TED talk - Ethan Zuckerman - Listening to Global Voices

http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html

(the Chinese translation is below the English transcript)

I'm an American, which means, generally, I ignore football unless it involves guys my size or Bruno's size running into each other at extremely high speeds. That said, it's been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks. I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I've never heard before: FIFA, vuvuzela, weird jokes about octopi. But the one that's really been sort of stressing me out, that I haven't been able to figure out, is this phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao." If you've gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen this. It's been a major trending topic.

Being a monolingual American, I obviously don't know what the phrase means. So I went onto Twitter, and I asked some people if they could explain to me "Cala a boca, Galvao." And fortunately, my Brazilian friends were more than ready to help. They explained that the Galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that's in terrible, terrible danger. In fact, I'll let them tell you a bit more about it. Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird native to Brazil. Every year, more than 300,000 Galvao birds are killed during Carnival parades. Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation, and it actually gets worse. It turns out that, not only is the Galvao parrot very attractive, useful for headdresses, it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties, which means that there's a terrible problem with Galvao abuse. Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvao. And it's terribly endangered. The good news about this is that the global community -- again, my Brazilian friends tell me -- is pitching in to help out. It turns out that Lady Gaga has released a new single -- actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell -- titled "Cala a boca, Galvao." And my Brazilian friends tell me that if I just tweet the phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao," 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird.

Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank, and actually a very, very good one. "Cala a boca, Galvao" actually means something very different. In Portugese, it means "Shut your mouth, Galvao." And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno, who's the lead soccer commentator for Rede Globo. And what I understand from my Brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine. He can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again. So Brazilians went to that first match against North Korea, put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase: "Cala a boca, Galvao." And in fact, were so successful at this that it topped Twitter for two weeks.

Now there's a couple -- there's a couple of lessons that you can take from this. And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one, is that you cannot go wrong asking people to be active online, so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase. So as long as activism is that simple, it's pretty easy to get away with. The other thing you can take from this, by the way, is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter. There's more than five million of them. As far as national representation, 11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter. That's a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K. Next to Japan, it's the second most represented by population.

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys. And you don't necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space. It's also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space. Twitter recently did some research. They looked at their local population. They believe that 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users, but it shouldn't be. And the reason it shouldn't be is that on any day you can go into Trending Topics. And you tend to find topics that are almost entirely African-American conversations.

This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers, who looked at a weekend's worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations -- and in ways that you wouldn't expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what's crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it's literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don't. We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them, where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture.

Now for me, I'm surprised by this, because this wasn't how the internet was supposed to be. If you go back into the early days of the internet, when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte were writing big books like "Being Digital," the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences, to put us all on a common field of one fashion or

another. Negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms. He's at a technology conference in Florida. And he's looking at something really, truly absurd, which is bottles of Evian water on the table. And Negroponte says this is crazy. This is the old economy. It's the economy of moving these heavy, slow atoms over long distances that's very difficult to do. We're heading to the future of bits, where everything is speedy, it's weightless. It can be anywhere in the world at any time. And it's going to change the world as we know it.

Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things. He's totally wrong about this one. It turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits. If I walk into a store in the United States, it's very, very easy for me to buy water that's bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It's actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It's really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It's extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there's an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There's a coup government. There's a military government. There's crackdowns on the press. It's actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment.

Here's what I think is going on. I think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization. We look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world. And that's a framework that includes things like airline routes. It includes things like the Internet cables. We look at a map like this one, and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away. You can get on a flight in London, you can end up in Bangalore later today. Two hops, you're in Suva, the capitol of Fiji. It's all right there.

When you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks, you get a very different picture. You start looking at how the global plane flights move, and you suddenly discover that the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy. There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected. There's basically a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York. but look at this map, and you can watch this for, you know, two or three minutes. You won't see very many planes go from South America to Africa. And you'll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off. When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible, and we look at what actually happens, we start realizing that the world doesn't work quite the same way that we think it does.

