Ten years ago, the twin towers had yet to come crashing down. A peace deal and transitional government had yet to come into being in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Olusegun Obasanjo had just taken office in Nigeria, while Thabo Mbeki was also beginning his first term as president of South Africa.

Enter Pambazuka News, launched in 2000 as a tiny text-based newsletter on a continent with miniscule email and internet connection figures. The first edition recorded on the Pambazuka News website only contained a short commentary on the DRC, followed by links to articles grouped under various subject categories. But the subscriber base rapidly grew into the thousands and subscribers started submitting their own letters and articles. As the newsletter and subsequent website grew, founding editor Firoze Manji would sometimes be seen to place his hand on his brow and say, with a worried and wondering expression on his face, something to the effect of: ‘What have we created?’

Fast forward to 2010. Pambazuka News has published 500 issues, a remarkable achievement for an internet-based information platform in an environment littered with websites that have died or are irregularly updated. There is hardly a major event or debate on the African continent that Pambazuka News has not been able to publish an article on.

But what is one to make of Pambazuka News and the impact it has had? Generally, it is notoriously hard to accurately quantify the impact of information. And Pambazuka News probably means as many different things to as many people who are subscribers. I remember one example, though, of someone who wrote in to the newsletter from West Africa saying that an article about someone making soap in East Africa had enabled her to get in touch with that person, find out how soap was made and begin making soap for herself.

In a technology environment where the spotlight tends to shine on the next great example of how gadgets are used for social change, this example strikes me as closer to the heart of what a platform like Pambazuka News has achieved. Whether it’s soap or ideas, what is the value of someone who reads an article on an important issue and finds themselves understanding something in a different way, or, even more dramatically, has their world view changed? What is the power of that if more than one person experiences the same change. 10? 50? 100? 1,000? Perhaps these people will never come together in the sense of revolutionary change, perhaps the majority of them will never participate further, but the space for awareness and the introduction of the power of uncertainty no doubt carry great significance.

Internet theorist Clay Shirky argues in his book ‘Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age’ (2010) that the tools the internet provides makes it possible to talk about a collective ‘cognitive surplus’ – a way in which we can all use our individual free time to participate in creating something that would not otherwise be possible. According to his argument, the internet enables us to treat free time ‘as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally-created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person as a time’.

The world’s collective ‘cognitive surplus’ is so large, he goes on to say, that even a tiny slice can have a huge impact, citing the example of Wikipedia as a case where people have come together to create something that wasn’t there before.

But there’s an important caveat: ‘The cognitive surplus, newly forged from previously disconnected islands of time and talent, is just raw material. To get any value out of it, we have to make it mean or do things. We, collectively, aren’t just the source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use, by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness.’

Shirky’s explanation is useful, perhaps, as one way of understanding Pambazuka News. In the context of an average of 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute by the end of 2009, and Twitter receiving close to 300 million words a day, Pambazuka News is a slice of the cognitive surplus. Providing the platform created the vehicle for people to share their views on Africa, with the urge to share being the driver – to share ideas, opinions and ways of seeing the world with a globally dispersed audience interested in a different Africa. And so before blogging was coined as a term, Pambazuka News was a kind of ‘post-it-by-email’ blog. Before Facebook, users hit the forward button on their email package instead of the ‘like’ button on their Facebook page.

Unfortunately, the idea only goes so far. Shirky frequently refers to the 2 billion new people included in the media landscape. But what about the three billion plus that aren’t there? Internet penetration in Africa is estimated at 10.9 per cent, compared to 58.4 per cent in Europe and 77.4 per cent in North America. With disparate figures like these, those who don’t get to participate risk (and already are) the subject of decisions taken by those who are able to benefit from their access to knowledge provided by the new media environment.

And Shirky’s picture of citizens voluntarily contributing to social good is perhaps a little utopian and doesn’t allow for the way in which powerful interests might direct cognitive surplus to their own ends. It’s probably also fair to say that cognitive surplus as a concept is probably under direct frontal attack. Media moguls and large corporates want to control information through pay-walls and exercise control over how we use the internet. And repressive governments are blocking internet and mobile phone access, scared of what happens when information really is allowed to flow freely amongst citizens.

In this context, Pambazuka News will become even more important as it seeks to continue to enable people to share information that challenges the prevailing status quo – a status quo that keeps so many of the planet’s people on the periphery.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Patrick Burnett is editor of Links & Resources, Pambazuka News.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.