By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net
There are over 10 million blogs, podcasts, and videocasts worldwide and many of these are created to talk about a person’s ideas. Some are about like-minded groups who talk about basically anything under the sun, from technology, finance, gaming, politics, lifestyle, entertainment, among other things. What if “netizens”, at least for one day, talk about one thing only, one subject that could perpetrate one idea that may change the world?
To encourage bloggers to be part of that change, a small group of them have dedicated October 15 of every year to Blog Action Day. This year’s main theme will be on poverty, a perpetual issue that affects more than half the world’s population.
So far, there are 9,887 blogs, podcasts and webcasts joining, with an estimated 10,800,000 audiences, the website says.
Blog Action Day’s goal is to talk about one topic, particularly a global issue.
It also intends to create a venue for people to share their ideas that can be used to spur change. They will only talk of one topic every year. The group intends to show the world that the Internet is a viable platform for change.
There are dozens of Philippine-based blogs that are also participating in this year’s Blog Action Day. Among these are Knowread-Knowrite, Geekothon, Ang Sa Wari Ko, Blogger’s Kapihan, Manilenyo in Davao , among others.
Bloggers Kapihan is particularly active in encouraging Filipino bloggers to participate in Blog Action Day.
Some members of this group are journalist Anthony Ian Cruz, UP debater Benjamin Espina, and Philippine Science High School Instructor Martin Perez.
The group has even put up a separate site, where other Filipino bloggers can post their own comments about the activity. These actions are important especially since it also reflects on the country’s own experiences with poverty.
Last year’s theme was the environment with 20,603 blogs that participated.
Blog Action Day is started by web startup Envato CEO Collin Ta’eed, and his relatives Fuad Ta’eed, and Cyan Ta’eed.
Other members of the Blog Action Day Team are Easton Ellsworth, Leo Babauta, Naysan Naraqi, and John Barton.
The group is supported by other private institutions including the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, BlogTV Inc., MercyCorps, Global Citizen Corps, among others.
During this year’s Blog Action Day, there will be a 12-hour online radio show, as well as video casts from participants. There will also be donation drives to support some institutions who are involved in health support and poverty alleviation, including The Global Fund and Kiva.
4 Feedbacks on "Blog for poverty"
LiveWellSimply
Good to see all the participation! I’m still figuring out how I’m going to take action personally besides blogging about it.
marge
proud to have joined this year!
Victor R
On Poverty:
Unlike some who enjoy talking about poverty as if it were a phenomenon to be dissected clinically or pondered about vicariously, I am a person who can say that it is one that I have not only personally experienced even if briefly, but have resolved to get to the root of if only to vindicate and validate the personal closure I have felt once I got out of it. Hence this brief personal intro.
From a family of fairly extensive means our material situation deteriorated with the decline in the Philippine economy that followed the decontrol-devaluation shock during the late 50s that itself was caused by years of political irresponsibility and poor policy choices. By the time my parents started to get sickly (in high school) it became fairly evident that we had joined the ranks of the genuinely impoverished. No need to dwell on the specifics, just that life has never been tougher ever since. Only luck through family connections, good education and true grit allowed us to pull ourselves from such horrowing situation.
This brief but severe encounter with life’s punishing harshness would shape my outlook and choices in life. Immediately after graduating in engineering, I took advanced degrees in economics, business and political systems to allow me to better understand the problem. I joined and volunteered in causes that allowed me to observe, first hand, the close interactions between poverty, the poor and decisions made at each societal level.
For a good two decades, I can say that I lived, breathed and ate everything that I could find about poverty, day in day out.
Ultimately I had to migrate abroad to see and understand personally, what other causes and factors behind poverty that were unique to the culture and society that I was born into. This was confined not only to the country where I migrated to but many countries, at all economic and political stages, all over the world where I had the opportunity to work, travel, teach, do business with.
From that vantage point I have arrived at a few conclusions. I do not claim to have found THE Holy Grail about poverty, but I do believe it is may be better than those whose experiences are only limited to reading books, journals, emails, blogs, attending seminars, presenting papers or writings of others of similar idological or political persuasions. I will spare the reader the onus of reading through these conclusions, save for one - which is that poverty is not at all the product of a man’s (or even a groups’) subjugation by forces outside their control. It is not entirely about oppression. It is not about
class warfare and let alone is it about ideology or morality which are not opiates but cop outs and excuses for inability to respond to stimuli and act accountably.
Instead, it is about poor choices that those who lack information commit, not so much because they are manipulated (though it is part of the human lot) but because they do not have the means to process such (always complex) time sensitive information and to act on it properly. In this regard poverty is more a product of systems that malfunction and are unable to optimize (not balance out) resource distribution, not because of greed (which has redeeming elements that can only be divorced from the bad ones at great peril to freedom and even worse substitutes), but simply because the information gets skewed and atrophied, which is the characteristic and inevitable end of all systems (entrophy).
From this perspective, which to those who prefer more emotional explanations may seem to be too dispassionate, this
writer has come to conclude that poverty is the lot of humans when systems are simply not able to function well. Societies will always stratify themselves into those who have and those who don’t have, the degree of skewness only being a function of the quality of information and the character of those who choose to act on it. All the pomposity, the grandiloquence and even the feigned hurt by tinkerers (for political ends) just confuse the system’s ability to sort the mess out.
Unfortunately it is what this life time of searching has come down to - and its implcation is simple - do not moralize or cast this noble mission as one of a battle between “right” and “wrong” (or least of all between “right” and “left”). It simply is a product of a system that malfunctions, for which there are proper solutions depending on specific circumstances.
To lose one’s head and cast this as a righteous crusade and other guilt trips may serve personal ends, but run the risk of worsening the problem itself. Just look at how China (and now India) effected the most successful economic uplifting of the poor in history, compared to the very emotional and mostly politicized way that other countries (like the Philippines) have tried to do it and one can see the destructive effects of emotions on such a problem as complex as backwardness.
David B Katague
I would like to get involved on this humanitarian project. Please note that my blog, http://economicdisasterphilippines.blogspot.com
dated Aug 6, 2008 discussed briefly my concerns regarding poverty and overpopulation in the Philippines.
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