So here's the problem that I've been interested in in the last decade or so. The world is, in fact, getting more global. It's getting more connected. More of problems are global in scale. More of our economics is global in scale. And our

media is less global by the day. If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s, 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast. That's down to about 12 to 15 percent. And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world. Here's a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk. Alisa's the president of Public Radio International. And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map based on what American television news casts looked at for a month. And you see that when you distort a map based on attention, the world within American television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated U.S. and a couple of other countries which we've invaded. And that's basically what our media is about. And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news -- which is dreadful, and I agree that it's dreadful -- I've been mapping elite media like the New York Times, and I get the same thing. When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded.

It turns out that new media isn't necessarily helping us all that much. Here's a map made by Mark Graham who's down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute. A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia that have been geo-coded. And you'll notice that there's a very heavy bias towards North America and Western Europe. Even within Wikipedias, where we're creating their own content online, there's a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based, rather than to the rest of the world. In the U.K., you can get up, you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session, you could read a newspaper from India or from Australia, from Canada, God forbid from the U.S. You probably won't. If you look at online media consumption -- in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet -- more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites. It's one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than [the U.K.], because we actually like reading your media, rather than vice versa.

So all of this starts leading me to think that we're in a state that I refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the internet. We think we're getting this wide view of the globe. We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese, and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world. And we forget that most of the time we're checking Boston Red Sox scores. So this is a real problem -- not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year -- but it's a real problem because, as we're discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions. This is a problem we have to solve.

So here's the good news. For six years, I've been hanging out with these guys. This is a group called Global Voices. This is a team of bloggers from around the world. Our mission was to fix the world's media. We started in 2004. You might have noticed, we haven't done all that well so far. Nor do I think we are by ourselves, actually going to solve the problem. But the more that I think about it, the more that I think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world. The first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention. In this case -- the map of the world at night by NASA -- they're dark literally because of lack of electricity. And I used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you're not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs.

What I'm starting to realize is that you can get media, it's just an enormous amount of work, and you need an enormous amount of encouragement. One of those dark spots is Madagascar, a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there. And so the people who founded Foko Club in Madagascar weren't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country. They were doing something much simpler. It was a club to learn English and to learn computers and the internet. but what happened was that Madagascar went through a violent coup. Most independent media was shut down. And the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence, everything that was going on within this country. So a very, very small program designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media, ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country.

Now the trick with this is that I'm guessing most people here don't speak Malagasy. I'm also guessing that most of you don't even speak Chinese -- which is sort of sad if you think about it, as it's now the most represented language on the internet. Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this. If you're using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site, you notice this really cute box at the top, which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page. Unfortunately, it's a machine translation of the page. And while Google is very, very good with some languages, it's actually pretty dreadful with Chinese. And the results can be pretty funny. What you really want -- what I really want, is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this.

And if you think this is absurd, it's not. There's a group right now in China called Yeeyan. And Yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day. They look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites. They put it online for free. It's the project of a guy named Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn't believe how biased American media coverage was. And he said, "If there's one thing I can do, I can start translating, so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better." And my question to you is: if Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the English internet into Chinese, where's the English language Yeeyan? Who's going after Chinese, which now has 400 million internet users out there? My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say.

So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese, there's no guarantee that we're going to find it. When we look for information online, we basically have two strategies. We use a lot of search. And search is terrific if you know what you're looking for. But if what you're looking for is serendipity, if you want to stumble onto something that you didn't know you needed, our main philosophy is to look to our social networks, to look for our friends. What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it. The problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock. You end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you, who have similar interests. And it's very, very hard to get information from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests. To do this, at a certain point, you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock. You need a guide.

So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices. She has one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors from killing each other, she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the Middle East. And in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit, and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who's given up smoking for the month of Ramadan, she has to know something about a global audience. She has to know something about what stories are available. Basically, she's a deejay. She's a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her, who's able to listen to the audience, and who's able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another. I don't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process. I think what's great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience. I know Amira. I can ask her what to read. But with the internet, she's in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read. And

you can listen to her as well, if this is a way that you're interested in having your web widened.

