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Is Boing Boing blind to causes of Africa?

Boing Boing doesn’t care about black people.

Boing Boing gives air time to DRM protestors who are “shocked, dismayed, and saddened” that their music might not play on their iPods. But what does it say about Sudanese refugees protesting being returned to war-torn Darfur, asks Ethan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman proposes that Boing Boing either hasn’t heard about the protests, that it is simply following Cory Doctorow’s professional commitment to free culture, or:

BoingBoing readers may well be more concerned with DRM than with refugee issues in Northern Africa. BoingBoing is a private business - it maintains a huge readership by covering topics of interest to its readers, and filtering out other topics. Perhaps BoingBoing is more useful to its audience by covering DRM protests and not human rights ones.

It’s this last point I’m most interested in. I’ve been writing for the past two years about “problems” with media attention - most notably, the problem that events involving Africa get a whole lot less attention than those involving Iraq, Israel, Europe and the US.

Zuckerman argues that the BB-reading class needs to pay attention to seemingly irrelevant issues in Africa because globalization will inevitably turn Africa’s problem into everyone’s problem:

The rise of militant Islam in Central Asia was pretty distant to most Americans until September 11th, when it suddenly became profoundly local. Failed or failing states in Africa might remain very distant to Americans… or they might not, if Somalilia or Côte d’Ivoire emerge as global arms bazarrs in the absence of a functioning state.

Are we missing the more important global political questions?

[via Robot Wisdom]

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 11:39 am and is filed under Cory Doctorow, Featured, Feuds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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