to develop hybrid systems which couple the spreading of content online with a social system which also spreads these same ideas and arguments to people who do not have access to the online world, just as in earlier times, "freedom discourse" was spread through oral as well as print-based channels. In so far as the digital networks are dominated by young people, we need to develop strategies which bring people together across generations, making sure that the wisdom of the old is coupled with the idealism and energy of the young. In so far as the current systems most often serve those who have the time and money to be able to use them, we need to create new social organizations which solicit and transmit the viewpoints of those who are locked by economic and cultural barriers from fully participating in those worlds.

For the forseeable future, we can't put all of our faith in digital media, because there are simply too many people who will be left behind. Rather, we have to focus more attention on understanding how information moves back and forth between digital and other channels of communication.

I'm hoping the conversation we've started here will inspire others to respond, suggesting alternative tools, platforms, and practices which may more fully achieve the goals you've identified here, pushing back or suggesting ways to work around the critiques we've offered of current institutions and policies. You've raised some core issues here which deserve a response.

Now let's turn this over to our readers.

Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support.

Abidjan Blog Camps

Théophile Kouamouo has long been one of Francophone Africa's leading bloggers. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Kouamouo is one of the founders of the Ivoire Blog network and started the wildly successful meme "Why I Blog About Africa." (Elia Varela Serra summarized many of the resulting responses in a two-part series on Global Voices.) Kouamouo is now trying to bring many more of his countrymen and women to the blogosphere by organizing a series of "blog camps" around Abidjan in which current Ivorian bloggers can discuss the issues affecting them and show new bloggers how to join their ranks. Kouamouo first proposed the idea on his blog back in August last year, which attracted a number of enthusiastic commenters supporting the idea. Blog Camps have a long history of attracting new citizens to the participatory net. A number of blog camps have taken place in India, including in Chennai in 2006 and, more recently, in Mumbai. Blogcamp CEE last October brought many new participants to the Russian-speaking blogosphere. For the most part, however, West Africa (and particularly Francophone West Africa) has been left out of the booming global blogosphere. That is starting to change. Panos West Africa, in partnership with Highway Africa and Global Voices, recently announced the winners of the Waxal - Blogging Africa Awards. Next year we can expect to find many more Ivorians on that list as Théophile Kouamouo sets out to organize a series of events that will bring dozens if not hundreds of Ivorians to the blogosphere. Abidjan Blog Camps will also promote more pan-African online interaction by teaming up with existing blog camp movements in Madagascar, Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, and South Africa.

Ceasefire Liberia

Just west of Ivory Coast lies Liberia and its roughly 3.5 million inhabitants. Settled by free slaves from the United States in the early 19th century, Liberia fell into a 14-year dark period of civil war and lawlessness that concluded in late 2003 with the presence of ECOWAS and the United Nations. Today Liberia is slowly recovering despite inadequate infrastructure, unemployment at around 80%, and former combatants (many of them minors) who must be re-integrated into society. Many unemployed Liberians have put their hopes in friends and relatives living abroad in the United States. However, there is often a lack of communication and understanding between Liberians at home and those living in the diaspora. By partnering with African Refuge - a drop-in center for West African youth - and the Century Dance Complex in Park Hill, Staten Island (the largest Liberian community outside of Africa), and Amnesty International in Monrovia, freelance journalist Ruthie Ackerman aims to help foster a transatlantic Liberian blogging community.

Those Liberians who lived through the war -- whether soldiers or not -- experienced some type of trauma or displacement. By creating a community and sharing experiences with others, it has helped give these youth a purpose and vision that there is something larger than themselves. This will benefit the community (on both sides of the ocean) on many levels: Liberians, many of whom have difficulty adjusting to life in America, can reconnect with their families and dispel myths about what life is like in the U.S. There are also left-over tensions from the war, which may be able to be diffused through the dialogue created between the communities.