So once you start widening like this, once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots, once you start translating, once you start curating, you end up in some really weird places. This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog, which is AfriGadget. And AfriGadget is a blog that looks at technology in an Africa context. And specifically, it's looking at a blacksmith in Kibera in Nairobi, who is turning the shaft of a Landrover into a cold chisel. And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going, "Why would I conceivably care about this?" And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you. This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference. He goes by the moniker White African. He's both a very well known American geek, but he's also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya. He is a bridge figure. He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds -- one in the world of the African technology community, one in the world of the American technology community. And so he's able to tell a story about this blacksmith in Kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology, about innovating from constraint, about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials. He knows one world, and he's finding a way to communicate it to another world, both of which he has deep connections to. These bridge figures, I'm pretty well convinced, are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web.

But the trick with bridges is, ultimately, you need someone to cross them. And that's where we start talking about xenophiles. So if I found myself in the NFL, I suspect I would spend my off-season nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth -- possibly recording a hip-hop album. Dhani Jones, who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, has a slightly different approach to the off-season. Dhani has a television show. It's called "Dhani Tackles the Globe." And every week on this television show, Dhani travels to a different nation of the world. He finds a local sporting team. He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them. And his reason for this is not just that he wants to master Muay Thai boxing. It's because, for him, sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world. For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food. For a lot of us it might be literature or writing. But there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it.

The goal of my Talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia. My guess -- given that you're at a conference called TEDGlobal -- is that most of you are xenophiles, whether or not you use that term. My challenge instead is this. It's not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world. We have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we

have. We have to fix our media. We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education. We have to fix our immigration policy. We need to look at ways of creating serendipity, of making translation pervasive, and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures. And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles. That's what I'm trying to do. I need your help.

我是美国人 所以我通常不看足球 除非有像我这个块头的人 在场上高速跑动，并时不时的撞在一起。 虽说如此，但是 过去几周 你要想不关注足球都很难。 一上twitter，我就看到各种各样从未听过的奇怪的名词 FIFA, vuvuzela, 还有关于

octopi 的古怪笑话 而其中最让我摸不着头脑的 至今没搞明白的 就是"Cala a boca,

Galvao."这句话 假如过去几周你曾上过twitter的话 应该都看过这句话 因为它已经成了一个热門话题了

作为只懂一門语言的美国人，我显然不知道这话是什么意思 于是我就来到twitter

我问是否有人能告诉我这是啥意思 幸运的是，我的巴西朋友们 非常乐意帮忙 他们告诉我说，Galvao 是 一种罕见并且濒临灭绝的鹦鹉 并且是少的不行、马上就要灭绝的那种 我还是让他们来说吧 下面我跟大家讲Galvao的故事 它是巴西原产的一种非常珍稀的鸟类 每一年嘉年华游行的时候 都会有30万只Galvao鸟被残害 这很显然是一桩悲剧 并且情况正变得更糟 这种鸟不但非常漂亮 羽毛可以用来做头饰

并且它还能用来做迷幻药。 这就是说一旦落到坏人手中， Galvan就可能被滥用。

有些病态心理的人还拿Galvao的毛放在鼻子上弄响当口哨。 这种鸟的处境非常严峻 好消息是 ——这也是我的巴西朋友告诉我的 全球的人都伸出援手来帮助这种鸟

包括Lady Gaga 也出版了新的单曲 事实上应该是有五六个单曲，我能记得的有这么多 标题都是"Cala a boca, Galvao." 我的巴西朋友就告诉我说 只要我在twitter上推"Cala a boca, Galvao,"这几个词 就会有10美分会被捐助到一个 拯救濒危鸟类Galvao的 全球行动中

现在你们大概可以猜得到这是一个笑话 不过它又是一个非常好的笑话 实际上，"Cala a boca, Galvao"有其他非常不一样的含义 在葡萄牙语里，它的意思是：“闭上你的嘴” 并且它是专指这位叫 Galvao Brueno 的先生 他是Rede Globo

