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Ethan Zuckerman , the founder of Geekcorps and co-founder of Global Voices Online, took central stage on Saturday morning to talk about the great (yet underused) potential of the Internet to foster global dialogue about important issues.

Ethan has spent a good amount of time thinking how technology can be applied to solve non-technological problems. Geekcorps, which he founded in 2000, has the noble goal of sending Western geek volunteers to the developing world where they help around with technology ((Ethan's year in Ghana had a profound impact on his career and research interests). Since 2000 Geekcorps had expanded its operations and is now part of IESC (Ethan is no longer involved in either).

Ethan's next big thing was to found GlobalVoicesOnline (together with Rebeca McKinnon, a former CNN Bureau chief in Beijing). GVO's mission states that “Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore”. And this is pretty much what they do quite successfully. GVO has now an effective advocacy arm, a special outreach program, and editions in multiple languages.

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Those who have not see Ethan present before may have been surprised at his great communication skills. Ethan – who openly describes himself as a “geek” (back in the 1990s he was one of the senior people at Tripod, the pioneering web service) – is a very big man with thick glasses and long hair—just as much “geekish” as one could imagine.

Yet from the very first seconds on stage, Ethan takes control of the audience and emanates plenty of confidence through his voice and body language (he'd make a good presenter for Geek TV if such a thing existed). He apologizes that the audience would have to listen to him before it gets to see the two beautiful ladies that follow him and fires up his first slides.

The subtitle of his talk is “Why peace, love and international understanding are harder than it might seem”. Zuckerman starts by making a reference to yesterday's Woz session, which deeply inspired him. “His speech was basically a torrent of stories and enthusiasm, boundless self-confidence and geeky desire to make cool stuff”, wrote Zuckerman on his blog a few hours after the Woz speech was over (Zuckerman has a bit of a reputation for live-blogging from conferences he attends – recently he even compiled a manual for it).

He talks about ways in which computers may change not only the ways in which businesses are run (hence the Woz tangent) but also bring something new to the world of international relations (he references the paper that Tiffany Shlain, yesterday's speaker, wrote in 1988 with her Iranian colleague).

In his next slide, Ethan takes us back to 1984 .There were about 1000 people on the Internet back then (Zuckerman himself joined the club a bit later) and, as Zuckerman says, they all looked like him (=very geeky). What's interesting is how soon different countries were joining the Usenet (what eventually evolved into today's Web) and how they interacted with each other once online. While some Western European countries were on Usenet in early 1980s, it took the Soviet Union until 1990 to join it.

Or did it? Ethan brings up the famous Kremvax hoax (also known as Moskvax and kgbvax) that circulated on Usenet on April 1, 1984 . Somebody was creative enough to create a dedicated Usenet site and post a letter signed by Kostantin Chernenko, the then leader of USSR, which stated that the USSR was willing to talk to its enemies. The elegance of such parodies can never fade: “We have been informed that on this network many people have given strong anti-Russian opinions, but we believe they have been misguided by their leaders, especially the American administration, who is seeking for war and domination of the world”.

And while most people got the joke, some were in an exhilarating mood because of Chernenko's letter; (“let's open a bottle of Wild Turkey and celebrate this historical event” reads a typical account. Discussions ran for three weeks until the real author wrote in and said it was April Fool's Joke.

For Zuckerman, the Kremvax hoax is the first example of how the Internet can be used for international communication on important issues.

From there Zuckerman goes into another direction, giving us a glimpse into the history of globalization. In an obvious reference to Marc Levinson's book “ The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” (which Zuckerman had blogged about it here), ge talks about the tremendous role that the shipping container played as a major facilitator of global trade

Another case is point is water from Fiji, which has flooded the US market: isn't that another great sign of the global triumph if it's cheaper to produce water in Fiji and ship it to the US than produce it locally? Regular readers of Zuckerman's blog would not be surprised to see this Fiji reference either – this is a topic he had blogged about as well.

