Google's new project to add Darfur imagery to Google Earth has received lots of press. Today's San Francisco Chronicle describes it:
In an effort to raise awareness about atrocities in Sudan, Google Inc. has updated its online satellite mapping service with images of burned villages, refugee camps and wounded children.
The project, done in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers users of Google Earth a bird's eye view of the aftermath of four years of fighting between the East African nation's Arab-dominated government and the largely black residents of the Darfur region. The United Nations has said that more than 200,000 people, many of them Darfur civilians, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced in the conflict.
Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs, said the new high-resolution images are intended to encourage individuals to act against what he -- along with U.S. officials and many human rights groups -- describe as genocide.
"We're joining with the museum today in this initiative because the situation in Darfur is a global catastrophe, and because we believe technology can be a catalyst for education, for understanding and for importantly, action," he said at a press conference in Washington.
Among the hundreds of locations highlighted with icons that resemble flames and tents on Google Earth are the remnants of small villages that had allegedly been set ablaze. Users can zoom in on the black outlines of huts and livestock pens dotting the savannah.
Link: Google Earth zooms in on Darfur carnage / Company joins with Holocaust museum to press for action,
See also CNN: Google Earth maps out Darfur atrocities.
The Holocaust Museum has also set up a What Can I Do? page.
You can't fault them for trying to raise awareness, and I think Google Earth has a lot of potential for this sort of campaign, but is it really true that "technology will make it harder to ignore genocide"?
It probably can't hurt (tasteless video games perhaps being the exception). But how much technology does it take? Most people in the world should know about the genocide in Darfur by now. It's been in the newspapers and on TV, though not enough. Do we know which types of media have the greatest impact on people's awareness and inclination to act? I'm sure people have studied this sort of thing.
An interesting excerpt from later in the story:
Crisis in Darfur, as the layer of images added Tuesday is called, is just
one of several on Google Earth that have a political bent, grouped in a folder
labeled "Global Awareness." The U.N. Environment program offers an overlay
showing changes to the environment, such as shrinking lakes, while another
layer by grassroots environmental group iLoveMountains.org highlights the
removal of mountaintops in the Appalachians by coal mining.
Brian O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Google, said his company does not
open its satellite mapping service to just any organization that wants access
to Google's users. Only groups that Google feels "have high-quality global
information and come from reliable, vetted sources" get taken under Google's
wing.
That's potentially a lot of political power in Google's hands, contrary to what they said last week regarding New Orleans -- that politics don't enter into their algorithms for choosing map imagery. Mapping is very political, and they won't always be able to satisfy everyone. They're not promoting map layers on, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or China and Taiwan.
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