的 首席足球评论员 我从巴西朋友那里听到的是 这家伙只会讲陈词滥调 他一张嘴就会使最精彩的比赛 变得淡然无味 在巴西对朝鲜的第一场比赛时 球迷们举起了这

个横幅 并且在Twitter上发起一个运动 尝试说服其他人 转发这句话 他们的行为影响范围 甚大 还连续两周占据了Twitter潮流榜榜首

从这个故事中 我们可以学到几样东西 第一个是 让人们在网上参与一些事情 是不会有错的 只要这样的参与只是转发一句话而已 假如行动就那么简单 那是很容易处理的 另外一个你可以从此事了解到的事实 就是很多巴西人在使用Twitter 估计有超过500万的巴西人在用 就看这个图表分析吧 有11%的巴西网民使用Twitter 这比英国或美国的使用比例还高 仅次于日本 巴西也是Twitter使用人数第二多的国家

假如你在使用Twitter或其他社交网站 但是你没有意识到 那里有很多的巴西人 那你跟我们大多数人一样 因为在社交网站上 你会跟别人打交道 这些人都是你自己选择的 假如你像我一样，是个大块头、热爱技术的美国白人 你应当还是会跟那些长得很胖并且也比较喜欢技术的白种美国人打交道 甚至不知道，原来有那么多巴西人

活跃在Twitter上 另一个让很多美国人想不到的事实是 Twitter上面也有很多美国黑人 Twitter最近做了一项研究 对当地的Twitter用户进行了分析 他们发现，24%的美国Twitter用户 都是非洲裔美国人 这是非洲裔美国人占全国人口比例的 两倍 很多Twitter用户听到这个数字也许会下一跳 但这本不该如此 事实上 任何时候，你登录Twitter去看当天的热門话题 你会发现很多几乎就是 在非洲裔美国人中间发生的对话

这是 Fernando Viegas 和Martin Wattenberg 画的一个图 他们两位都是非常杰出的视觉设计师 他们研究了 一个周末的Twitter服务器的流量 发现很多的热門话题都

呈现种族隔离趋势 而且是以你意想不到的方式出现 例如漏油事故基本都是在白人的圈子里讨论 而露天烧烤 则基本是黑人圈子的话题 最为疯狂的是 假如你想在Twitter上看到不一样的人 用鼠标点几下就行了 点一下“露天烧烤”这个标签，马上就能看到很不一样的对话 参与的人跟你自己很不一样 但一般来说，我们这里大多数人不会那么做 我们通常把自己关在一个过滤气泡里，这是我的朋友 Eli Pariser

的说法 看到的只是一些我们已经认识的朋友 以及一些跟我们已经认识的朋友很相似的人 我们看不到一个更大的世界

我却对此感到非常的惊讶 因为互联网的初衷并不是这样 假如我们回到早期的互联网 当尼哥罗庞蒂那样的先知们 写《数字化生存》那样的书的时候 他们的预言是

互联网会成为一种强大的力量 会将文化间的差异抹平 让我们所有人过上同样的生活 尼哥罗庞蒂的这本书是以一个故事开始的 他提到在原子世界里 建立彼此关系很困难 他参加在佛罗里达的一个科技会议的时候 他看到了桌面有一瓶Evian水 那是相当古怪的事情 尼哥罗庞蒂说，这是疯狂的 这是旧经济的做法 那是将东西搬来搬去的经济 要把很沉的原子以很慢的速度搬到很远的地方，这太困难了 我们的未来是比特的世界 那个世界是所有东西都非常迅速，也几乎没有重量 任意时刻，比特都可以在世界的任何一个地方 这将改变整个世界

尼哥罗庞蒂确实说对了很多东西 但在这一点上，他却完全错了 事实上，在很多时候 原子要比比特更具移动性 比方说我去到美国任意一家商店 很容易可以买到 来自斐济的纯净水 虽然那要花费高昂的运费 但如果我想看一部斐济的故事片 却是极其困难的一件事 也很难听到斐济音乐 我也很难获取关于斐济的新闻 这本身很奇怪，因为斐济有很多事情在发生 那里发生了政变，出现了军政府 该国的新闻出版也遭到了钳制 那也许正是我们此刻 该关注的地方