Real Experience of the Digital Era - China

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Shenyang, literally meaning "the city to the north of Shen River" and capital of the Liaoning province, is touting itself as China's "next tourist destination." But whether you are visiting the ancient pagodas of Old City or the official "High-tech Industrial Development Zone" the tourist brochures won't mention the city's male and female sex workers who mostly come from poor rural communities in search of talked-up urban opportunities. In partnership with the Ai Zhi Yuan Zhu Center for Health and Education documentary filmmaker Wei Zhang will train male and female sex workers who use the AZYZ center how to maintain a blog and upload short video documentaries to share their experiences, opinions, and troubles in order to promote more understanding of the region's sex worker population.

Nomad Green - Mongolia

Environment officials from throughout Northeast Asia met in Ulaanbaatar this week for the first time to discuss climate change and how to enhance energy efficiency in the region. Mongolia's capital city was a fitting location for the meeting as the country's environmental deterioration has accelerated recently due to rapid urbanization, industrial growth, and increased coal consumption. Ulaanbaatar is frequently shrouded in a haze of thick pollution:

Desertification from climate change is threatening the livelihoods of nomadic Mongolian tribesmen and the country's saiga antelope was just named the most endangered antelope species in Asia. It is amid so much negative news that Portnoy Zheng, in collaboration with the Mongolian and Tibetan Foundation and the Mongolian Green Party, will train Mongolian citizens how to spread awareness - both at home and abroad - about their country's environmental crisis. Nomad Green aims to 1.) train citizen journalists how to use blogs, digital video, podcasts, and map mashups to report on environmental news, 2.) create a network and community of environmentalists sharing and spreading information about related threats, solutions, and opportunities, and 3.) translate content into Chinese and English to promote more regional and international cooperation in facing Mongolia's environmental challenges.

Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques - Yemen

With international coverage of the Middle East focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and the financial markets of the Persian Gulf States, little attention is given to one of the region's poorest countries, Yemen. The few spikes in media coverage of Yemen over the past few years are all related to fears of al-Qaida presence.

In collaboration with the Hand in Hand Initiative, Ghaida'a al-Absi will organize a new media training course for female politicians, activists, and human right workers in order to bring a new perspective to the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists. It is fitting that today, on the 98th anniversary of International Women's Day, we announce al-Absi's initiative to bring more women's voices to the internet. The deteriorating status of women's rights in Yemen is frequently documented and discussed, but rarely do women themselves take part in those discussions. By reaching out to NGO's and political parties throughout Yemen al-Absi aims to change that.

Please join me in congratulating and welcoming the newest five grantee projects to our community.

Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat. I was hoping for a quick fix.

I saw a Washington Post poll, reported on Inauguration Day, of black and white Americans asking their views on the persistence of racism in the US. Only 44% of African Americans polled said that racism is still a major problem. A majority of blacks said it was not (whites, true to past patterns, in large majorities said that racism is no longer a major problem). However, a follow up question asked whether the respondents still witnessed or experienced racism in their daily lives and a significant majority of African Americans said that little had changed for them in their local communities and in their daily experience of racism. Most blacks reported continuing denials of service and jobs, less access to housing, and racialized police harassment.

Yet, the majority of blacks interviewed chose to say that racism is no longer a major problem. I think that shows a pretty sophisticated parsing of the moment--its huge symbolic significance and its limited practical reach. I think that black responses to the poll suggest that perhaps patriotism, the flag, the Capital building, the White House, and other icons that have been very fraught for African Americans for a very long time, have a more elastic meaning than they did before this election. See, Funkadelics, "Chocolate City" for a longer and more danceable discussion of the cultural possibilities of a black presidency. I believe that this moment is not just an artifact of a black person having been elected: Obama's personal integrity, intelligence, political stance and skillful communication have done a lot to create it. And while this is not always the substance of freedom discourse, it certainly sets a welcoming stage.

