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It is not clear wether blogging can lead to or improve development in underdeveloped countries or regions. Denskus and Papan are asking for some more action than just mincing words:
”Equally, development blogging needs to find a balance between potentially self-absorbed naval gazing of expatriate development workers and researchers, and meaningful engagement with local communities and their visions and communication needs. It needs to focus on content as much as exploring a relatively new medium.
At this point, it remains to be seen whether blogging can be more than a lifestyle tool that may improve individual practice, but fails to engage with broader, traditional structures – especially in the context of large aid organisations and communities in the Global South.”
If writing can lead to development is a question that is hard to answer. Whether its writing on a printed paper or online, it has to reach the people that live in a society that needs development, be it infrastructure, better education, less violence or clean drinking water. It is hard for people in a poor area to get out of the negative circles of joblessness, drugs, violence and the feeling that the future has no hope. The question is, if these people are likely to read development blogs? Maybe the blogging is written by and read by people who are already “developed”, or at least blessed with a laptop and electricity in their house. A lot of people in the world does not have this and cannot even afford to take the bus to the next internet café. Sometimes the only access they have to the internet is when they manage to borrow a relative´s smartphone to take a glance at the glorious world wide web.
The way the digitalized society has made it easier to detect and blow the whistle about corruption is an interesting topic. For example, the Fishrot scandal in Namibia, where an Icelandic company bribed government officials to get fishing quotas, has got help from idividuals. In this case, social media and the easy access to information has helped people to voice their concerns, and also made it more difficult for the culprits to hide, when many people put small bits and pieces together as a mass journalist collective.
But corrupt people want to hide. And the more people are chasing them, they further adjust and try to cover their tracks, even in a digitalized world. In Data Journalism in the Global South (2019), Fallas writes in his text on “Big Data and Algorithms: The New Path of Cross-Border Investigative Journalism” that ”understanding this new reality is fundamental because corruption, in public and private collusion, is hidden more and more in frameworks of digital operations of world order”.
To conclude, the digitalization in the development sector has many sides. One way that has proven successful is that it has given individuals and journalists a way to easier work together to discover malpractices by governments and private companies, with the common aim to build a world that is a little bit better, bit by bit.
Development projects and social media are fields I would like to explore more in my blog posts in the future: Is it really helping that more and more people get a smart phone, or are they just stuck in poverty with no outlooks in life, other than the somewhat fake world of social media?