I’ve just read an article which used “problematised” as a verb. Apart from causing me to stumble and have to re-read the whole sentence, this uncommon word illustrates perfectly the problem with so much “educated” writing. And with journalism.

Discussing this on Twitter earlier this afternoon, I said I’d save the writer from further embarrassment. And the editor. But I’ve changed my mind, because I’m going to pull them into this conversation.

The author is Jeff Sparrow. The editing is by newmatilda.com. And the article is certainly something I’m interested in understanding: The Golden Age Of Publishing is an essay on the challenges facing publishers as we move into the digital era.

Here’s the whole paragraph:

That’s why the glory days of the press coincided with the long boom after the Second World War, a time of relative economic and social stability, in which Keynesianism explicitly validated public works and the public sphere. Since then, however, the turn back to marketisation that reached its zenith with neo-liberalism has problematised, more and more explicitly, the very notion of a public. In the idealised free market, there is, as Margaret Thatcher famously explained, no such thing as society — there’s simply an aggregation of competing individuals. In the midst of that fragmentation, the old newspaper model no longer makes sense.

“Problematised”? I’d never seen the word before! I thought it might mean “position as a problem” or something like “assert it’s a problem rather than a benefit”. But no.

So what the hell is this about?

The Macquarie Dictionary tells me:

problematise (say ‘probluhmuhtuyz)
verb (t) (problematised, problematising) to expose and analyse problems in (something previously assumed to be without problems): to problematise the current assumptions.

So that core phrase about problematising the notion of the public — and I feel dirty even typing that! — might perhaps go something like this:

But since then we’ve turned back to the market as our solution [saviour?], a process that reached its peak in neo-liberalism. This process has, ever more explicitly, exposed problems with the very notion of a unified “public” that we hadn’t realised before.

Now I don’t know whether that gets the emphasis right. If I were the editor, I’d run those suggested changes past the author to make sure we’re conveying the right nuances.

But that’s the problem. I’m a well-read, intelligent middle-aged person with a tertiary education and a keen interest in the subject matter. If I can’t be sure I’ve understood the author’s intent, then what chance does anyone else have?

Who are the author and editor at newmatilda.com expecting to communicate with?

I think there’s two issues here: assumed cultural literacy, and the role of the writer.

The concept of cultural literacy was coined or at least promoted by E D Hirsch Jr. As Wikipedia puts it:

Cultural literacy is the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions and informal content which creates and constitutes a dominant culture. From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical references to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with the culture and reflection of it.

Take a daily newspaper. To be culturally literate — and this is my rough paraphrase — you need to understand all of the words and phrases used in the front-page stories that are presented without explanation.

Let’s say there’s a story about the Prime Minister reshuffling the front bench. You need to know that “front bench” means the cabinet, and that the cabinet consists of the government’s ministers. You need to know the power relationship between PM and cabinet. You need to know that cabinet positions are often granted as rewards for service rather than being based on competence. None of this is explained in the story. It’s assumed you’ll already know.

If it’s a story about the Bombers, it’s assumed you already know that that’s the nickname of the Essendon Football Club in Melbourne, and that they’re an Australian Rules Football team rather than part of the Australian Rugby League. Indeed, the abbreviation “AFL” will be used without explanation, as will team members’ nicknames and various aspects of the game’s rules.

And yet most people are excluded from the political story because they don’t know the nuances. As I’ve written elsewhere:

Most people couldn’t identify a front bench, government or opposition. Most don’t even know what a front bench is. In the late 1980s I did a vox pop in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall for ABC Radio. The question: “There’s just been a state cabinet reshuffle. Can you name any cabinet members, old or new?” 80% didn’t know what a “cabinet” was. “Oh like John Howard, you mean?” asked one. Well, kinda. Just a different parliament and (then) a different side.

And I’d be excluded from the football story. I just had to look up “Bombers” to see which club that is. Sports journalists are particularly bad at understanding cultural literacy issues. If you’re not already into a sport, where do you start? Because the news stories give you no clues.

In just that single paragraph of the newmatilda.com story, “Keynesianism” is presented as a given, and “zenith” is used rather than the everyday “peak”.

I studied computing science and linguistics, not economics or media studies. I know that Keynes was an important economist because… something. But give me a chance! At least give me a sentence or two explaining his views of the “public” in the context of what you’re trying to explain to me.

My point here is about communicating clearly with your audience. What is newmatilda.com’s intended audience? Only people with a post-graduate education who already know that “problematised” has a particular meaning in post-grad analysis? That’s perfectly fine, but it seriously reduces the size of your audience — with obvious implications for your potential revenue.