Showing the geographical breakdown of food products in his local grocery store (Zuckerman lives in Lanesboro, MA, a town of a few thousand people), Zuckerman says that even in such a small place as his town he can choose to go have dinner from a dozen countries

Curiously, says Ethan, the label is not moving around as much but the jobs are moving around. Ethan says that we are in a very complicated immigration situation. Globally, labor is much less mobile than it was before. He compares today's global economy today to how it looked like in 1913, the height of the previous period when the global economy peeked. Back then, says Ethan, 10% of the world population were migrants. Right now, it's only 3%.

Zuckerman says that we are experiencing what Daniel Cohen, the author of “Globalization and its enemies”, dubbed “immobile globalization”: thanks to technology, today people don't really need to move to hold global jobs (think customer service available in India for American clients). ““It is only through television, or during a few vacation weeks for tourists from rich countries, that one encounters other societies” is a particularly powerful quote from Cohen's book than Zuckerman had put on this blog while reviewing the book in 2006.

“How global is our Internet? How global is our information?”, he asks next. Does this flattening of the world apply to the Internet?

In some respect, yes. Ethan gives us an example of the Nollywood movies, the third largest source of movies in the world (soon to take over Hollywood as the second source). There are Nigerian films that are being released every day and there is a web service that allows to download Nigerian movies for just 4 dollars per day. A similar examples he mentions is a web-site that allows Jamicans who live abroad to tune in and listen to Jamaican radio. There are literally thousands of other similar examples.

Zuckerman showcases a blog run by the former Vice President of Iran, who joined the blogging bandwagon because it allowed him to find a way to connect with the Iranian youth; he really had few other channels at his disposal, says Ethan.

Ethan shows a map of the world at midnight – the famous NASA image from 2001—which shows how wired different parts of the world are. Ethan says that it gives us a good sense of where the one billion Internet users are. While North America and Western Europe are gleaming with light, there are still a lot of people in Africa, Brazil, and Asia. The map of electrification is a good proxy map of where the Internet users are.

“If you don't see them on this map, you probably don't see them online”, says Zuckerman. “Mobile phones are changing this”, he continues, “but not much – you still need to power them”.

Next, Zuckerman shows a map of the fiber cables that actually make the Internet. Fiber-optic cables connect the US with Europe, some lie under the pacific ocean, some in the Middle East. But if you look at Arica, you can barely see anything. There is only one cable in Africa, which is definitively not enough for the whole continent (there is still nothing in East Africa, for example) . Only smth in North Africa.

Another map comes from the Open Net Initiative—a consortium of four universities affiliated with the Berkman Center at Harvard (where Zuckerman is a fellow)--to show the audience how governments restrain the Internet. China, Iran, and a dozen other governments have decided that it's going to be very dangerous to give people access to this. Tools of creation, says Zuckerman, are extremely important, and those are one ones that are getting blocked on a regular basis in those countries.

So far, Zuckerman has been talking mostly about the physical and political barriers, but there are also interest barriers. To show them, 4 years ago Ethan built a tool called Global Attention Profiles which tracks the attention that selected news media outlets pay to different parts of the world. GAP queries Google News every day, finds the frequence with which all countries appear in it, and then colors the world map accordingly. When Zuckerman showcases the map, one could see that high-attention regions like North American or Western Europe are in red, but this is not the case for Sub-Saharan Africa or Central Asia. You have a 12 time better chance of reading a story about Japan than a story almost any African country on a multitude of sources tracked by Google News.

Zuckerman recommends another book – this time by Kwami Antohny Appiah, a Ghanian-American philosopher currently at Princeton, simply entitled “Cosmopolitanism” (WW Norton, 2006). For Appiah, a true cosmopolitan is not a New York fashionista, but a global citizen, somebody who feels at home everywhere.

Zuckerman points that this is a very new phenomenon. Thousands of years ago we saw much less people than we see today. Getting on an airplane and flying to Africa is something radically different from what we have had in the past and is only what probably only the last 2-3 generations have experienced.

Zuckerman pulls up a flag of Nigeria – one could sense some intimidation in the audience-- he'd better not quiz them on what country this is. Nigeria is the most important country on the African continent, with around 130 million people, may be more, may be less-- it's very dangerous to do census people down there. It's supposed to be a rich nation (Nigeria is soon to overtake Venezuela as the world's 3 leading oil supplier) but the wealth doesn't really get distirbuted evenly. But what do we know about Nigeria? Of course, all sorts of online scams!

