Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant! The world-shaking news that the 16-year-old sister of Britney Spears is with child was making a big noise on the Internet yesterday. Countless bloggers were prattling about it. Yahoo users made her name their second most popular search term.
Even CNN put it front and centre on its website.
Shawn Ahmed thinks there's something a little bit wrong with that. He likes to think that history's most powerful communications tool could serve a higher purpose than spreading celebrity gossip. He likes to think it could change the world.
For the past few months, the 26-year-old Canadian graduate student has been fighting poverty in Bangladesh, his parents' homeland, and telling his story in pictures, videos and blog entries on the Web.
Armed with his cellphone, camcorder and trusty Mac laptop, he posts the results on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and his own site, uncultured.com.
"The only way that extreme global poverty can be eliminated is if my generation makes it its personal responsibility to do something about it," he told me by phone from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
The trouble is that many of his generation never look at the mainstream media, so events like Bangladesh's disasters barely register with them.
"If I ask them, when was the last time you checked CNN or some other news site, they'll say, 'Maybe two or three days ago.' If I ask when they last checked their Facebook news feed, they'll say '20 minutes ago' or 'I'm on it now.' " His website and videos are a modest, one-man attempt to connect to a wired generation through their own media and turn them on to things that really count.
"I'm not a charity. I'm not an NGO. And I'm not trying to be a YouTube celebrity," he says in the introduction to his site. "I'm just a guy who believes if you want to make the world to be a better place, you got to do your part."
His videos on uncultured.com show him interviewing aid workers, handing out mosquito-proof bed nets to poor villagers and giving blankets to victims of cyclone Sidr, the storm that killed more than 4,000 Bangladeshis last month.
In one of his videos, he meets a 15-year-old boy who makes a meagre living going house to house, giving out onions in exchange for empty water bottles, which he then sells to a recycler. The slender boy carries a huge sack of onions and bottles on his head.
"When I was 15, I was sitting on the couch and watching TV and thinking of maybe getting a part-time job so I could buy more video games," Mr. Ahmed recalls.
The son of an Imperial Oil executive, he was born in Sarnia, Ont., and schooled in Bedford, N.S., and Markham, Ont., before studying at the University of Toronto. He began his anti-poverty crusade after seeing a speech by Jeffrey Sachs, the author of The End of Poverty, while working toward a master's degree at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind.
Inspired, he took a break from his studies and went to stay with his grandmother in Dhaka. With no training in aid work, no organization behind him and no real plan of action, he was winging it. He started off distributing bottled water in a flood zone, then persuaded a European company to give him free bed nets and water purification straws for distribution. He documented it all on his website and videos, recently featured by the Vancouver-based citizen journalism site NowPublic.com.
It's a token effort, he admits. He is way outgunned by the big charities like Save the Children with their armies of workers. But their slick videos and other promotions often fall flat with today's Web-savvy youth. He hopes that by personalizing his effort, he can connect to the Facebook crowd and inspire them to join the anti-poverty struggle. As he puts it in one of his videos, "I'm just trying to YouTube with a purpose."
Sites such as Facebook and YouTube are always going to have a lot of froth on them, from pet tricks to bedroom karaoke. A self-described shy geek who is into space stuff like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, Mr. Ahmed has no problem with people having fun. But if more started using these Web tools like he does - reporting, educating, inspiring - what a difference it could make.
Marcus Gee