Thinking about that welcoming stage, and in the vein of the barbershop comment you mentioned, there have been mountains of micro-gestures since the Inauguration that have gotten a lot of air time (mainly phone conversations in my case) in the black community but appear largely to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream. Small as they are, I have to say that these gestures have evoked very strong positive reactions for me and, I imagine, for many other African Americans. Rev. Joseph Lowery began his benediction with "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro National Anthem. He did not sing it. He simply spoke it as a prayer. He did not name it and the black audience at the Inauguration did not openly respond to it in the moment. Just a quiet reminder amongst the folks that this was Black President Day. Several friends sent me the links to it on You Tube. My heart leapt each time I heard it and I felt full of energy, optimism and even ambition. There was footage of the new President doing the Bump, a very popular dance in our college days. Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but these clips said to me that this man has shared cultural and social experiences that defined our coming of age as black people making our way as the first generation to integrate at some scale into elite white institutions. The quip was that he went home and played Parliament and the Funkadelics ("One Nation Under a Groove") in the (black) Inauguration after-party at the White House.

My black friends are also gleeful about the moment, replayed again and again in the press, when Biden is cutting up before the second swearing-in and Obama, deadpan, grabs his arm, turns him firmly in the direction of the podium and signals it is time to get to work. When I told a friend about it, a cultural linguist, he said, "thank you, that story is a gift." Another came from an unlikely source: Nancy Pelosi in her remarks first made reference to Malcolm X's "ballot or the bullet" before invoking King. Hmmm, interesting, that she began there.

Obviously these are each the smallest of gestures that could mean nothing. We can recall that Clinton, when first elected made a few choice micro-gestures: playing the saxophone, visiting black churches, showing obvious comfort in the company of blacks, even earning himself the now patently insulting moniker "first black president" in some circles--but in my view, he quickly squandered the trust and enthusiasm those signals generated when he failed to make a significant investment in urban policy, anti-poverty measures, civil rights laws and other matters important to blacks.

Yet, much in the same way that racism and degradation are often conveyed in tiny signals that over time crush the spirit, Obama's little moments, I think, so far are building hope and a sense that something might shift. They are creating space. I see a broad discourse now evolving, an Obama mythology celebrating his wisdom, principles, strength and resoluteness against the Republicans. His daily triumphs--one day against corporate greed, the next, his kids' Midwestern flintiness in the face of DC snow. I hear the stories again and again told by people hungry for strong humanist leadership and feeling relief as they begin taking stock of how bad things became under Bush. They speak of enjoying and sharing with friends the moments that are available on YouTube. I always participate in these happy exchanges, adding my own favorites--and of course I replay the savory moments on YouTube. This little ritual fixes the small daily victories in my mind and prepares me to continue the struggle another day.

The struggle. No surprise, as the Washington Post respondents testify, the real work of unwinding the racial privilege and disadvantage produced in the last several centuries continues and we need much more than symbols. The critical question for us, then, is can we fill this new space Obama is creating? Can we create or revive the practices, institutions, and discourses that you talk about, such that we might advance black freedom discourse, and through that, improve democracy? What might it actually look like to do so, and how might technology help?

Let's be specific. Everyone loves a good crisis (paraphrasing journalist, P. Sainath). The economic collapse and Obama stimulus package give us a chance to fix some of the more polarizing weaknesses of the New Deal which, with labor protections, mortgage and educational assistance, gave whites a powerful pathway back to the middle class and, by withholding these protections and benefits from black and brown, created new tools to entrench and racialize poverty. The stimulus will likely provide enough material aid to cities, where the majority of black and brown people live, to make some progress and Obama's powerful populist messaging inspires hope. At the same time, the money is coming fast and many of the current institutional arrangements, from community revitalization and workforce development protocols to banking practices to local government procurement policies will likely help reinforce the inequitable status quo.