我认为其实是这么一回事 我们以往 特别关注全球化的 一些基础设施建设 我们关注有哪些技术构架 使得全球化成为可能 这些构架就包括国际航空线 包括互联网电缆 假如我们看看这一幅地图 似乎整个地球都是平的 因为从A到B通常可以直飞或转机就到 在伦敦上飞机 当天就可以到达班加罗尔了 假如转一次机，你就能到达斐济首都苏瓦 这本身非常棒

但假如你仔细观察在这些线路上 流动的是什么 你看到的将会是很不一样的图景 仔细观察国际航班的 踪迹 你会发现这个世界甚至远远讲不上是平的呢 这个世界相当的起伏不平 有些地方之间连接的很好 比如伦敦和纽约之间就有 非常庞大的空中交通往来 但你看这个地图 看上三两分钟 你会发现 从南美到非洲就几乎没什么空中往来了 还有一些地区是 被系统性的割裂开了 当我们把注意力从基础设施转向人

去观察一些发生在现实中的事情 我们会发现，这个世界并不是 像我们所想象那样运转的

这就是我最近十年 在关心的一个事情 这个世界正变得越来越全球化 彼此之间联系越来越紧密 更多的问题开始变得全球化 经济活动也日益全球化 但是我们的媒体却走得离全球化越来越远 假如你在70年代的时候 看任一美国晚间电视新闻 会发现有35%到40%的国际新闻内容 现在只有12%到15% 这带给我们的是一个不够真实的世界 这是一张Alisa Miller在之前的TED演讲中展示的图片 Alisa是Public Radio全球的总裁 她做了一张统计图，实际上就是一张变了形的世界地图 是基于美国电视新闻 一个月内 所关注的新闻发生地而绘制的 你可以看到，当我们基于新闻关注点来勾画世界地图时 我们发现 美国电视新闻所关注的 基本就是这个严重膨胀的美国

以及其他几个曾被美国侵略过的国家 这两者基本就是美国媒体关注的重心 也许你认为这仅仅是美国电视新闻的状况 很糟糕的一种状况，我也承认这一事实 不过同时我也考察了一些精英媒体，如《纽约时报》 但是得出的是基本一致的结论 不管是纽约时报还是其他的精英媒体 他们所报道的也基本是超级发达国家 以及被美国侵略的国家的新闻

甚至是新媒体也 没有带来很大的改变 这是马克·格雷汉姆制作的一副地图 他就在牛津大学互联网研究中心工作 这幅地图显示的是在维基百科上 标有地理信息标记的条目 你会发现 北美和西欧受到的关注最多 即使这是在维基社区里面 这个社区的内容完全是他们自己创造的 也会出现类似的情况 文章的内容很大程度上跟作者所在地有关 而很少会关注世界其他地方 我们现在在英国 这一节会议结束后你就可以回去拿自己的电脑 可以阅读到来自印度或澳洲 或加拿大甚至是美国的新闻 但是我想你基本不会这么做 假如我们看网上的媒体访问情况 你会发现，互联网前十位的用户 超过95%的在线读者关心的都是 国内新闻网站 这一点美国人做得比加拿大人稍好一点 因为我们喜欢阅读加拿大的媒体 而不是相反

所有这一切使得我去想 我们正处在一种 我称为”假想大都会“的状态 我们都在阅读互联网 我们以为我们已经可以看到全球图景了 我们偶尔会撞上一个中文的网页 这让我们觉得我们已经拥有了最好的技术 可以让我们很好的联系到世界其他角落 但是我们忘记了 我们大多数时候还只是在关注波士顿红袜子球队的战绩 这就是问题所在 不是说红袜子队今年确实成绩不好—— 而是说，我们遇到了严峻的问题 我们在TED这里所讨论的一些问题 都是世界性的问题 是一些很有趣的问题 它们都是具

