New Tools for News Gathering

New Tools for News Gathering

Combining traditional shoe-leather reporting with the wealth of digital services now available can make the difference between a good and a great reporter

Local reporters are the ground troops of the journalism world. Armed with their notebooks and tenacity, they are often first to the scene when news breaks, slogging it out in the trenches to serve their communities and cover the stories other outlets ignore.

That commitment to shoe-leather reporting and a bulging contact book will always be the cornerstone of good journalism, but social media provides an ever-widening scope to find stories and sources that might otherwise slip through the net. The digital sphere does, of course, bring a new world of challenges as well.

Here are 10 ways local reporters can get ahead and meet their communities online.

Twitter Lists

Twitter is still the king of real-time information, so it’s worth getting to grips with what sets the power users apart: lists.

If you don’t have any lists set up for your beat the best place to start is to look at other people’s, and you can do this with a relatively simple search.

Want lists for Sunderland? Or Gainesville? Or Dhaka? Try this in Google’s search bar:

“site:twitter.com/*/lists/Manchester”

The star there basically tells the search engine to fill in the blanks of the search term, so when it is in the space for a Twitter username it will return any public list with “Manchester” in the title.

Have a look through other people’s lists and follow the ones that seem worth it, but also keep an eye on who features regularly across the lists or who shares information relative to your beat and start building your own list. From there, you can see who those accounts retweet regularly and refine your list to make it the perfect source of information for you.

But what if there aren’t any public lists for your area? Try using Followerwonk to search Twitter bios for mention of your local area and add them to a list of your own.

Tweetdeck

Every journalist who works online should really be using Tweetdeck. It lets you build a dashboard of columns to monitor multiple feeds and timelines all in one go – perfect for those local lists.

Lists won’t necessarily catch all the chatter though, so it’s worth setting up a couple of columns with customised searches. The best way to break down newsgathering on social media is into keyword and geolocation, and an obvious place to start is with the name of the place itself.

Street names and landmarks are also worth a shot, both with hashtags and without, but it’s important to remember how people speak when news breaks. Journalists think in keywords – “car crash on fifth avenue” – but someone who was at the scene is much more likely to tweet something along the lines of “OMG two cars just smashed into each other right in front of me”.

First-person pronouns (me, my, I), exclamations, swear words and keywords like “shooting” or earthquake”, for example, are all more likely to return tweets relevant to news.

Twitter’s EMEA lead for Moments Joanna Geary wrote a great guide for journalists using the platform in the build up to the UK election last year, and it can help to have a basic understanding of Boolean search for further tweaking.

But you can also use Tweetdeck to search for tweets geotagged to specific locations.

Right-click on a location in Google Maps and select “What’s here?” to see the lat/long co-ordinates, then enter these into Tweetdeck’s search bar – with “near:” and removing the space in the middle – to see tweets tagged to that location.

Precisely how far the search area around the specific point extends is unclear, so it helps to set the radius yourself using “within:” and a distance in miles.

You can then use the column options in Tweetdeck to filter your results to tweets with pictures and video or the number of retweets or likes a tweet has, if necessary.

When a gunman opened fire at the Umpqua Community College in October 2015, a geolocated search with “omg OR wtf AND shooting AND campus” would have found the following tweet:

Combining these geolocation tricks in Tweetdeck with location or story keywords can help to find relevant tweets and contacts, but it may also be too noisy to be useful. Tweak the settings and combinations until you find something that works for you.

Geolocation

Talking of geolocation, Twitter isn’t the only social network that uses GPS to let users show where they are. Instagram, Flickr, the Russian network VKontakte and the Chinese Sina Weibo all have geotagging, among others.

Yomapic and Echosec are great free tools for searching by location, returning posts from Instagram and Vkontakte or Twitter and Flickr respectively. Choose a point on the map and either draw a search area or select a radius and the websites will return posts and images in that location.

There are much more powerful options available but they come with a price. Geofeedia and SAM Desk are both used by news organisations around the world for their features and add-ons including newsgathering, verification and curation across a range of social networks. But they are only really practical for those with big enough audiences (and wallets) to pay for it.

Facebook

As the biggest social network in the world, Facebook has the potential to help journalists find stories and contacts like no other. But after severely limiting public access to its Graph Search – “a privacy nightmare” – the options for searching and newsgathering have been severely restricted.

Zuckerberg and co introduced Signal as a “discovery and curation tool for journalists” back in September 2015 but the dashboard has many limitations and is intensely US-focussed, despite the region comprising just 17 per cent of the global Facebook community.

So what can we do?

Groups and interest lists are perhaps the best way to monitor communities and pages on Facebook for stories. Set up an interest list by clicking on ‘Interests’ in the Facebook side bar and then add Pages to the list around a relevant topic, like this one for media industry news. The result is a customised newsfeed, much like a Twitter list but for Facebook, displaying chronologically-listed posts from the select pages.

Monitoring official pages is only useful to an extent, however, so getting involved in groups and communities where people discuss their gripes and grievances can bring undisclosed stories to light. Search Facebook for a specific location or topic before selecting ‘groups’ from the results and browse through the groups available.