Yet, a good chunk of the money to cities is infrastructure spending and, in an amazing turn, the Building Trades, once seen as among the most conservative and racially exclusive unions in the labor movement, have come to understand that the future of their unions as older white members begin retiring en masse in the next five years, is black and brown youth. They train 100,000 new workers a year and have made a commitment to open their doors to black and brown youth as the stimulus opens up the job market for their members. Finally, a lot some of the money is targeted for green infrastructure, an area so new that there may not be as much establishment in place to thwart opportunity.

What practices, institutions and discourses might help avoid the dangers and align the possibilities now arising to address poverty and exclusion in a fuller and deeper way? There are loads of community organizations in minority and white communities that will need to figure out right now how they will respond. What role could black freedom discourse and your idea of a "self-consciously multiracial and multicultural community of practice" have? How can the world of networked publics help here?

A customary black discourse about the dangers of this moment ("Remember, the New Deal threw us overboard") is entirely in keeping with the historic role of the freedom discourse to remind us that the best-laid plans can overlook or punish the vulnerable and despised. But historically the discourse coupled dire warnings with inspired hopes and perhaps the Obama presidency gives inspired hopes new grounding--not just in micro symbols but in a senior White House staff that includes black people who know the full, sad, history of the New Deal, lived the multi-generational consequences of its exclusions, and have the expertise and the authority to help avoid the same mistake. A Facebook network (my son created a page for me about a year ago and it remained completely inactive until last month when about 10 people my age sent me friend requests) like the one used to support Prop 8 in California could help build base support for their efforts, bringing pressure through on-line mobilization where they need it and pressuring them when they veer off.

But we need more to get this opportunity right. We have to figure out how to use new media to go beyond what, at its best, I think it currently does best for most people-- serving as an exchange for faith-sustaining or mobilizing stories.

We need vehicles to quickly transmit legislative developments and funding implications to networks of community organizations as the stimulus hits the states and cities.

We need technology-enabled learning environments to share lessons about implementing government funding programs and best practices in green building.

We need creative platforms for community groups to collectively discover overlooked local resources like brown fields that could be redeveloped, and then to collectively plan how to rebuild their neighborhoods.

And perhaps this is where your idea of consciously multiracial hush harbors comes in: we need spaces for older white workers to explore how they can find common identity and make common cause with the young black and brown turks coming into their hiring halls and apprenticeship programs.

I desperately hope that these ideas aren't just more of my ill-advised hope for a quick technology fix and that somewhere, better minds than mine are already at work on tools that can help these projects. What do you think?

The project aims to involve the participants - five day-laborers who use IDEPSCA as a resource center - in the design process. Rather than telling the participants how they should use their mobile phones, they have surveyed the day-laborers current mobile communication practices and their needs in order to collectively come up with new communication strategies that more effectively meet their needs. (Melissa Brough has a great write-up about participatory design in communication research, and another here.) In this way the academics get to avoid the nasty label of 'paternalistic residents of the ivory tower', the day laborers get free communication consultants, and Nokia gets to spread the wonders of the multimedia cell phone to a population that has yet to place its chips on the iPhone.

I began with my standard introduction to Global Voices and how it started out as a grassroots citizen media effort to both supplement and challenge mainstream media's international coverage. A few years in we then came up against three major obstacles: 1.) censorship was silencing voices we would otherwise amplify on the site, 2.) online linguistic barriers insulate communication among speakers of the same language, and 3.) most bloggers and podcasters are highly educated, upper-middle class and urban thus giving a skewed portrayal of national sentiment. Those three obstacles led, respectively, to the creation of GV Advocacy, Lingua, and Rising Voices.

Rising Voices began with the goal diversifying the viewpoints and content on the conversational web by including members of communities that have historically been excluded from both traditional and new media. However, we quickly came to realize that these projects should meet the needs of the members of the participating communities and not just the needs of international news junkies looking for a story that no one else knows about. Mobile Voices, I believe, came to the same realization. Rather than just changing popular perceptions of migrant workers, several of the participants mentioned their desire to use their mobile phones to find work and send out alerts about immigration raids.