有全球影响的问题 需要全球参与对话 我们才能找到解决之道 这就是我们需要解决的问题

下面要带给大家一个好消息 过去6年，我跟这些人在一起 他们都是“全球之声”的志愿者 他们都是来自全球的博客作者 我们的使命就是要给世界的媒体解毒 我们是2004年开始的 也许你也注意到了，我们做得还不是非常好 而且我也不认为单凭我们自身的力量 可以解决问题 但是当我对前面的问题想得更多时 我就发现，我们这几年所收获的一些经验 对于如何重新发掘网络的力量 来实现更广的全球对话是有很好的启发的 首先我们要考虑的是 世界确实有些地方 是没有人关注的死角 这是美国航天航空署所拍摄的地球夜间图 有些地方所以黑暗确实是因为那里没有电力

我以前认为这个地图上黑暗的地方 都是不会受到媒体关注的地方 因为那里有比受关注更基本的需求

后来我慢慢意识到 事实上要获得关注也并非不可能，只是需要非常大的投入 以及大量的宣传 这个图上其中一个黑点是马达加斯加 很多人知道那个地方是因为看了好莱坞电影 而不是因为 了解那里的风土人情 不久前当地人组建了一个 Foko 俱乐部 他们本没有想到要改变马达加斯加国家形象的 他们做的是简单得多的 事情 因为那只是一个旨在学英语 以及电脑和互联网的俱乐部 非常巧合的是，当时马达加斯加 发生了暴力政变 大多数的独立媒体都被关闭 而那些通过Foko俱乐部 学会了写英文博客的高中生 突然发现其实有很多的国际读者 在关心他们那里发生的抗议和暴力事件 还有其他各种动态 于是原先一个很小的项目 旨在帮助学员上网的项目

在不经意间成为了一个独立媒体 并且产生了巨大的影响 来帮助我们了解这个国度

但我想这里大多数人 应当是不会马达加斯加语的 你们当中大多数人应当也不会中文 但这是 一个可悲的事实 因为互联网上用得最多的是中文 幸运的 是，人们正在开始寻找一些方式来解决这个问题 假如你用的是Chrome浏览器，并且你在阅读一个中文的网页 你会在页面的上方看到这样一个很可爱的方框 浏览器会自动识别到这是中文网页 你只需要点一下鼠标 就可以看到英文翻译 可是，这仅仅是机器翻译

虽然Google机器翻译在一些语言之间的转换做得很好 但是在中英文的转换之间却很差 于是你看到的翻译也许会很滑稽 而我猜我们最希望看到的是 可以找到一个按钮 点一下 马上会有人帮助我去翻译

也许你会认为这有点疯狂，事实不是 这是一群叫“译言”的家伙 它是一个 有15万志愿译者的 群体 他们会主动的去发现英文互联网的有趣的故事 而后翻译成中文，每天的产出有100篇 文章来源是主流报纸以及网站 并且所有的翻译都是免费阅读的

这个项目由张雷发起 在发生拉萨骚乱的时候，他正住在美国 他不敢相信美国的媒体 对于事件的报道是如此的片面 于是他说：“假如我可以做点什么，那我就做点翻译吧 让不同语言的人们可以 藉此更好的了解对方。” 我要问大家： 假如译言可以征集到15万人 把英文翻译成中文 那英文的译言又在哪里？ 有谁在翻译中文互联网？ 要知道那里有4亿的用户啊！ 他们中间至少有一个人能说出些有趣的东西吧

即使我们可以找到这样一种方法 但我也不敢保证说我们一定可以找到 我们在网上寻找信息的时候 我们通常有两种策略 可以是搜索 假如你知道自己要寻找什么，搜索是很棒的 但假如你希望找到一些意外的”宝藏“ 如果你想找到一些 你并不知道自己需要的东西 我们大多数人的做法是到我们的社交网络友邻里 去看友邻在关注什么 他们关注的东西也许我们也感兴趣 但这种做法的问题是 你最终会跟随大众 你会不自觉的去跟随 一群可能跟你特征很像的人 向前走 并且你很难从其他的群体