Now, Facebook may have shut down the public access for its Graph Search but that doesn’t mean it is no longer accessible. Michael Bazzell of the open-source intelligence website Intel Techniques has built a powerful and – frankly – terrifying search tool that works in a similar way to the old graph search.

Using tools like this can raise some serious ethical questions however, so don’t be surprised if a source is shocked you managed to find out information from their Facebook profile they thought was hidden.

Instagram

Instagram eclipsed Twitter in terms of regular users back in September 2015, and is the social network of choice for many young, visually-minded members of the global digital community.

You can organise Instagram accounts into specific lists, like on Twitter or Facebook, with Iconosquare. Once signed up, go to ‘My Followings’ in the menu and organise accounts you follow into specific groups before viewing each group as a timeline in itself.

You can search Instagram with Iconosquare, but Gramfeed is a more powerful platform for diving deep into Instagram, working like a dashboard to search for posts by hashtag, user account, keyword or location.

If This Then That

If This Then That (commonly referred to as IFTTT, or just IF) is a brilliantly simple and effective way to automate a lot of online habits or practices, like the robot butler you never knew you needed.

If following an event like a protest or political speech, IF can automatically build Twitter lists from everyone who tweets on a hashtag; it can save the tweets on a hashtag to a Google Doc; or even email you a daily digest of all tweets from a specific location. It can do most of that for Instagram as well, and can also combine with Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Reddit and scores of other platforms or services.

Sign up and create ‘recipes’ between different services like the above, or browse the thousands of recipes already created by users to see what else is possible.

It is worth remembering, though, that IF will do exactly what you tell it to do without the added nuance of a human touch. Automation is great up to a point, but set the parameters too broadly and you may struggle to find a newsworthy signal in all that social noise.

Get The Approach Right

There has been a backlash from the public around how journalists approaching sources on social media in recent months. That tweet about the UCC shooting mentioned earlier received dozens of replies from reporters asking to contact, and hundreds more from other Twitter users furious with reporters who were just trying to do their job.

It is a sensitive and difficult issue that is still being refined. But first and foremost, don’t be an egg.

This Twitter user is actually a fairly senior journalist at a local news paper in a major city, but there is nothing on their profile to signify this except regular requests to use pictures. Their approach is the digital equivalent of donning a balaclava and knocking on a stranger’s door to politely ask if they can borrow a cup of sugar.

So include a photo and a bit of personal information and if you are not a regular Twitter user, just share stories from your publication. You could even use IF to retweet your publication’s main account.

For the approach itself, most news organisations use some combination of being friendly; ascertaining whether the user captured the image; whether they can use and exhibiting genuine concern for what the witness has been through.

What many still leave out, however, is taking the conversation out of the public sphere. If you can get that person into a conversation in a direct message, email or on the phone you can find out so much more than you can in a quick note on a social network. And that rapport building is where the journalist’s skill lies.

Verify, Verify, Verify

There are two main reasons people share misinformation on social media: to gain followers by posting outrageous but believable claims, or to intentionally derail the news agenda. The journalist’s job is to report the truth, so it goes without saying that it is important to treat any claims seen online with the same healthy skepticism you would from a phone call or face-to-face conversation.

This doesn’t always happen though. In recent weeks, major news organisations published old footage of flight turbulence as if it were new and a staged video of a travel vlogger suffering a fish to the face during a storm, to name just a couple of examples.

There were some caveats questioning the truth of the latter in some publications, but the same doesn’t always happen in far more important stories. Both the San Bernardino shooting and Paris attacks of 2015 resulted in unverified falsehoods published or broadcast by news outlets.

Most news outlet questioned whether this video from a travel vlogger was true, but others claimed it was a “weather girl” in Wales. The direction the fish enters the shot compared to the direction of the waves and the fact it appear to be already gutted are just some red flags to its veracity.

We’ve got a whole section dedicated to verification reads and resources here at First Draft News, but the fundamentals are to establish the source, the date and location of an image. Find the original uploader of a picture or video, check out their social media history to see if there are inconsistencies with what they claim and try to speak to them.

You can print out our Visual Verification Guide to keep or your desk on in your pocket for quick reference as well.

Credit Sources Properly

You might be able to download an image with as much as a right-click, but the person who took it is still the copyright holder and should be credited accordingly. According to Storyful, the social newswire which has built a business on finding and licensing newsworthy images from social media to news outlets, the “vast majority” of online sources just want a credit.

Speaking to the source to establish how they want to be credited is vital and can lead to more information than a picture or video can provide, but journalists still have a responsibility to their sources.

An eyewitness to the Shoreham air disaster in the UK last August can be heard laughing in his video of cars and bodies burning in the streets. Having just witnessed a fighter jet smash into a busy road the man is obviously in shock, but some outlets published the audio and his account details, leading to “serious abuse” on Twitter.

Journalists should be more aware of the repercussions that going public like this can have, and can protect their sources from burning in the fire of publicity or, in some countries, put in very real danger.

Build a Sense of Community

Giving online sources the same respect as offline sources can not only ensure their safety and get you closer to the story, but also means they could be sources for other stories further down the line. Reporters spend a lot of time and effort cultivating their sources and developing their contact book with people they meet face to face, and the same can be true of people met online. It can be as simple as following up on stories, checking in to see if someone is ok following an accident or other trauma, or being active in online communities which may yield stories.