Now the mobile blogging component of Mobile Voices is just one aspect of a project that could potentially include a mobile interface job board which links day laborers with contractors seeking workers with specific skills or time availability, and an alert system (probably based on Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS) which warns undocumented workers of immigration raids that affect them.

Currently there are five day laborers - Adolfo, Marcos, Manuel, "Crijm", and "ZamoraN" - participating in the pilot mobile blogging project. They document their daily lives by sending Gizmo-based voicemails, MMS, and text messages to a customized Drupal content management system. It is even possible to subscribe to the blog posts via SMS.

I am especially fond of Adolfo's mobile blogging as he is posting in both English and Spanish and uploads photographs of his research, metaphorical reflections, mind-numbing boredom, and grateful enthusiasm. (One of the motivations of these mobile bloggers is to show their family members back home what their life is like in Los Angeles.)

In many ways Mobile Voices is several steps ahead of anything we've tried to do thus far at Rising Voices. They are working with a community - undocumented migrant workers - that has a lot to lose if information about their locations and identities are made public to the police. (Imagine the scenario of a participant uploading a photograph of a building in Los Angeles, LAPD checking Mobile Voices, heading to the nearby location to ask the mobile blogger for proper documentation, and then deporting the blogger.) They are also working with a community that has little or no access to the internet and depends on basic cell phones to both produce and consume content.

Before concluding our discussion I offered three points of so-called "pushback" about their project:

1. First, if one of the objectives of the blogging component of the project is to challenge the negative stereotypes against migrant workers then how do they plan on reaching readers whose perception of day laborers has been unfairly shaped by biased programs like "Smile ... You're Under Arrest"? As it now stands the Mobile Voices blog will attract little attention outside of like-minded activists. This is the problem with online media: as content producers we want to reach new audiences that we otherwise wouldn't meet, but as content consumers we search for content that we are already interested in. One possible solution here is to reach out to so-called celebrity bloggers like Zadi Díaz and Xeni Jardin and ask them to put the content in front of readers who normally wouldn't search it out.
2. Second, there is an ethical consideration related to teaching citizen journalism techniques. When Joan, Stéphane, Lova, and Mialy taught their fellow Malagasy citizens how to become citizen journalists they had no idea that their country would soon "feel like a war movie." The bloggers trained by Foko Madagascar have become some of the most authoritative voices on their country's current political crisis. The more attention they receive for their frontline reporting, however, the more risk they are willing to take to get that photograph, video, or piece of information that no one else has. The danger of doing so was made depressingly clear when Ando, a news reporter and friend of the Foko bloggers, was killed last month. It just as easily could have been one of the Foko bloggers out to report on the latest development.
3. Finally, I question the need to spend so much time on developing a customized Drupal website in order to enable the same features which are already available on free commercial services like Brightkite. Similar to the custom site being developed, Brightkite also allows posting by MMS, text message, and email. You can also subscribe to the content of others (contacts or those near you) by SMS and/or email. I already know that the argument in favor of open source development is that anyone can take the code and build on it. However, this often comes at the cost of unsustained projects that are left without developers and without proper documentation.

With all that said, Mobile Voices is still on the cutting edge of adopting brand new technologies to help communities that we so often ignore and refuse to empathize with. I'm eager to see what comes out of their project and how their tools and lessons learned are adopted by others.

Wanting to bring this exchange to a larger audience, I asked Cunningham if she would be willing to engage in a written conversation which I could share with the readers of this blog. Such conversations across disciplinary and racial borders are rare these days even as the election of the first African-American president mandates that all of us re-examine our country's racial politics from whatever vantage point we may see the world. This exchange took place over more than a month's time. I will be sharing it here in four installments, hoping that each piece may spark further reflection and conversation within the community of people invested in better understanding the future of media and its impact on our society. What follows ranges from the history of the black press and the black church to speculations about the design of democratic structures in cyberspace.

