Can blogs, wikis, and other participatory web architectures change the world for the better? Does the Sociable Web reach developing countries?

Currently, not even a quarter of the world's population has Internet access. 70% of North Americans are able to go online-- Europe 36%, Asia roughly 10%, and Africa 2%. Willinsky's arguments for Open Access to research don't apply to those who don't have net access in the first place. But -- imagine-- what would a broad movement of bloggers/citizen journalists in Africa, bring to the attention of the rest of the world? This would be a personal reporting with an affect that you would not find on CNN. South Africa already has an active Indymedia (image left).

Resources of the Sociable Web including Wikipedia are still of little use to those without a computer and command of English. Most African languages have only about a thousand articles in Wikipedia. The problems encountered are ranging from keyboards supporting a particular language to computer manuals in a local language.

The current explosion of the cellphone industry in Africa is a widely known fact. Africans may not have ready access to the Internet but more than half of them own mobile phones with SMS capability but without the ability to run the Internet.  In South Africa, net access is still sparse but alternatively banks are looking into low cost banking options via cellphones. Notably, also the world's first feature-length movie was shot on a cellphone in SouthAfrica. The film titled “SMS Sugar Man” was directed by Aryan Kaganof and the story, not far as interesting as the technology, is about a pimp and two high class prostitutes.

Currently there are several initiatives that are focusing on educating African youth via cellphone. Tomi T Ahonen reports that "There are more radios than mobile phones, but those radios are in North America and Western Europe, built into our cars etc. In Asia, Africa and Latin America many more mobile phones exist than radios. ...  30% of the total population on the planet carries a mobile phone. Every one of them can do basic texting, basic mobile commerce, receive basic news, etc. "

The future of the Sociable Web in developing countries is the bridging between simple mobile phones and the resources available online. The project MobilED is a good example:

In March 2006 the pilot of MobilED was launched with teachers of Corwall Hill College in Preotoria (South Africa). The project focuses on HIV/AIDS and is for 15-16 year-olds. "The platform will offer access to Wikipedia content with SMS, so that students can search the Wikipedia by sending a query term to the server.  The server will then call back and a speech synthesizer will read the article for them."

The 2004 blog explosion did not make it to the sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa. For most Africans the Internet is as far away as a semi-soy latte at a Starbucks. With little net access and all of the action happening in North America and Europe, so far blogging was limited to Western ex-pats. But this is changing: the Ethiopian blogging scene is up and coming with blogs like Nazret.com. And, outside of Africa, in South Korea, OhmyNews is a strong and successful example of the Sociable Web.

Ethan Zuckerman points out that through citizen journalism and the Sociable Web the world will have more access to what is going on in places that are not sufficiently covered by news agencies.

Zuckerman: "None but the largest news agencies are able to pay the travel costs and insurance for reporters to cover these stories. Most choose not to cover a conflict that's bloody, dangerous, difficult to summarize in a soundbite and unknown to most of their readers or viewers. The net result - we simply don't have information about many parts of the globe relevant to world debate. ... Even when we do have some information about under-covered parts of the world, we have another problem, what Ito terms "the caring problem". People pay attention to subjects they care about. They tend to ignore subjects they know little about. Media, trying to serve its customers in a free market, responds by giving them more information on subjects they've demonstrated an interest in and ignoring other subjects."

Mark Warschauer's work on Technology and Social Inclusion is also definitely worth considering in this context.

Citizen journalism that cares about local topics in Congo, for example, will produce a decisively different media sphere than that currently shaped by CNN and others. Initiatives like MIT's $100 laptop contribute to better computer access in Africa. But cellphones, not the Internet, dominate Africa and cater to predominantly oral cultures.

The future of the Sociable Web in Africa is mobile. 

References:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4512290.st
http://www.netsquared.org/blog/david-barnard/web-2-0-and-africa
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=mobile-phones-for-learning
http://in-eteam.blogspot.com/2006/05/web2-tools-seminar.html
http://mark-greenspan.blogspot.com/2006/05/reshaping-mainstream.html
http://arabwikipedia.blogspot.com/2006/02/blogs-and-wikis-ushering-in-era-of.html
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=444
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004150.html
http://www.thechristiansciencemonitor.com/2005/0826/p07s01-woaf.html
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003423.html
http://www.cafe151.co.uk/notebook/2006/06/africa-and-web-20/
http://zangu.com/static/zangu3.html
http://my.cheeseforge.com/
http://cbdd.typepad.com/global/2004/07/icts_impact_in_.html
http://okrasoup.typepad.com/black_looks/2005/02/last_weekthere_.html
http://geology.com/records/sahara-desert-map.shtml

African weblogs:
http://blogafrica.com/about.html
http://zimpundit.blogspot.com/
http://blackstarjournal.blogspot.com/
http://blog.uhuru.de/
http://www.davidajao.com/blog/

Journals:
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/
http://www.cafeafricana.com/