A curiosity

Courtesy of Wordle. I notice there is a naughty word in there – I didn’t write it, it was a quote from the potty-mouthed Jeff Jarvis. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting way of looking back over the last few months of From Davos to Seattle.

June service notice

I will be guest blogging at Global Dashboard throughout June.

Activism, the internet age and the perils of simplification

I’ve just finished watching this video from the World Development Movement:

Is it me or is does the sketch simplify to the point of becoming patronising? I know that NGOs have to appeal to a time-pressured public with short attention spans, but I can’t honestly see how the video isn’t insulting to the intelligence of the average person. If you wanted to introduce the issue to children, I could respect that, but this is meant for the general population. I know it’s not meant to be taken too seriously, but there’s surely a point at which NGOs like the WDM need to engage with the public at a more substantive level.

One of my lecturers is working on a research project on the Make Poverty History campaign and I find myself having to agree with him that there comes a point at which appealing to quick campaign actions like petitions and text messages (not to mention wristbands) comes at the expense of building a more committed support base. On its dissolution, the flash-in-the-pan activism of Make Poverty History failed to translate into more concrete and permanent groupings. Organisations like WDM need to learn that it’s not enough to put out simplistic videos like this one (let’s not forget that excessive simplicity is a form of deception) and then ask people to send off a quick email to the EU. NGOs have to work on fostering really committed grassroots campaigners, people who are willing to properly educate themselves on the issues, rather than base their activism on easy stories like the one above.

Since I’m having a little bit of a rant about activists, I’ll include this clip too, just because it amuses my silly side. The crucial point is 41 seconds in.

On Bhutan

According to Sitemeter, this blog was recently visited by a reader in Bhutan, which I find rather exciting. Bhutan is a fascinating country – see Wikipedia for starters. According its CIA World Factbook entry, Bhutan has “one of the world’s smallest and least developed” economies. This site’s visitor was one of the 4% of Bhutanese who have an internet connection.

The preservation of national traditional cultures in the face of globalizing forces has long been of great importance to Bhutan. Perhaps inevitably, that is now beginning to change.

Bhutan’s forthcoming democratisation is another aspect of the country that makes it utterly unique. But perhaps the most famous thing Bhutan has given to the world (recently, at least) is the concept of Gross National Happiness.

Photo by Curr_En, via Flickr (Creative Commons).

The internet as the perfect market

I was reading Thomas Friedman yesterday and one line in particular caught my eye:

“… the Internet offers the closest thing to a perfectly competitive market in the world today”

Now there’s a thought.

Of course, the internet still has problems with asymmetries of information, language barriers, risk of fraud and of course the “digital divide”.

Above all, what prevents the internet becoming a perfect market is its lack of tangibility. That is, if I want to buy a product online, I am unable to feel it, smell it or taste it. I cannot try on a shirt online. So in the end, buying physical goods on the internet will always be a little bit of a gamble. But for intangibles and services, the internet is quite unique. And with a little know how (and that must be the crucial part), one can compare the prices of stocks, insurance, commodities or holidays accurately in real time.

The theoretical potential of the internet as a marketplace is massive – a revolution in competitive advantage. In a borderless virtual world, innovation must be king. No-one will be able to rely on having a prominent outlet on the high street. Not to mention the range of services possible. No longer will we have to rely on the limited choice offered locally or nationally. There can literally be a world of choice out there.

This reminds me of a separate but germane story about the power of the internet for commerce and free choice, also from Friedman’s book. In 1999, Germans found they could get around government prohibition of the sale of Mein Kampf by simply ordering it from Amazon.com. The proscribed text would arrive in the post in an anonymous brown parcel. National laws were evaded and eventually the book reached Amazon’s bestseller list for Germany (which would seem to show that banning it hadn’t been very productive).

Friedman would seem to see these events as demonstrating the power of the internet as a symbol of globalisation. He seems to believe that capitalism + technology + ingenuity = freedom. Now, I hardly need to say that I’m a fan of the internet. It’s much like saying I’m a fan of breathing. (The new Facebook excluded, of course.) And this conception is perhaps broadly correct. But it should be clear that there’s a counterpoint to this triumphalism – just as there is a dark side to globalisation, there’s also a dark side to the internet. I’m thinking of things other than the new Facebook now. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that more Germans are reading Hitler? For their freedom of thought, yes. For Germany as a whole? Perhaps not. Nonetheless my tendency is, in this case at least, to support the freedom of the individual over the good of the community. I say again, there can be literally a world of choice out there. That’s a very exciting prospect, but also one pregnant with challenges.

Kiva.org: bringing microfinance to the masses

Recently I was doing some research on microfinance and discovered Kiva.org. It may or may not be new to the reader, as it’s been going since 2005, but for me it was a fascinating find. Kiva is a nonprofit organisation which combines the internet, individual philanthropy and microfinance. It’s backed by the Clinton Global Initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation and a host of corporate partners.

Ordinary citizens (usually in the developed world) make a small loan to one of Kiva’s vetted entrepreneurs (usually also ordinary people, this time in the developing world). We’re talking about as little as $25, a similar amount to an average charitable donation. The transaction is facilitated by PayPal, which forgoes its usual fees.

Those individual $25 loans are combined into a larger sum (as of 31 August, the average loan made is $469.95) and that sum sent to a microfinance institution “on the ground”, who pass on the money and general help and advice to the entrepreneur.

Vahobjon, a Kiva entrepreneur in Tajikistan. Photo by juxtapose^esopatxuj.

The loans made through Kiva now exceed $41 million, from 331,372 lenders. Oh, and the repayment rate is an impressive 98.48%. The only catch is that you don’t get interest, at present, anyway.

It should be borne in mind that microfinance is not perfect – see the work of Milford Bateman, among others – but there can be little doubt that it is often has a highly positive impact, on the individual level at least. Kiva.org is a very exciting project and makes for a more tangible, targeted and perhaps more useful way for concerned citizens in the West to help encourage international development. It will appeal especially to those who prefer the “bootstraps” approach to poverty-alleviation.