Blogging and War: Can Technology change Social Processes?

There's been a recent hype around the use of mobile technologies to "empower" people to submit reports "from the field", take action and change the course of society...

Somehow, just like we were promised that TV would educate people and that the Internet would free us all, we've heard it all before, yet we have to see it happen.

Can blogging about war, sharing experiences "from the field" stop a war? Before thinking about technology, we need to ask the questions: "where do wars start?" and "where do they end?", and most important: "can wars be stopped at a different place from where they start?". Wars do not start because of public opinion and it is very unlikely that any war will stop because of public opinion. In any case, deployment of technology does not equate, or even necessarily facilitate, social processes and structures that enable social engagement and civil participation in the making of decisions regarding matters of state and national and international security. Even in the USA, with decades of a strong Civil Rights movement and wide media coverage of constant activism and protests, it took years for the government to pull out of Vietnam.

Technologies do not liberate people, and even if they enable people to do things, that doesn't mean they will. This idyllic notion of "the field" is no different from our own environment and daily lives. Would you blog about the annoying lack of parking space around your favorite gourmet supermarket, traffic congestion when kids are picked up at the local school or the rising prices of gasoline? Probably not, although these are crucial aspects of your life as a member of a developed community. It is likely however that younger people will blog about traffic congestion at the mall and any attempt to raise the now standard US$0.99 per song fee for digital music. Or perhaps you do blog about those things. Yet, things don't change because you blog about them. They won't change even if a million people blog about them.

The media produces hundreds of daily reports on war, seen by millions of people, yet the world is not only still at war, but new wars are started all the time. Reuters produces extensive investigative unbiased reports on war, poverty, economic development, stakeholders, change makers and the experiences of common people around the world. I see them every weekend from my temporary home at Trinidad and Tobago, so I guess that millions of people from Argentina to Vanuatu do too. They are so much more interesting than the repetitive newscasts from the 6 o'clock news and even more appealing than some of my favorite Comedy Central and Animal Planet programs. Yet, for all the attention, the world keeps turning and people continue to suffer hunger and hardship, kill each other and hate someone else's guts even more with each turn.

Will those "in the field" blog about their hardship? I doubt it. They are busy surviving, just like you're too busy trying to beat the rush hour traffic and make it home in time to spend some time with the family. There is no such thing as free time afterwards with back to back episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report.

Granted, some will blog. Most likely those who are already active trying to denounce the situation and a few more who will discover that they too can raise their voices now. But without positive results coming out of the activity or, technically speaking, proper incentive, most people will not or will get tired rather quickly of doing it. If you blog and nothing happens, chances are you will not insist in that time consuming, fruitless activity when you can be do something more fulfilling and with more impact, say like throwing stones and molotov cocktails to tanks...

Blogging works in developed communities because of the social aspects involved. Kids and grown-ups enjoy and crave for attention and recognition. People blog not to keep a journal of their thoughts or to share them with the world, but because they want to be read and seen and known and commented and forwarded.

In underserved communities, the situation is quite different. Most of your peers don't have access to Information Technologies and will not for years to come. They may be getting cell phones, just like everyone else but they're not using them to browse the web, and even if they did, there is a very slim chance that they will browse to your blog page.

We are again making the failed assumption that by deploying Information Technologies we can replicate a social phenomena and dynamic from developed environments to underserved communities and that they will take advantage of it.

We need to ask ourselves if the results of enabling these people to report "from the field" is just to amuse us, be thankful for our luck of not living among barbarians, or even remind us that we must do something about the problems that take place somewhere else. We will certainly read this modern-day instant "Anna Frank's" diaries from half a world away, fresh "from the field". Perhaps we will even ask if we can adopt one of these bloggers, just like we can adopt whales or cute little Andean kids or starving African children for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day. We've been fighting poverty that way for decades...

Technologies will take us only as far as existing social processes allow us. Without these social processes, we're just deploying toys and generating revenue for the telecommunication and technology corporations, often by taking money out of poor people's pockets.