It is that community element that has always driven local reporting. Social media has turned journalism into a conversation rather than simply a broadcast medium, and although that has more often been true in the past among local media compared to the national press, combining traditional skills with new digital services can make the difference between just getting the story and making journalism a positive force in the community.

Characteristics of Journalists in the Internet Age

Characteristics of Journalists in the Internet Age

Journalism is changing: technologically, commercially, in the media, in the formats, in business models. So it is quite natural that the very role of journalists must be renewed and adapted to the unavoidable reality.

But first, we must understand what a journalist is and does:

Journalism is the profession of writing or communicating, formally employed by publications and broadcasters, for the benefit of a particular community of people. The writer or journalist is expected to use facts to describe events, ideas, or issues that are relevant to the public. Journalists (also known as news analysts, reporters, and correspondents) gather information, and broadcast it so we remain informed about local, state, national, and international events. They can also present their points of view on current issues and report on the actions of the government, public officials, corporate executives, interest groups, media houses, and those who hold social power or authority.

The new changes demanded by the job:

1- A journalist must know how to work for different media.  He must be multi-skilled and master different languages.

It’ a matter of professional survival. If being an expert in a medium is an added value, it is also essencial that we can adapt to others, just in case we’re caught up in a company restructuring. Besides, that multitasking is very useful in this age of media convergence: a journalist with good radio skills can take the production of his newspapers podcast, or use his photographic qualities to illustrate the news in his station’s website.

2-A journalist is his own editor.

Calm down, i’m not promoting the newsroom anarchy. But editorial independence is needed in these times where the news is published immediately, as breaking news or via Twitter, calling for a faster response time.  Staff cuts and new newsrooms organization -telework, for instance- promote that autonomy.  But the weight of responsibility increases.

3-A journalist is a brand.

And his own product. If the job market is volatile, freelancing is an option (as it has always been). To value himself, a journalist must know how to sell his work: by creating off-work contents – blogs, photo galleries, slideshows, videos, flash experiments ,podcasts, etc. It is fundamental to have an entrepreneurial attitude, and know how to highlight his individuality. Personal marketing weighs in here, in the way your CV/Resume and  portfolio and also the profile in social networks is presented. Besides, it becomes more easy for the audience to associate the work to the worker, which humanizes the professional and the company he works for. Proactivity is a characteristic that all good journalists must have, but is of utmost importance in a world that allows to create  your own projects with low costs.

4-A journalist must network.

It had to before, but there were geographical limitations, social and economical factors , and a whole sort of real world constraints. Online, the limit is in the number and the value of the contacts one has. A well set up professional network can increase recognition and it allows to reach out to more sources and get help.

5-A journalist is a producer.

The age of typewriters is long gone, so we need to know something more than writing. Now  programming and video,audio, photography, design knowledge are demanded, to develop multimedia works on your own or to effectively communicate when working as a team.  And we can get  that knowledge online. The final result may no longer be a text, but a multimedia package, that we must know how to make, or explain.

6-A journalist is an information archaeologist.

Think of yourselves as explorers, digital Indiana Jones. There is room for new types of journalism, driven by database use or using links to older news related to the subject we’re covering. It’s part of the new role of journalists to select, cross, select and use other sources -even from the competition- from different times, simultaneously and immediately, to explain the evolution or to frame a story.  And the web is full of information for those who know how to look it up and use it.

7-A journalist is a moderator.

The journalist is the bridge between users, the newsroom and the story’s characters. Through managing the comments of the article, crowdsourcing, and collaborating with the readers, the journalist can add value to the first published draft. We must understand that a story isn’t finished after being published, there is always  more data that can help to improve the understanding of the facts. So, it’s  part of the role of the journalist to feed, gather and filter the dialogue that now is sustained with the users, and incorporate it in the final result.

8-A journalist is a authenticator.

Amid all the user generated content and contributions is up to the journalist to verify and validate what is news or not. Fact checking is still a part of the job, but now it has a bigger importance because of the immediate impact a wrong information can have, because it spreads faster and further. This is a good example.

9-A journalist is more a traffic cop than a private investigator.

Or even better:  there will be more traffic cops than private investigators.. .I’m sorry to destroy a romantic image of journalism, but there will be less Humphrey Bogarts, the rise in the volume of information will demand for more traffic managers. Their role will be essential to guide the masses in the search for information. Sites like NewsTrust.net are a good example. Journalistic creation and investigation will continue to exist, but most of the work will be redirecting users and contents into the right places.

10-A journalist is a DJ.

Remixes and makes the news flow coherent.

…and 5 things that haven’t changed:

1-A journalist is a professional specialized in gathering, treating, creating and managing information;

2-A journalist works for society;

3-A journalist is curious by nature, and tries to know more than what is showed;

4-A journalist is the first defender of freedom of speech and information;

5-A journalist is a target;

ICT and Social Inclusion

ICT and Social Inclusion

Thinking about the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for social inclusion (eInclusion) from the vantage point of social capital can make existing initiatives for bridging digital divides more effective. This approach also points to new strategies that could better harness the power of ICT for social inclusion in a wider sense. Thus, social capital provides a promising conceptual framework and policy tool to support the implementation of the European Union policy agenda for eInclusion, as most prominently articulated in the June 2006 Riga Ministerial Declaration on eInclusion.