I’d argue that there’s plenty of people interested in the history and future of the media, but only a small proportion of them are media studies or sociology post-grads.

My second point is that it’s the writer’s job to write clearly for their audience.

On Twitter, Barry Saunders said — and I’ll turn a series of tweets into prose — “Having spent time writing as an academic as well as for general audience, some words can’t be simplified. Sometimes you should just crack out a dictionary. If you understand the word ‘problematic’ [then 'problematised' is] really not a stretch.”

Sure. Sometimes there really is no alternative to a specialist’s specific jargon word. So when you use it, explain it. Or link to a definition. But if there is an everyday alternative, use it! Even if it takes a few more words or a re-phrasing.

In this case, though, I don’t think the specialist meaning of “problematised” is quite so obvious. Well-educated me got it wrong first time around. Surely I’m not alone.

Every reader who stumbles over a meaning… Every reader who makes a mistake in interpretation because they didn’t know a word’s special meaning in the special context… Every reader who’s forced to go to a dictionary or, more likely, doesn’t bother… Every one of them represents a failure of communication.

Every failure of communication is a failure of the writer, and of their editor whose job it is to massage the writer’s words for the audience.

[Photo: 135.365 Academics by Reilly Butler, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.]

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

Saturday 27 June 2009. This isn’t exactly the world’s newest Boeing 767-300ER, and there’s slightly too much pubic hair in the toilets. Breakfast is being served, and my stupidly-expensive Moleskine notebook is filling up with notes about the Parable of the Quartered Donkey.

That’s quartered as in hanged, drawn and quartered.

I’m the donkey.

The smiling Kenya Airways staff go about their business of bread rolls and bitter coffee en route from Bangkok to Nairobi, where I’ll change for my flight to Dar es Salaam. I wake from a brief period of something vaguely approximating sleep to the realisation that Project TOTO has one significant flaw: multiple goals, with conflicting requirements.

Something deep in my gut says this is going to be a problem.

Flash forward to today. It’s only two weeks since I arrived in Tanzania and a week since I left again, but the world is eager to analyse the project’s “success” or “failure”. We already have Laurel Papworth’s Stilgherrian: Wherefor art thou, bloggers? (which has triggered some excellent discussion) and Fi Bendall’s Sharing the knowledge: How NGOs can benefit from online consumer awareness.

Both articles are well worth reading. Both highlight what I think is a serious problem: short-term thinking.

But first, those multiple goals.

• “Give poverty a voice.” This was the “public” goal. Training Tanzanians in blogging and getting their blog online, as promoted in the original #secretmission briefing note and media release. This requires uninterrupted time at a computer with a decent Internet connection — although there’s also the paper blogs training exercise. But that’s just the orientation and technical set-up. Actually establishing a corporate blog requires discussion within an organisation, and then slowly, steadily building an audience. That takes months, unless you’re Stephen Fry.
• Tell the story of poverty. Expose me to the reality of African poverty, so I can write about it. This requires both plenty of contact time in the field, and plenty of quiet reflect-and-write time in solitude. As I wrote a fortnight before I left Sydney, an insightful essay can take half a day, and I was already worried then that it was going to be tough.
• Expose a hidden problem. The report Breaking the Curse, commissioned by development charities including ActionAid, reckons African states have been deprived of royalties and taxes by mining firms, thanks to a lack of legislative oversight and overly-generous tax concessions. They want to expose Australian mining companies if they’ve been behaving badly. This is investigative journalism. It’s all about establishing trusted contacts and research over an extended period.
• Raise ActionAid’s profile. This whole project came about because Austcare, a “trusted brand” in charities here in Australia, was becoming ActionAid Australia, and needed to promote it new identity. If people were reading about the project, then they’d learn the new name.
• Raise money. In amongst all that is the need for ActionAid to cover the costs of the project — as well as fund its continuing operations, of course. Fundraising targets were amongst the KPIs Fi Bendall write about in her piece, though they’re not spelled out.

It strikes me that all of these things take time.

Indeed, as Laurel writes:

Social media can be slow — everything happens in the long tail of rippled content, rather than the short head of traditional campaign activity.

And as Ash Nallawalla commented:

I didn’t know about Stil’s trip until the day of his send-off party, and only because Neerav mentioned it.

It’s all too easy to forget that just because we might be hyper-focussed on some issue and hanging on every tweet, for others it’s just part of the background chatter in their lives.

