Ethan Zuckerman
Founder, Global Voices
Love and Serendipity
Ethan Zuckerman is one of the people we can thank for breaking open the Internet in the early 1990s for non-techno-geeks to create their own web pages and publish their thoughts, creations and business ideas for a cyber audience. He was involved in the first wave of dot.com companies that made it big a decade ago. Or, as he humbly remembers, “In 1994, if you knew what the Internet was, you could probably get a job.”
When the boom subsided and the dot.com whizzes scrambled to predict what the next big thing would be, Zuckerman moved away from the pack. The commercial end of the Internet did not excite him as much as its creative potential to transform the world.
“Almost everyone who made money in the first round of that dot.com era was incredibly lucky,” he says. “But now they’re slogging through their second, third and fourth businesses. Many didn’t go on to the second round of success. I’ve had a lot more fun than they have.”
Inspired by former dot.com colleague Dick Sabot, who had what Zuckerman calls a “broad vision” of the Internet, and armed with the wisdom gained through his own experiences living in West Africa, he set out to answer the question, What was the Internet going to mean?
He became the executive director and self-proclaimed “Big Geek” of a volunteering agency, Geekcorps, Inc., and took on the mission of sharing his considerable techno-talents with hopeful entrepreneurs in developing nations. He worked to build “lasting ties between geeks” around the world through the common bond of IT know-how.
Zuckerman describes his role as one of “evangelism and advocacy.” The religious reference is apt—especially because he’s all about love, openness and faith in humanity. He’s also a big believer in serendipity and likes to read the front page stories below the fold because that’s where some of the quirkier things in life appear—things that call out for careful attention.
As a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Zuckerman is now paid to ponder the meaning of the web and see where that leads him. He works to magnify the Internet’s global reach by promoting communal responsibility and a genuine awareness of the political realities of the world. But he’s quick to point out that the Internet has given us a false sense of globalization.
“There’s so much information on the net that choice becomes a factor,” he explains. “We have an imaginary cosmopolitanism—we feel more global because it’s there. In reality, the net has helped us fool ourselves, because we have actually become more parochial.”
One of the projects he has worked on at the Berkman Center is Global Voices Online, a website that aggregates and translates “novel news.” The site publishes blogs that reflect international conversations and pushes the mainstream media to pay attention to neglected pockets of the world. The point is to get people talking to each other, solving problems together.
Zuckerman calls this “cultural bridging,” a phenomenon that is covered in his forthcoming book, [tentatively] titled Disconnect. Here, and in much of his other writing, he bats around terms like “homophily” (love of like-minded people) and “xenophilia” (love of the other), states of mind that are intrinsically opposed to one another. It’s no surprise that his vision of a truly connected world relies on ample amounts of xenophilia, a willingness to love people about whom we know absolutely nothing.
“We have a tendency to look at what we already know,” he says. “One of the lessons of the decade so far is: what you don’t know can hurt you. This leads not only to shocking ignorance and a total misunderstanding of the world, but also to missed opportunities for marketing in developing countries. The people who are more connected—more globalized—clearly have an edge.”
The problem is: How do you find something you’re not looking for? Zuckerman says the answer is serendipity—the accidental encounter with good ideas that open up our world.
In its current design, the Internet tends to take us to familiar things. Instead, “what we need are a lot of new systems to help us stumble over things, to jog us out of ordinary reality,” he says.
That’s where xenophilia comes in—the kind of love that waits and listens for a distant voice with an openness to new things.