或者从世界其他地方获得资讯 因为大家都只呆在各自的圈子里 要摆脱这一点，你就需要有人 时不时跳出来把你拽到别的群体 你需要向导

这个女人是阿米拉·阿依·胡赛妮，她是全球之声的中东地区编辑 她的工作也许是全球最困难的工作之一 她不但要防止我们的以色列作者和巴勒斯坦作者 相互残杀 还要去想组织怎样的内容 才会让你对中东 感兴趣 也就是说要让你走出 日常的轨道

并且将注意力放到 一个在斋月期间 成功戒烟的故事 她需要对全球读者有所了解

也需要知道本地有些什么新闻 我们可以把她的角色看成是一个DJ 她是一个很好的人肉编辑 知道她手上有什么资讯 能够倾听读者需要什么 也可以基于此而做出决定

让读者去关注某方面的信息 我相信这样的事情由机器来做并不一定是最好的 我认为互联网最棒的一点是 她可以帮助DJ寻找到 更广的观众群 我认识阿米拉 我可以问她我该读什么 但有了互联网，她可以告诉很多人 她们可以阅读什么 并且你也可以找到她的推荐 假如你对中东感兴趣的话

一旦你开始这样去扩大自己的视野 去关注那些黑暗的地区 一旦你开始了翻译和编辑的过程 你就很容易会去到一些很奇怪的地方 这是一张来自我很喜欢的一个博客

的照片 这个博客叫 AfriGadget 它是专門关注非洲技术圈的 群体博客 而这个照片就是 在内罗毕的一个铁匠 他正在把一辆Landrover越野车的车轴 改造成一个凿子

也许你会问 为什么我要关心这样的事情啊？ 这个家伙也许可以给你解释 他叫Erik

Hersman, 也许你在会场上见过他了 他的网名是 White African 他既有美国式的极客风格 同时又是一个肯尼亚人，生于苏丹而长于肯尼亚 他充当了一座桥的角色 他可以同时看到两个世界 一个是非洲的技术社区 另一个是美国的技术社区 所以他可以知道 这个内罗毕的铁匠的故事 并且将这个变废为宝的故事写出来 这个故事也体现了“局限出创新”的观点 让我们看到了废物利用的许多可能 他看到了一个世界发生的故事 并且寻找一种方式将其传递到另外一个世界 并且他可以在两个世界之间轻松穿行 我坚信，这样的桥梁人物 正是未来我们通过互联网 实现让世界变得更好的寄托

但是桥梁的意义在于：最终 你需要人们从这些桥梁上走过去 这时我们就不得不谈起“异国癖” 假如我是国家橄榄球联盟队员 在没有比赛的季节里 也许 我会养伤、在家休整或其他 甚至是录制一张嘻哈唱片 但是辛辛那提队的中线卫 达尼·琼斯 却有独特的方法度过他的休赛期 他还拍了一个电视节目 叫“达尼·琼斯走世界” 每一周

达尼·琼斯都会去到一个不同的地方 找到当地的球队 跟他们一起训练，而后一起比赛 之所以这么做 不是因为他要学会泰拳 而是因为对他而言 运动就是一种语言 使得他可以通过运动 来认知这个世界的多元和奇妙 对于我们有些人可能这个语言是音乐或食物 或文学或创作 但可以肯定的是 有一些很简单的工具可以帮助我们探出头去看到世界的其他地方 并且找到你的位置

我的演讲的目的不是 要鼓励这个屋子里的人 去喜欢异国文化 因为这是

TEDGlobal，我想大家 大多数都有些异国情结 不管你是否喜欢这个词 我带给 大家的挑战是 单单做出个人的决定去寻找更广的世界 这还是不够的 我们需要找到一种方法 去改变整个系统 改变我们的媒体 改变互联网，改变我们的教育 改变我们的移民政策 并且去开创一些 鼓励发现新鲜体验的机制 把翻译做得更广泛 去发现和赞颂 那些勇于充当桥梁的人们 我们都要学会养成一点“异国癖” 这正是我所努力为之的事情，我需要你的帮助。