I felt like I’d been talking about Project TOTO for weeks, to the point of boring everybody. However I was still getting messages on Twitter a week after I’d arrived in Tanzania from people wondering why I wasn’t in Sydney. People asked me today whether I was still in Tanzania, when I left a week ago.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. People retweet things said days ago because they’ve only just logged in and scrolled back. People add comments to blog posts from months or years ago, because they’ve just stumbled across them while searching for something on their agenda today.

Despite knowing this, Laurel is disappointed by the lack of instant reaction:

I expected Australian bloggers to get more behind Stil, and I’m a little disappointed they didn’t. A few blog posts on the going away party — we bloggers love boozy tweetups — but no real analysis of the changes that citizen journalism can wrought to this new hybrid of Social News and Social Action.

But one commenter, Just some guy, absolutely nailed it, I reckon: Authenticity. Or rather, the lack thereof. His comment is worth reading in full.

As an outsider — I don’t know any of you people — I have to say that the apparent lack of interest in this project has to do with the failure of Stilgherrian to communicate in an authentic voice.

For someone who, according to the voice he chooses to use in social media, can barely lift the telephone or make it up Enmore Road without a “FFS” about some perceived injustice against his delicate sensibilities, to suddenly become the Mother Theresa of African blogging read as forced, fake, self-censoring and pandering to the politics of his sponsors.

It’s absurd to be harangued for not getting behind the project when, from an objective point of view, all we saw was an endless series of tweets about getting there only to be followed by more tweets about getting out of there and worrying about getting a decent hotel room in Bangkok.

It was ridiculous to find one of Australia’s most cantankerous voices on the internet replaced, suddenly, with an apparently calm acceptance of things we know, from experience, he would never put up with in his day-to-day life in suburban Sydney.

Regardless of how socially significant the project may be — which was never really explained or expressed outside of months of chatter about “sekrit” meetings — its expression read as two-dimensional and insular.

If you genuinely believe that Australian bloggers outside your network should support and promote this kind of international action, you need to back off from the provocative language and engage a real-world audience with something a little more useful. As it stands, it looks like all that happened was a piss-up and a couple of long drives in the African countryside as narrated by Evelyn Waugh on Valium. Got anything better to offer?

Whoever he is, he’s right. I did self-censor. And I did worse. I committed the unforgivable sin of being boring.

From the time of The Gnome Incident, I was stressed about saying something else that might cause problems. Though I had a document in which my editorial independence was agreed there was, as vealmince pointed out weeks ago, inevitably an invisible pressure to conform to The Message simply because ActionAid was paying for my ticket.

This is, of course, precisely the criticism aimed at embedded journalism. And rightly so.

As I said in my previous post, for most of the time in Tanzania I was completely exhausted. And exhausted, I didn’t have the focus to say what I was really thinking and feeling. While I didn’t have time or, often, an Internet link to blog, I did tweet to sustain the presence — but my tweets became banal.

One of the recommendations from Thursday’s debriefing with ActionAid Australia was that the next outreach blogger will need time to recover from jet lag and a less-packed schedule if they’re to write while in the field.

Barry Saunders also nailed it in Social media and social justice:

I’m quite keen to blog about [Project TOTO], but frankly, I’m more interested in hearing the voices of the Tanzanian bloggers. The last thing the blogosphere needs is more middle-class white westerners drowning out other people’s voices.

Hear hear!

Quite frankly, I’m uncomfortable with the slogan “Give poverty a voice”. Poverty already has a voice. Everybody does. What poverty needs is for us to shut the fuck up and listen for a change.

While my longer blog posts are only just starting to appear, we’ve established some valuable human links between Sydney and Dar es Salaam — both through actual voices from Africa in the blog Jambo Tanzania and whatever other stories emerge . It’ll be interesting to see how that evolves.

Update: The following point occurred to me as I was responding to comments. I think it deserves to be pulled up into the body of the post.

Which of these two aims was the real aim of the project?

1. Give poverty a voice.
2. Look at me and tell your friends! I’m giving poverty a voice!

Humans are highly-evolved social animals. I think we have a special part of the brain designed to detect insincere attention-seeking behaviour.

Thanks heaps to ’Pong for the video work (although I did the cutaways which allowed him to edit it). Apologies to Mark Pesce, whose to-camera piece wasn’t recorded properly — although we can see him lurking in the background in his lovely red jumper, and raising his eyebrows quizzically.

Also, I am too fat.

It’s D-1. I depart from Sydney airport in just 29.5 hours. I still have a million things to do. I am incredibly stressed. I hope to write more later today. My Twitter stream will reveal more, however.

There’s so many links here that for the blog version I’ll put them all “below the fold”. Happy reading!

• The Recently Deflowered Girl | found_objects: Reproduction of a sweetly funny book from 1965 featuring illustrations by one of my favourite cartoonists, Edward Gorey.
• The “misunderestimated” president? | BBC News: A collection of George W Bush’s “best” mis-speaks.
• Ada Lovelace Day | PledgeBank: On 24 March, celebrate and promote women in technology by publishing an item about an unsung heroine. I’ll be doing something.
• People Who Deserve It: As the tagline says, “socially responsible reasons to punch someone in the face.”
• The internet's undersea world: A map of all the sub-ocean data cables, showing where the recent breaks in the Mediterranean caused problems — and how few links Australia really has.
• All’s fair in battle of ideas | theage.com.au: A nice analysis of the issues surrounding the Quadrant hoax.
• Tools for News: “Don’t be a tool. Use one.” Show this site to your legacy journalists. Then sack them.
• Weather pages, internet banking banned by Queensland employers | Herald Sun: Queensland government employees are finding that over-zealous Internet filters are hampering their ability to do their jobs, blocking email which includes medical terminology an even classifying the weather forecast as “entertainment”.
• Australia’s 20 Worst Cases of Censorship and Moral Outrage in 2008 | Somebody Think Of The Children: Again, what it says.
• 30 Excellent WordPress Video Tutorials | Six Revisions: What it says.
• Do Not Want: Bindi Irwin Doll | The Inquisitr: Poor 10yo Bindi Irwin is being turned into a marketing platform. Yes, dolls. I find this truly disgusting. Maybe we can release her back into the wild soon?
• Teens who pledge virginity just as likely to have sex | theage.com.au: Teens have just as much sex whether they’ve entered into an “abstinence pledge” or not. But if thy haven’t been taught about contraception, they don’t use it. Gosh.
• Business Survival needs good IT People | Wrapt in Web: In the current economic crisis, companies who don’t have the strategic stuff like IT and social media sorted out will be the ones which die, argues Alistair Nicholson.
• US consumer confidence at all-time low | Business Day: They’ve been keeping records of consumer confidence in the US since 1967, and this is the lowest they’ve ever been.
• Australia, the once-and-future wireless king? | CNN Money: A Fortune Tech Daily puff piece on Telstra’s Next G wireless broadband network. Yes, Next G is a world leader, but reading this you’d never know that anyone's ever said a bad word about the company.
• Can The Internet Save The World? | newmatilda.com: “The global economy might be melting faster than Greenland but not all the news is grim. Technological advances mean that democracy and citizen journalism are surging, writes Barry Saunders in a review of the year online.”
• Model for the 21st century newsroom pt.6: new journalists for new information flows | Online Journalism Blog: An interesting model for how a future newsroom might be structured, and the roles for journalists.
• Modbook | Axiotron: Hanging out for a Tabletmac? Can haz one now, with this clever MacBook Pro conversion service.
• Best of the web in 2008 | Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ: The first post in Peter Black’s end-of-year wrap, for some reason he’s listed my website as one of the 5 best for 2008. Mad fool. He does link to some other fascinating stuff though.

• Brisbane (Mt Stapylton): A sequence of radar images of last night’s severe storms over Brisbane.
• Web moves to front and centre in coverage of Obama presidency | ABC Digital Futures: For the first time ever, a website (not a newspaper or news agency) will have the most reporters covering the White House.
• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide | Google: What it says: an excellent guide to what works best for getting better Google search results.
• Fireside chats in the 21st century | ABC News: “Obama not only raised far more money via the internet, he also spent far more than McCain on it. This approach clearly paid off,” says Barry Saunders in this superb opinion piece.
• New task force to examine ISP level content filtering | iTnews Australia: The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has formed a task force to look into the Federal government’s controversial ISP filtering scheme. The task force meets on 26 November and expects to take “a leadership role, provide expert technical advice, and review e-security and ISP filtering proposals” to assist the ACS to develop its own policy positions.
• The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media | Capture the Conversation: “In the world of social media, are you going to be a force for good? Or are you going to turn to the dark side – ruining your chances and infuriating those who cross your path?” Some interesting tips on building an online presence.
• Industry and government work together to tackle internet terror | Home Office: The UK government announces an Internet “filtering” plan similar to the Howard government’s NetAlert scheme. The key difference is that the “bad stuff” it’s protecting us against is “websites that may encourage the endorsement or participation in acts of terrorism” rather than Conroy’s ubiquitous “child pornography”.