Dayna Cunningham: It was great to have the opportunity to talk to your Comparative Media Studies class and pose questions about how new media might help to address the paradox I have been grappling with: the US has elected its first black president at a time when black institutions are weak and black civil society is in deep disarray. What will happen to black voice now that we have this black president? By black voice I mean in particular the longstanding tradition of bottom-up critique of American culture, society and democracy by one of its most despised groups.

Let me start by saying that from where I stand, collective discourse, debate, dissent and demand are crucially necessary for building the political will to advance African Americans' equity claims. Black voice is critical to this process. I am focused here on that part of black voice that prioritizes political strategies and collective action. Thus, I use the terms "black voice" and "freedom discourse" interchangeably. Because our struggles are counter-majoritarian, because therefore, the "sensible" thing to do is to ignore them and go on with the existing frameworks that make these struggles invisible, it is critical for black people to be able to come together and make sense of their conditions, determine what they want to change and then to figure out how they will make change. This is very different activity from supporting a particular candidate or even a legislative agenda. Electoral and legislative campaigns by definition demand cultivation of the white electoral majority's opinions and carry inherent risk that they will censure claims or interests that are unpleasant to that majority. Without a prior agenda-setting discourse enabling African American communities to arrive at some collective decisions about their shared future, I can't imagine either innovation in support of, or accountability to, black concerns.

Black voice stems from the schizophrenic daily experience of being un-free in a society that claims freedom as its first principle. Black voice provides a unique, and I would argue, necessary, perspective on the failures of American democratic institutions. Frederick Douglass, asked to address an abolitionist group on the subject of Independence Day, captured it best when he chose to "see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view:"

[Y]our high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . . The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. . ... This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.
You may rejoice, I must mourn. . ."

Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" July 5, 1852

Black voice has been shaped throughout its history by a vibrant and diverse intellectual and popular tradition with wide-ranging debate about black conditions and freedom strategies. From Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Movement in the mid-1800s, through the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and '70's, each successive wave of African American intellectual and political currents also was supported by organization in the black community that enabled discourse, agenda-setting and collective action. All of these elements were critical to the unfolding of black freedom movements. The multiple intellectual, political and cultural sub-currents that emerged from these movements also led to the formation of a diversity of local organizations and efforts.

Black voice cannot be separated from the black church and its prophetic tradition--an unsparing, scripturally-grounded moral judgment against the immoral exercise of power and a calling to account of the government and powerful institutions for mistreating the powerless. From Douglass, who compared the US to "a nation whose crimes. . . were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!" to King, who declared, "America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life," the African American hope for freedom is bound up with God's love of justice and there is little separation between the struggle for justice and the preaching of the word.

The African American press also played a crucial role in popularizing and deepening black freedom discourse and in inspiring collective black political action. The nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal began in 1827 with the declaration: 'We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.'' The Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier were among the largest national black newspapers, reaching circulation in the hundreds of thousands. The Defender was read extensively in the South, smuggled across the Mason/ Dixon line by black Pullman porters and entertainers, passed from person to person, and read aloud in barbershops and churches. Both the Defender and the Courier engaged in explicit and effective political campaigns such as the Defender's support of the Great Migration that saw the exodus of over 100,000 people from the South to Chicago, and the Courier's "Double V for Victory" campaign, joined by most of the other major black newspapers and advocating an end to racial repression in the US as the US fought fascism overseas.

In addition to the general circulation papers, many black political organizations had their own organs--the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, first published by WEB Dubois; Marcus Garvey's Negro World, and during the black power movement in the 1960s and '70s, black nationalist, Pan- Africanist or socialist papers. These publications at times reached circulation in the hundreds of thousands with polemics about the relative advantages of various ideologies for addressing the conditions of African Americans and featuring sharp political debates on critical issues from segregation and joblessness, police brutality and education system failures to southern African freedom movements, and the war in Vietnam.

The great diversity and pervasiveness of black freedom discourse throughout helps to explain the generally progressive bent of African American politics today. However, I would argue that today, black politics has largely been reduced to the electoral and legislative spheres; African American media too often promote black celebrity and individual advancement, and along with much of the black civic infrastructure, rarely focus on freedom discourse as a means of exploring strategies for collective political action and accountability to black interests. Perhaps only the Church has survived as an independent space for black voice--and even the Church is sometimes compromised by "prosperity gospel" preachers who have little time for freedom discourse . Moreover, the uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, (whose preaching that the US risked damnation as a result of its role in the Gulf War was not unlike King's prophesizing that America would be damned for its failure to address poverty, or for that matter, King's condemnation of the US role in Vietnam) silenced even the progressive black Church for the duration of this election. While every white Democratic presidential hopeful in memory has, as a matter of course, cultivated highly visible relationships with black clergy, Obama, was forced to renounce his ties. More than an attempt to alienate whites and to cut Obama off from his core base, many African Americans saw this as an effort to de-legitimate black voice.

Has Obama's election signaled the dawn of a post-racial moment in which black voice no longer is relevant or necessary? Not likely. African American progress has ground to a halt since the early 1970s, coinciding with a series of policy assaults that shifted massive state and federal resources from increasingly-black cities to suburbs. These policy assaults, cutting social advancement while criminalizing poverty, occurred during Democratic as well as Republican administrations and at all levels of government regardless of the presence of black elected officials. Black elected officials continue to be isolated on major policy issues of concern to black communities within federal and state legislatures. These conditions and political dilemmas are structural in our majoritarian polity and are unlikely to change significantly with the election of a black president. The majority of whites did not support Obama (according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, McCain/Palin carried the white popular vote nationally, 55-43 percent). They are even less likely to support the kinds of radical policy interventions needed to reverse the last thirty years' conscious and systematic disinvestment in black communities. Without a revivified black freedom discourse and politically energized black public that articulate and press for accountability to its
legitimate claims and join forces with immigrants and other dispossessed groups also struggling for a foothold of inclusion in US society, such interventions will never happen.

Has Obama's campaign, now being institutionalized as an ongoing organization, with its highly effective organization, social networking, face-to-face outreach, and vast fundraising capabilities, rendered black civic space obsolete? Can it substitute for black black freedome discourse? If not the Obama post-election process, where will the new spaces for black freedom discourse exist?

I would argue that though it will create rich opportunities for people to gain political experience and to engage in important forms of collective action, the Obama post-election process is unlikely to be a sound substitute for the political process of black freedom discourse. Like the campaign, singularly focused on electing the candidate, an ongoing effort to support his presidential initiatives is unlikely to be structured to invite discourse, debate, dissent or demand. How would it provide opportunities for people to hear a range of policy proposals and decide which ones they prefer? How would it enable debate? How would it give access to deeply marginalized black voices--gang-involved kids, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, HIV/AIDS survivors? What if important sectors of black communities fundamentally disagree with the first black president on issues of great urgency and concern to them? What if Pres. Obama wants to do the right thing but needs public pressure to accede?

The need for a 21st century freedom discourse is paramount. The Obama campaign proved that the connection of media technology and organizing holds much promise for constructing electoral movements. Now, how can that technology help us construct new spaces for black and other subaltern voice? Which tools and platforms will help collective deliberation and debate, not just aggregate or pass on information? What venues and mechanisms will aid formation of political identities of dispersed and despised groups? How can these groups find opportunities for speech back to the majority? On these questions, Henry, I look to you and your colleagues for help.

Dayna L. Cunningham is Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab at MIT. CoLab is a center of research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Planning. Combining on-the-ground planning and development expertise of DUSP faculty and students with local community knowledge, CoLab helps community residents and leaders create innovative experiments and living examples that address urban sustainability challenges. In 2006-2007, Cunningham directed the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, ngos and government that seeks to use processes of profound innovation to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Cunningham is a 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law.