Everyone has seen the photo of the little Vietnamese girl running away from the napalm, the man in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and the death of Neda during the Iranian protests.  UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave an inspiring talk at TED and explained why these images came to symbolize and publicize a movement for the rest of the world to see.  These moving photos evoke a strong emotional response and are testaments to the power of the image to inspire action and civic participation.

As I discussed in an earlier post, technology and social media are helping to give a voice to people whose stories might otherwise not be heard.  In his talk, Brown says:
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ReadWriteWeb, a blog about web technology, has a post by Richard MacManus this week about ://URLFAN, which ranks websites by popularity based on blog mentions. As MacManus explains:

We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN’s ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media – and in particular bloggers. That’s a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it’s still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

://URLFAN is, as we write this, “currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds.”
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Tuesday’s state dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the first of the Obama presidency, included many sartorial nods to the honored country. Michelle Obama wore a strapless gold and silver gown by Indian-born designer Naeem Khan, accessorizing with a number of bangles.

Director M. Night Shyamalan brought his wife, Bhavna Shyamalan, clad in a striking black and white sari.
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One of the great cultural tragedies of the Iraq war was the 2003 looting of the National Museum, which once housed one of the world’s most impressive Mesopotamian collections.

The United States was blamed by many for not doing more to stop the looting. Now, an American company, Google, is planning to digitize the museum’s collection and make it available online, for free, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who made the announcement at the museum yesterday.
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I’ve written a lot about Facebook, which is wildly popular in the United States. But as Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation at the State Department, noted in an interview with Kojo Nnamdi that I blogged about in a previous post, Americans tend to focus on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook because they’re popular here. To be sure, those companies have a global presence, but sometimes they’re not the main site in other countries. For example, Brazil’s population has adopted Google’s Orkut as its main social networking site over Facebook.

Steve Hamm has an article in Business Week talking about the latest social networking site with global ambitions, XIHA Life:
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Computer behemoth I.B.M. is not the first company you would expect to use humans to help with translations. But that’s exactly what they’re doing to fine tune an automatic translation tool that will be speedy and accurate enough to be used for instant messaging between speakers of different languages.

The New York Times has an article about the endeavor, nFluent, which is currently only used by I.B.M. employees but which is intended to be sold to other businesses someday:
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Brookings Fellow Cynthia Schneider has a great TED talk about how popular television shows like Afghan Idol and Poet of the Millions, which is broadcast throughout the Arab world, are changing tribal societies.  These merit-based competitions, with equal access to everyone and the winner selected via SMS voting, are reaching incredibly deep into society. People of all ages go to great lengths to watch the shows in private and public places, and become so engaged that they campaign for their favorite candidate.
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The Guardian has an informative article about British diplomats who blog. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) launched a web platform two years ago and now 30 diplomats blog about all number of subjects.

The FCO says it takes a hands-off approach to what its ambassadors write about. Some stick to government policy. Others write colourfully about the pitfalls of overseas life. In a recent blog posting Britain’s governor of the Cayman Islands, Stuart Jack, revealed a gang of marauding green iguanas had invaded his roof. He even attached a picture. (Jack also pointed out that crocodiles once indigenous to the Cayman Islands but now found only in Cuba and Florida had been spotted paddling off the coast. He admitted that the sighting might have been a large fish.)
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The premise that people of different religions can share fundamental values such as tolerance and respect is not in itself groundbreaking. But the worldwide, virtually instantaneous affirmation of an explicit statement – a Charter for Compassion, crafted with the help of 150,000 online visitors – is not something that could have happened during our parents’ generation.
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I was asked about the role of storytelling in civic participation at the Futures of Entertainment Conference.

I don’t think the average person typically connects policy or legislation to their daily lives.  They probably don’t know that Section 2704 of the recent 2,074 page health care bill prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage due to a pre-existing condition.  But they can relate to the story of the family who lost their house because the pre-existing condition wasn’t covered by insurance.  People can relate to such stories on an emotional and human level.   And I think that emotional connection is what often inspires civic participation and activism.

Technology and social media are changing the game because people now have the opportunity to tell their own story and don’t need to rely upon traditional media to do it for them.
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