Too Much? Too Little?

Today, the amount of information flowing in and out of the international development space is mostly overwhelming.  In fact, ‘mostly’ does not cut it. It is incredibly overwhelming. Even if I decide to focus on one small facet of international development, whether it is social enterprise, aid, reproductive health, or any other worthy cause, I often feel as though I simply cannot keep up.

I spend the better part of every day (including weekends) cursing the invention of Twitter, blogs, online 24-hour-a-day-updated-by-the-minute media. Life used to be so simple – i.e., my source of information used to be in print – The New York Times, select semi-academic publications such as Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, and The New Yorker. End of story!

I now have 2,289 unread articles on my Google Reader from 47 different blogs. Living in Mumbai, I have to check Twitter in the morning to keep up with tweets from the North American workday and evening, then keep track of the Indian/European workday, and, when that is finally over, I once again get the North American morning barrage. Borders and time zones no longer matter. Honestly, I’m worn out.

But, when I think about those who lack access – access to education, access to employment, access to a better life – the common denominator being access to information – I thank my lucky stars. 

In the brilliant documentary “The Name of the Disease,” produced by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, we are confronted with the voices of patients, shamans, doctors and various health officials in some of the poorest parts of rural Rajasthan, the desert state in western India. This documentary is an attempt to understand the complex and multi-layered narratives of the poor and the sick. What comes out most forcefully is that when family members fall ill, these villagers simply don’t know why and don’t know what to do about it. They rely on uninformed hearsay in caring for their sick family members because they lack access to verifiable, potentially life-saving information. Fatalism becomes the predominant attitude, tragedy the predominant occurrence.

Today, I read an article on ethnic minority communities in Kosovo and their struggle to break out of the cycle of poverty in which they find themselves entrapped. They lack information on a different level. While many of these ethnic minorities – the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians – understand that better education will break the cycle (also, some do not), they are not in a place to do anything about it. “Their main concern is eating, and when you don’t have enough to eat, you don’t think much about education.”  In the story, Mr. Hasanik is among those who are focused mainly on survival. He knows his children should go to school, but he says he cannot afford the books they would need. If his children cannot go to school, they will not learn and their chance of bettering their lives in the future diminishes. This is an urgent problem, for Kosovo, and for the world. Globally, with millions, if not billions, being left behind, being uninformed, simply “not knowing,” the future has the potential to appear grim, with progress slow and despair growing.

So, while I crib about my information overload, I should instead be thankful for it. The proliferation of social media outlets has actually empowered ordinary people like me. I am no reporter employed by a newspaper, nor am I a member of a government or a university faculty, but, I have quick, easy access to a multitude of sources of information that previously I would have had to dredge out of library and archive basements scattered across continents. Or, even worse, the kinds of material that I am bombarded with on a daily basis would not have been written at all. A forum in which it could be published would have not existed.

Even more empowering is the fact that I’ve been given a soapbox and can express my opinions at any time. Imagine if we could give everyone these powers – both access to information and a forum to create and share their voices!