If you’re like us, you’re still in awe of the internet’s amazing capacity to provide a window on people, places, ideas, and information from around the world, with only a few clicks of a mouse button. At EnlightenNext, the web has changed virtually every aspect of our lives, from how we pay our bills to how we engage in spiritual inquiry.
Social activist and internet entrepreneur Ethan Zuckerman wants to bring that same transformative power of communication technology to millions of people in the developing world. Combining years of hands-on experience in Africa and elsewhere with the imagination and passion of a visionary computer geek, he is convinced that new media and new technologies can have profound impacts on social, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions across the globe. Whether it’s with cable TV empowering rural women in India or cell phones and satellite radio strengthening agricultural markets in Ghana, Zuckerman’s goal is to improve lives and living conditions by building new channels of communication that can function as truly creative engines for sustainable global development.
In this second of a series of conversations exploring the contours of “bright green” environmentalism (see the Oct–Dec 2007 issue), EnlightenNext editor Ross Robertson talks with Zuckerman about his fascinating and multifaceted work. Covering everything from Zuckerman’s innovative research as a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to his involvement with the pioneering bright green clearinghouse WorldChanging.com, this engaging dialogue illuminates a whole range of new angles and perspectives on the many complex challenges of building an equitable, interconnected, and technologically empowered world.
Ethan Zuckerman is a global activist and researcher focused on the impact of technology on the developing world. Based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society
at Harvard Law School, he is the cofounder of Global Voices, an international web-based community of bloggers and citizen journalists dedicated to broadening intercultural understanding and improving global journalism.
Prior to joining the Berkman Center, Zuckerman helped found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. He later used proceeds from the sale of Tripod to Lycos to fund Geekcorps, a nonprofit organization that sends technically skilled volunteers to developing nations to help build internet and communications infrastructure. Under Zuckerman’s management, Geekcorps sent over a hundred volunteers on three- to six-month tours of duty to a dozen nations. The organization continues to work throughout the developing world as part of the International Executive Service Corps.
In 2004, Zuckerman began writing for WorldChanging, a web-based clearinghouse of “tools, models, and ideas” for building a sustainable future, and he was its first board chairman. His work has been recognized with awards from the World Economic Forum, MIT’s Technology Review, and Fortune magazine, which named him one of its top ten innovators under the age of forty in 2003.
Zuckerman lives the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. He graduated from Williams College with a BA in Philosophy in 1993, and in 1993-4 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana, and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.