What is social capital?

Social capital refers to the extent, nature and quality of social ties that individuals or communities can mobilize in conducting their affairs. Social capital is not a new concept, but gained prominence in the policy arena in the late 1980s, when it found its way into many policy programmes for social integration and cohesion in North America and Europe. How does social capital relate to social inclusion? A robust and growing body of empirical research confirms that: a lack of social interconnectedness is, in itself, an important dimension of individual deprivation. Exclusion is not only a matter of poverty or a lack of material resources. Social isolation poses risks to individual well-being and health, as well as social cohesion. This makes the strengthening of social capital within groups at risk of social isolation an important aim for social inclusion efforts; social capital facilitates learning and the acquisition of skills. Learning is a social process and social networks and communities of practices are indispensable spaces for informal learning, providing opportunities for individuals to seek advice, discuss ideas and upgrade their work-related and other skills; ƒ social capital creates economic opportunities. It helps individuals to find a job, enhances their employability and productivity and generates the trust and reciprocity between co-workers and business partners required for efficient markets; and, social capital stimulates political participation, civil engagement and community governance. Ties between friends and colleagues are found to be important motivating structures for civil engagement.

To sum up, social capital is an important objective and cross-cutting policy tool for addressing some of the root causes of social exclusion. It can serve as an early warning diagnostic to detect a breakdown of social cohesion and the onset of individual alienation. It also directs attention to the various bottom-up networks, community initiatives and other civil society organisations that can be mobilized for outreach and inclusion efforts. How can social capital inform and support e-Inclusion efforts?

Mirroring the multiple interlinkages between social capital and social inclusion, a social capital approach promises to enhance the design and implementation of eInclusion initiatives at various levels:  At conceptual level, it helps us to better understand how ICTs are adopted and ICT skills are learnt in social learning environments, thereby providing guidance for making ICT literacy and skill initiatives more effective; At the programme level, it puts the support of social networking aided by ICT firmly on the eInclusion agenda. It also emphasizes the significant opportunities offered by a new generation of increasingly popular ICT-led social networking tools and platforms, commonly labelled as Web 2.0, for fostering social capital formation and inclusion. At the same time, it alerts us to the challenge to make these emerging online meeting spaces and tools accessible for all;  At the operational level, it directs attention to the pivotal role of civil society and bottom-up community initiatives in reaching out to people at risk of exclusion. Civil society and bottom-up community initiatives are indispensable partners in the design and implementation of social inclusion initiatives, including eInclusion efforts. 

At the service design level, it leads to the insight that individual citizens often interact with online public services via networks of intermediaries. As a consequence, the design of such online services needs to take into account the information needs of this additional client group of private or civil societybased intermediaries. What does this mean in practice? Experiments with social capital informed approaches to eInclusion are being carried out in many countries. Examples with regard to ICT literacy initiatives include the use of peer trainers and peer learning in day activity centres in Denmark or the use of existing youth workers as ICT teachers for disadvantaged young people in youth centres in Germany. Support for online 10 self-help groups and communities of practice for care givers and support groups is a central element in some active ageing initiatives in Finland, while a web project in the Netherlands catalyzes the networking and social integration of ethnic communities through the provision of a very popular online discussion space and news service for North African immigrants.

Moreover, with regard to reaching out to target groups and supporting their social networking, e-Inclusion efforts can also take a cue from the private sector which has recognized the importance of new online meeting spaces and is setting up a virtual presence to become visible and engage more closely with target audiences. This strategy might also help the designers of online public services and elected representatives to reconnect with specific client groups, such as young people, that are difficult to reach and motivate through established communication channels. These examples illustrate the breadth and diversity of current social capital informed approaches to eInclusion. They confirm that a social capital approach aligns itself very closely with the European eInclusion agenda, which aims not only to combat social exclusion in its various dimensions with the help of ICT but also seeks to prevent new generations of ICT from generating new socio-economic disparities. Early evidence points to encouragingly positive outcomes for these social-capitalinformed projects and suggests a wider application of the social capital perspective for eInclusion, which in turn will require a more systematic stock-tacking and comparison of innovative projects and emerging good practice in this area.

ICT and social networks

Early speculations and rather anecdotal evidence tended to view the impact of a new generation of ICTs, such as the Internet, as quite negatively and suspected that ICT would follow in the footsteps of television and precipitate a further erosion of social capital. However, more recent and more grounded empirical investigations convey quite conclusively a different message: far from undermining the formation of social capital ICTs are found to enable individuals to thicken existing ties and generate new ones.

ICT in the form of mobile phones or email, for example, are used to stay better in touch with close friends and family members, making it possible to retain close communication while meeting increased demands for mobility, or, through enabling teleworking arrangements, reducing the need to spend time outside the family home in the first place. At the same time, ICT in the form of interest-oriented online discussion groups or networking spaces come in handy to develop more new ties to like-minded people in what are looser, more fluid, differentiated, interest-based, elective and far-flung networks for a wide variety of purposes, including professional skill and career networks, common hobbies and socializing or self-help groups to cope with specific problems. A growing number of studies confirm this enhancing and transformative impact of ICT on social capital.