Zuckerman shows a screen shot of a typical scam letter, where one is asked to transfer N amount of money to a Nigerian bank. Most of those scams are based on a very old model – dubbed “Spanish Prisoner” back in 1588. Scam started proliferating in Nigeria in 1980s—back then, it was done using fax machines and other devices; today Internet provided a very fertile ground for their dissemination.

Such scams – called “419 scams” after section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code that penalizes such activities. Zuckerman shows a Nigerian music video called “I go chop your dollar”, which (rather dramatically, one should add) depicts what is normally happening in a fraud case (you see foreigners flying into Nigeria, meeting with people who look like Nigerian officials, driving in nice cars, etc).

Yet, recently there has been an explostion in scam-baiting, says Zuckerman (to learn more about scam-baiting, I recommend to read this wonderful article in June's Atlantic). There exists a special community at sites like 419eater.com that makes scammers perform all sorts of silly things and take photos of themselves afterwards.

To illustrate this point, Zuckerman shows another famous viral video – the Monty Python's sketch performed by two Nigerian scammers who were promised a scholarship in a British art school if they act good enough by one of the guys there were trying to scam. For Zuckerman, there is no winner in such games; instead of using the Internet as a tool of active dialouge on important issues, we are wasting our opportunities in engage in who-will-scam-whom games.

A similar phenomenon is taking place inside the Korean game “Lineage”, where the South Koreans often interact with the Chinese entrepreneurs who offer special items on eBay that can be used in this game. But since the Chinese also like to play the game but not necessarily adhere to its rules, there is a way going on between the Chinese and the Koreans and they are using “Lineage” as their platform.

Another case in point is the geo-distribution of Orkut users (Orkut is a popular social network dominated by the Brazilians and Indians). Since it was not set-up as an English service, it was logical that many conversations would be in foreign languages (they turned out to be in Portuguese) but the English-speakers didn't seem to have enough cultural sensitivity to deal with content in other languages every day, so they just left, turning a Google-owned Orkut into a Brazilian monopoly.

The central question of Zuckerman's presentation is why do we walk away from opportunities to talk to each other that Internet facilitates? He says that there are problems that the world is facing that require us to talk to one another. Greenhouse effect is one example where there should be an open conversation between the US and China (at which point Zuckerman exhibits two powerful pictures, one of an American factory and one a heavily polluting Chinese factory). “We are talking past each other... Even though we have the capability, the real problem is that we still don't talk”.

But there are still many people out there who want to make those bridges between cultures and countries. So he shows a blog called Saudi Jeans -- run by a Saudi feminist. He shows a blog about Zimbabwe which talks about what it's like to live in a country with hyperinflation, where the price of today's apple can buy you a house in six months. He shows the famous Chinese blog EastSouthWestNorth – a Chinese guy in New York translating a couple of stories from the Chinese media every morning.

Ethan pulls up a picture of a crab wearing three watches-- it does look quite surreal. When a blog gets blocked in China, people usually say that they got “harmonized” (perphaps, alluding to the doublespeak of the Communist part that is still building a “harmonious society”). But even the word “harmonize” became too dangerous to use – it got on the list of the sensitive words that ISPs and owners of online forums look for and then block. But since there is a similarity between the pronounciation of the words “harmonize” and “rivercrab”, bloggers started using the latter instead to denote they got blocked. Now they just say “I got rivercrabbed”, says Zuckerman.

But still, why watches on the crab? Well, one Chinese bloggers writes under the pen name of “...wears three watches” ("dai sange biao”), which is a pun on “three represents” ("sange daibiao"), a political slogan coined by former President Jiang Zemin. So some blogger decided to combine the two great absurdities and to a photo of a rivercrab wearing three watches (make sure you read what Rebecca McKinnon, the co-founder of Global Voices Online, wrote about the rivercrab mash-up on her blog). Perhaps, the is the future of online activism: subtle yet very creative and pointing the absuridity of the regime.

Zuckerman uses that last example to demonstrate how complex the online environment outside of the US is. You need a guide, says Zuckerman, and he did help to build such a guide—Global Voices Online, at which points he invites Georgia Popplewell (GV's managing editor) and Amira Al Hussaini (GV's regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa).