Guerrilla reporting in ‘difficult places’
In mid-2009, when thousands of Iranians took to the streets amid allegations of fraud in the June presidential election, the images of the protests that reached the West were almost exclusively those captured by ordinary citizens on cell phones and digital cameras and disseminated over the Internet, circumventing the government’s information clampdown. So Iran was a fitting place to begin the virtual tour of the world that took place last Thursday evening at MIT’s Stata Center, under the auspices of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media and the title “Civics in Difficult Places.”Hosted by Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at both Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Future Civic Media, the two-hour event was a series of interviews, using the Web-based videoconferencing software Skype, with activists around the world who are helping create grassroots media networks in countries with hostile political environments or scant resources.From the...