ICT and local communities The question remains whether this transformative impact might have a negative effect on one particular type of social capital, the social ties within a geographically defined, local neighbourhood. Although no conclusive evidence is available there are also reasons to believe that ICT has the potential to enrich rather than to undermine local life for several reasons.

Despite its virtual, borderless image, it is estimated that up to 80% of the information available on the Internet has a place-bound geographic aspect to it. Most communication and networking tools provided by ICT do scale. This means they can handle the networking needs of small and large communities alike and make it possible for local networks to expand and interlink with other local communities, thereby supporting bridging and linking social capital and enhancing the networking and collaboration opportunities for local networks.

A new generation of ICT applications and business models are built on unlocking the power of the Internet for local neighbourhoods. New geographic information platforms such as Google Earth, make it possible to visualize, annotate and share local information of all types with unprecedented ease and effectiveness. New local search tools have emerged that help to better target searches and retrieve locally-relevant information from the online space. Finally, local online marketing is viewed as a major untapped revenue source for websites and therefore has evolved into a major incentive for innovation and experimentation in online publishing to develop locally targeted content collections. All these trends conspire to make the Internet and the information and applications that it provides more place-sensitive and more relevant for local communities and their information needs.

ICT-enabled opportunities for social capital

There is ample evidence to suggest that ICTs are helping to expand, transform and diversify social capital. And they do so by providing: Tools for communication and collaborative information sharing, ranging from simple email to interactive publishing tools such as blogs and to sophisticated collaborative work platforms that allow to jointly create, annotate and share information items, such as wikis or social tagging applications. Meeting spaces, where like-minded people can gather and socialize. These online spaces started with the bulletin boards of the early internet, then morphed into tens of thousands of thematic discussion groups carried by Usenet or on websites and are by now developing into sophisticated multimedia online social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook populated by well over hundred million users and their networks of friends, as well as increasingly popular virtual words such as Second Life that mimic ambient aspects of real environments and enable participants to develop sophisticated online alter-egos. Collaborative projects that serve as attractors to bring together volunteers and seed networks around initiatives to share Internet connectivity, to jointly develop software (e.g. thousands of open source projects), or to build online content resources (e.g. the Wikipedia project to build an online encyclopaedia currently with 67,000 active contributors working on over 4,6 million articles in more than 100 languages.1 multimedia online social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook populated by well over hundred million users and their networks of friends, as well as increasingly popular virtual words such as Second Life that mimic ambient aspects of real environments and enable participants to develop sophisticated online alter-egos. 

Collaborative projects that serve as attractors to bring together volunteers and seed networks around initiatives to share Internet connectivity18, to jointly develop software (e.g. thousands of open source projects), or to build online content resources (e.g. the Wikipedia project to build an online encyclopaedia currently with 67,000 active contributors working on over 4,6 million articles in more than 100 languages.

A big challenge from benefits for the few to benefits for all

However there is another important message that clearly emerges from the literature. All these opportunities for building and expanding social capital with ICT are currently benefiting mainly those that are already privileged and well-endowed with social capital in the first place. Growing evidence suggests that it is the already highly educated and professionally advanced that use ICT to enhance their skills and network for career advancement, that it is the already politically engaged that harness online tools for mobilizing and civic participation, that it is the already well informed and well networked that actively seek out common interest groups online and fresh information resources of relevance to their lives. At the same time, the provision of ICT left to the market alone and its appropriation taking place in the context of existing socio-economic inequities does not make ICT work for expanding social capital of the marginalized and disadvantaged. New ICT are unlikely to link-up people with low networking skills, are unlikely to create networks from scratch where there are no pre-existing motivations and are unlikely to build ties and bridges across diverse communities with differing interest.

In a nutshell, without enabling policy measures and dedicated eInclusion efforts it is not possible to fully and equitably realize the significant opportunities that ICT presents for strengthening social capital and the concomitant opportunities for improving individual lives, prosperity and communal cohesion.

Gender and ICT

Gender and ICT

We would be justified in saying that one of the most potent forces shaping the 21st century are the new Information and Communication Technologies. Their revolutionary impact affects the way we live, learn, work, spend our leisure time, and communicate. ICTs are becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. They have the potential to enable many enterprising individuals, firms, communities, in all parts of the planet, to address economic and social challenges with greater efficiency and imagination. While ICTs and the Internet offer vast, new and unprecedented opportunities for human development and empowerment in areas ranging from education and the environment to healthcare and business, they are also one of the key contributing factors to social and economic disparities across different social and economic groups. The gender divide is one of the most significant inequalities to be amplified by the digital revolution, and cuts across all social and income groups. Throughout the world, women face serious challenges that are not only economic but social as well as cultural – obstacles that limit or prevent their access to, use of, and benefits from ICTs. Improved understanding and awareness of these challenges, but most importantly of the opportunities that ICTs could provide for women, are important steps towards bridging the gender digital divide and towards transforming it into digital opportunity. The involvement and engagement of women in the Information Society on an equal footing with men will directly contribute to improving the livelihood of people, making it more sustainable and thereby promoting the social and economic advancement of societies.

Use of Radio Networking in Brazil

CEMINA (Communication, Education, and Information on Gender)b is a Brazilian organization with the mission of improving education on gender equality, health and environment issues and strengthening poor women’s rights and citizenship through the use of radio. In 1995, a group of women’s radio programmes founded the Women’s Radio Network, which includes 400 women’s radio programmes distributed across Brazil reaching thousands of listeners located in the poorest communities. CEMINA is committed to integrating the Internet into a more traditional media that people are already familiar with in order to address cultural barriers which constitute a major challenge to overcoming the gender digital divide. CEMINA aims to empower women communicators by providing them access to the Internet through the creation of community radio telecentres and a defined space on the Internet with gender content.

Women represent the main economic force in most developing countries. As economies become more and more information-driven, the issues of women’s access to and use of ICTs is growing in importance for both 5 Preface developed and developing economies. The ease with which information and communication technologies can transmit and disseminate information for development is well recognized. But women’s access for women to ICTs cannot be assumed to occur “naturally” when gender-blind approaches and technologies are implemented. As a result of profound, gendered applications and implications of ICTs in employment, education, training and other areas of life, women need encouragement and support to take their rightful place in the information revolution. Women are underrepresented in all decision-making structures in the ICT sector, and this undermines the negotiation of gender-sensitive investment decisions and introduction of innovative patterns, policies and standards in the ICT sector. Equitable access to ICTs and the autonomy to receive and produce information relevant to women’s needs and concerns are central to women’s empowerment, and to the construction of an Information Society for all.

Mobile Phones for Rural Women in Senegal

The Senegalese telephone company Sonatel, and Manobi, a French company, provided cell phones with Web Access Protocol (WAP) to rural women agricultural producers in Senegal, thereby extending their access to the Internet. This technology helped women obtain information about market prices of the inputs for their food processing activities and for the sale of their produce. The women preferred cell phones to computers because of the ease of transport. Women in the project appreciated the economic benefits of the technology, and other women were interested in becoming part of the project.

ICTs are understood to include computers, the rapidly changing communications technologies (including radio, television, mobile telephony and Internet), networking and data processing capabilities, and the software for using the technologies. ICTs provide us with the capacity to harness, access and apply information and disseminate knowledge in all kinds of human activities, thus giving rise to the information- or knowledge-based economies and societies. These have the potential to create new types of economic activity and employment opportunities, thereby improving the quality of daily life. For example, ICTs are changing the way business operates through e-commerce applications, and have brought improvements in health-care delivery. As an information and knowledge-based tool, ICTs can enhance networking, participation, and advocacy within society. They also have the potential to improve interaction between governments and their citizens, fostering transparency and accountability in governance as a result. Information and communication technologies could give a major boost to the economic, political and social empowerment of women, and the promotion of gender equality. But that potential will only be realized if the gender dimensions of the Information Society – in terms of users’ needs, conditions of access, policies, applications and regulatory frameworks – are properly understood and adequately addressed by all stakeholders. Poverty, illiteracy, lack of computer literacy and language barriers are among the factors impeding access to the ICT infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and these problems are particularly acute for women. But women’s access to ICTs is constrained by factors that go beyond issues of technological infrastructure and socio-economic environment. Socially and culturally constructed gender roles and relationships remain a cross-cutting element in shaping (and in this case, limiting) the capacity of women and men to participate on equal terms in the Information Society. 9 Introduction: Gender and the Digital Divide UNESCO believes that unless gender issues are fully integrated into technology analyses, policy development and programme design, women and men will not benefit equally from ICTs and their applications.

Women’s Use of TeleCentres in Asia

In 2002, UNESCO explored the potential of ICT to contribute to poverty reduction in nine locations within five countries in South Asia. Access to ICT represented real and symbolic access to modernity, the future, education and knowledge. ICT centres constituted a space in which people could develop a sense of change and possibility. The study showed that gender perspectives played a significant part in determining both the barriers as well as the positive effects of ICT for empowerment. Social and economic exclusion due to gender-based restrictions on mobility was found in many households, with most women’s interaction generally restricted to their immediate family, a few neighbours and some extended family. The restrictions resulted in narrowing women’s access to the information and resources that ICT centres provided.

Benefits for Women at an ICT Centre in India         

As women became involved in the Baduria ICT Centre in West Bengal, India, they reported that they gained more respect in their local communities as a result of the ICT skills acquired at the centre—learning to use a computer and accessing and distributing information to local people. This resulted in greater respect at both the family and community levels. Younger women felt they were able to approach the job market with greater confidence. There was also an emergence of solidarity; since women learned to use computers together at the ICT Centre, they often discussed their problems, creating a sense of unity among them and bringing forth leadership qualities.

ICT and Empowerment of Women           

In developing countries, there has been an increase in pro-poor ICT for development initiatives. A study by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) on ICT for poverty reduction strategies states that trends show that “ICT have been applied to systemic improvements important to poverty reduction such as education, health and social services delivery, broader Government transparency and accountability, and helping empower citizens and build social organization around rights and gender equality”.91 However, the study also cautions that while documentation of experiences is increasing, there continues to be a need to consolidate research and evaluate lessons that will facilitate effective ICT for development strategies, including support for pro-poor initiatives such as girl’s access to primary education. Women’s empowerment is focused on increasing their power to take control over decisions that shape their lives, including in relation to access to resources, participation in decision-making and control over distribution of benefits. For women who can access and use them, ICT offer potential, especially in terms of reducing poverty, improving governance, overcoming isolation, and providing a voice. However, existing persistent gender discrimination in labour markets, in education and training opportunities, and allocation of financial resources for entrepreneurship and business development, negatively impact on women’s potential to fully utilize ICT for economic, social and political empowerment. 

There is a growing body of evidence on the benefits of ICT for women’s empowerment, through increasing their access to health, nutrition, education and other human development opportunities, such as political participation. Women’s sustainable livelihoods can be enhanced through expanded access of women producers and traders to markets, and to education, training and employment opportunities. By using one of the most important democratizing aspects of the Internet—the creation of secure online spaces that are protected from harassment—women are enjoying freedom of expression and privacy of communication to oppose gender discrimination and to promote women’s human rights. Experiences throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean illustrate creative solutions to provide access to and use of ICT as a tool for participation and, most importantly, to contribute to women’s empowerment. For example, the Multimedia Caravan project in Senegal provided rural women with the opportunity to develop their own ideas on how ICT can be used to further their development needs and goals. In Kenya, women and men weavers were trained in using the Internet to learn new weaving techniques and access more realistic prices for their products.

In Uganda, the Uganda Media Women’s Association established a radio programme—Mama FM—where women can actively participate and learn about development issues such as human rights, children, governance, nutrition, health, among others. In Poland, the Network of East-West Women disseminated information to enhance women’s participation in the European Union accession process in European Union candidate countries. These projects illustrate the scope of ICT and clearly show that technologies such as radio, television and CD-ROMs are perfectly acceptable, and in many cases more effective forms of ICT than web-based solutions, as they can resolve issues such as language, illiteracy or access to the Internet. The advent of new technologies and the growing convergence of all media have had a major impact on In April 2002, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University launched a six-week online module on “Violence against Women on the Internet”. The course synopsis stated “In this series, we will explore the various ways in which violence against women is facilitated through the use of the Internet, as well as ways in which the Internet may be used as a site of resistance to such violence. Violence against women is a critical social problem that affects all of us in some way. Whether we have directly experienced abuse, know a friend who has been victimized, or have been confronted with the myriad other forms such violence take, it impacts how we view the world and shapes our experiences and opportunities”. 

Online module on violence against women on the Internet in the U.S. the information and communication work undertaken by the women’s movement. The new technologies offer potential for innovative social interaction, including peer and bottomup communication, and creative opportunities for the creation, reproduction and dissemination of information relevant for women. There are increased opportunities for national, regional and global distribution of women-generated news, much of which, in the past, was limited in outreach. The Internet has brought women’s news and views into the public domain, with countless websites targeted specifically, if not exclusively, to women.93 Availability of technology is only one aspect influencing the potential for empowering effects. Potential for empowerment is also affected by socio-cultural aspects, such as class, age, ethnicity and race. Women from the same social context may not enjoy equal access to ICT.

Online Activism

Activists can use digital technology to:

1) Shape Public Opinion

Collective resistance, protest, activism, advocacy: where do they come from? They come from a collective perception of injustice coupled with a belief that an alternative is possible. As social movement scholar Doug McAdam observes, in order for collective action to occur, “at a minimum people need to believe need to feel aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem.”

What would make you feel aggrieved about your life? You’d need some information about your situation and maybe an explanation of why that situation was unjust. Social media is a great way to both generate and share this kind of information, especially when official news-generation companies (the mainstream media) are beholden to elites whose interests are different from yours or by a government that does not want to be criticized.

Online media has became important source of un-reported news, discussion, social commentary, and political debate, paving the way for bloggers. In countries where political discussion is taboo… web forums created new spaces, outside of society, where political discussion was relatively safe.

Digital technology helps the public shape public opinion. Anyone with an Internet connection can start a blog. Anyone with a smartphone can record and upload a video of police abuse. Not only can people act as citizen journalists, creating their own news stories, they can also educate and raise awareness of injustice by curating and re-broadcasting news stories to their friends using whatever social media platform they prefer, or even an old-fashioned technology like email.

The Internet can also be used to access foreign media and information. The most powerful way to spread information is when the oppressed inform one another. 

User-generated content, the fact that people are sharing information with their friends and family, is different from past modes of mass information dissemination. In the past there have been brave journalists and television anchormen who have shared information with the public and fomented opposition to an unjust policy . However, while these broadcasts did make people feel more aggrieved, it didn’t necessarily make them feel optimistic about change. They felt aggrieved, but alone, in front of the TV set. What could they do by themselves?

Social media is different because the means of information transmission also creates collective identity and collective grievance creates optimism: it’s not just me that’s mad, my friends are mad too. Maybe together we can do something. If my friend shares a news item with me about a corrupt official I know that 1) he knows, 2) he is mad enough to share it, 3) he knows that now I know too. To badly paraphrase Clay Shirky, social media creates a situation where I know that you know and I know that you know that I know: we have mutual awareness of our mutual awareness. It is not just me and my friends sitting alone stewing about an injustice in front of our TV set, it is my friends and I talking about this injustice in a forum, or a chat, or on my Facebook wall. And that conversation just might turn into action.

