Two faces of digital media

20700110 Kim SungKi

To see a project in Google Earth, we must download a "layer."(or some program) And we may see unconsciously their's ad as they are wanted. Also, we concentrate to what is on display. Digital media enables people to witness and participate, whether commenting on a blog, or sharing stories and conversation with distant correspondents. We're at a technological frontier that can take us much further. However, it is needed what is ability to see the otherside.

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The Right Click
Google Earth and YouTube can find your house or favorite music video in seconds. Can they help end genocide?

Anyone who has ever downloaded Google Earth knows that exhilarating swift plunge when you zoom in from a vantage point outside the planet, past continents, countries, street grids, and buildings, until suddenly, there's your childhood home. This unique online journey is now being recognized and harnessed as a force for good, using the all-seeing eyes of modern surveillance to shine a light into the dark secrets of injustice.
"Crisis in Darfur" is a section of Google Earth that superimposes documentary evidence of genocide and information about the Sudan conflict onto satellite imagery of the region. Place markers in the shape of flames and tents dot the geography like digital gravestones, linking to information, imagery, and firsthand testimony: more than 13,000 people displaced from Nertiti, a village in West Darfur; 133 buildings destroyed in Arrama Bir in North Darfur. The screen reveals one horrific story after the other. "The Janjaweed came in the morning, broke the shops, and took the money, the sugar, and the goods," reports a woman from Kutum, in North Darfur. "They killed 32 people in their houses." Rather than over­whelming viewers with flat numbers—300,000 dead, 2.5 million people driven from their homes—the new technology connects the universal and the personal in the form of an online narrative.
"Crisis" has become emblematic of a trend in which nonprofit groups are using the newest web technologies to present, in one place, satellite imagery, statistics, and video that can expose atrocity and prompt action.
Amnesty International is using satellite imagery on "Eyes on Darfur," its website that launched last June to keep watch over specific villages in the region—Hashaba, Deleba, and Selia among them—and to serve as visual proof of the brutalities being committed. Other initiatives are joining them, from Jane Goodall's Gombe chimpanzee research in Tanzania to Appalachian Voices' campaign against mountaintop removal coal mining. This broad scope offers designers an unprecedented opportunity to convey the complex dimensions of a given issue in a compelling for­mat that accounts for history and the area's physical landscape as well.
"To be able to tell people what genocide looks like through photographs and through eyewitness testimony is very important in terms of trying to engage people to do something about it," explains John Heffernan, director of the Genocide Prevention Initiative at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which partnered with Google Earth in April 2007 to launch "Crisis in Darfur."
Of course, just because a site looks good doesn't always mean that it functions effectively as a tool for activism. To do so, it must be designed so users can easily click through to act—write letters, join a group, post comments, send a donation, forward information to others—in response to the information shown. In the same way that a commercial site is designed well if online shoppers find it easy to complete their purchases, activist platforms are successful when they convince users to undertake some kind of meaningful action.
To see a project in Google Earth, users must download a "layer," and within these layers, organizations and individuals can choose the set of visual elements that annotate the digital landscape, such as the icons and pop-up balloons used for entries. But the interface itself, and the method of navigating through it, are determined by the Google Earth software. Google's characteristic design philosophy is on display: Like its search function, the screen provides a wealth of information and encourages autonomous navigation. As such, "Crisis" captures the enormity of the horror, but the result is a visual cacophony. If a visitor downloads numerous layers—and chooses to display them simultaneously—the screen becomes awash in hundreds of tags and annotations, a representation of information that Edward Tufte would denounce.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id20080130_339019_page_2.htm