2) Plan an Action

Changing public opinion is a slow, low-burning, and often decentralized process. It is uneventful, it occurs under the radar. This is how it is able to occur at all. Yet, sooner or later, if there are enough people (of even just the right people) talking about their dissatisfaction, they will decide to take action.

Of course, action doesn’t just happen, it requires some planning, even if only to decide what the action is and when it will happen. Digital technology is useful for this too. Digital technology allows for the decentralized many-to-many communication of changing public opinion and the centralized few-to-few communication of planning an action.

Yet social media, and the mass participation it facilitates, are also changing how the prominent members of a moment perceive their role. They see themselves less as leaders and more as specially-skilled peers accountable to the rank-and-file.

Social media is making decentralized and leaderless movements logistically easier, since participants can be in constant contact. Research has shown that large groups can use social media to reach decisions in the absence of. However, even when planning occurs as it always did, in a small group of committed activists, video chat, text chat, free international online calling, and email make coordination cheaper, safer, and easier.

3) Protect Activists

The Internet and mobile technology provide benefits to the age-old planning process: they provide anonymity. Pseudonyms, encryption, throw-away cell phones, onion-routing: digital technology provides real protection for tech-savvy people who want to operate anonymously.

No shield of anonymity is absolute. In the absence of anonymity protections, planning online in a repressive regime – or even self-identifying as a dissident – is arguably even more dangerous than doing so offline, since digital footprints are easy to collect and track remotely. However, for those who do know how to protect themselves, the online world provides a safe space for plotting.

4) Share a Call to Action

These are some of the text messages Filipino youth sent to one another in 2001 before the overwhelming mobilizations that forced President Joseph “Erap” Estrada to resign. This was one of the first instances of digital activism playing a central role in forcing a head of government to resign, and it is still one of the most dramatic. People forwarded these messages to their own social networks and the call to action spread throughout Manila. Approximately one million Filipinos took part in the demonstrations, which at times filled the cities largest highway with people as far as the eye could see. An estimated one million citizens participated. It was because of digital technology that this vanishingly low-cost mass broadcast was possible.

Of course, digital calls to action can be infinitely more mundane as well. You know those mass emails from non-profits asking you to sign an e-petition or donate on their website? Those automatically-generated status message that let all your Facebook friends know you just donated and gives them a link to donate as well? Those are calls to action too.

While it is now easier to broadcast a call to action, it is also harder to be heard. It’s a catch-22 that activists and organizations try to make up with through attention-grabbing text and images that inspire strong emotional reactions, ranging from amusement to outrage. But it’s far better than the alternative, where the only people with freedom of the press were those who owned one.

5) Take Action Digitally

Signing an e-petition, donating online, changing your Facebook status message or avatar image to promote a cause, emailing your Congressman, carrying out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack: these are just some examples of digital-only activism tactics.

These kinds of actions that can be carried out entirely from behind a screen in your bedroom are the most controversial form of digital activism because they seem passive compared to more aggressive offline tactics (an argument famously made by Malcolm Gladwell). The tactics are known by various derogatory names: slacktivism, clicktivism, armchair activism. Some people even think that digital activism means exclusively digital-only tactics, even though it is only one of the five mechanisms.

People like Gladwell are skeptical that these tactics can make a big difference, and there is a basis for that skepticism. Gene Sharp, the most prominent scholar of non-violent activism, divides the tactics of non-violent struggle into three categories:

1.      Protest and Persuasion: Symbolic acts of peaceful opposition and acts to persuade the opponent to adopt one’s position

2.      Noncooperation: Withdrawal of some form or degree of existing cooperation

3.      Nonviolent Intervention: Methods that intervene directly in a given situation by disrupting or destroying established behaviors, relationships, or institutions (and creating new ones)

However, there are three arguments in favor of digital-only tactics. The first is that they are a good first rung on the ladder of engagement. They do not demand much of the opponent, but they also demand little of the activist in terms of time and personal risk. You can sign an e-petition or join a Facebook group in a few seconds. If your only activism options were offline – attending a rally or meeting – maybe you wouldn’t get involved in the cause at all. However, because it is so easy to take that first step digitally, you will get involved. Then it is up to the organizer to convince you to keep moving up, becoming more involved in the campaign and having greater and greater impact.

The second argument of digital-only actions is that they are not all passive. When the company GoDaddy.com vocally supported SOPA, many customers dropped their accounts. Though this boycott (a form of noncooperation) could all be accomplished online, it hit GoDaddy.com where they could feel it: their bottom line. GoDaddy.com quickly dropped their support of SOPA.

6) Transfer Resources

In the 2008 US presidential election, online micro-donations raised hundred of millions of dollars for President Obama and other candidates. New internet-mediated campaigning organizations like MoveOn.org fund themselves in a similar way. One of the greatest blows to Wikileaks in 2010 was when major credit card and payment processingcompaniesrefused to process donations to the organization. When a video of schoolchildren tormenting their elderly chaperone went viral in late June of 2012, a private citizen began collecting a vacation fund for her and $500,000 has been raised to date.

These are only a few examples of the ability of the Internet to act as a conduit for resources, specifically money. And, as the above examples show, these transfers can be important not only in funding new types of organizations, but in shifting the balance of power, either to an unlikely political candidate or away from an organization threatening state power.