Earlier this week, Redditors were given an amazing opportunity by a VSO Volunteer from Britain working in Kenya: two leaders from the Maasai tribe, a seminomadic people living in Western Kenya, signed onto to do an “Ask Me Anything.” To persuade the village chiefs Jto do the interview, the volunteer framed Reddit as “a global baraza,” or meeting. “I explained to Chief Joseph and Leshan that people across the world wanted to know more about their community,” he said, “and may even help them in the process.”
“Traditionally, part of the job of development organisations like VSO has been to tell the stories of the people who benefit from our work,” said Emma Harrison, VSO's head of global communications. “In a world where smartphones and Internet access are connecting people in new and exciting ways, our role is shifting from controlling the conversation, to simply making the introduction.”
In the Masaai village where the volunteer is staying, most people have cellphones, and some are beginning to get smartphones, as well. Between the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016, mobile data subscriptions in Kenya grew by almost 4 percent. There are now 24.7 million people logging online through their cellphones, in a country of 44.4 million. here appears to be a strong consensus that Internet access is enormously empowering.
A number of indigenous groups in remote areas have used the Internet to preserve and promote their cultures the Ethnos Project research group has found, and it’s become an important tool in public health, education and governance. Just as important, the Internet has allowed isolated communities to raise global awareness. Just two years ago, the Tanzanian branch of the Maasai managed to fend off a government land grab using, among other things, an online petition on the site Avaaincz.org. It earned well over 2 million signatures from all over the world.
These are the kinds of things the volunteer was hoping to use the Reddit conversation to educate people in the West about. At first, Redditors asked about the standard stuff: religious practices, diet, what people in the village do for fun. And then, one user asked the chiefs to describe their favorite Internet porn. “They don’t believe it and don’t know what it is,” the chiefs’ interlocutor replied — to a giddily gleeful audience. The assembled Redditors went wild. As the Washington Post put it, "It was their crowning achievement. They concluded that they had, in what may have been the Redditiest moment ever Reddited, introduced the concept of Internet porn to a culture that had not encountered it."
This whole story made me incredibly sad. Yes, as of this writing, Redditors have donated 1,000 pounds, or roughly $1,300, to the village’s school-building project, and many have also commented that they appreciated the insight into Maasai beliefs and customs. That's nice. But given that Maasai women already struggle with discrimination and oppression, that many women do not feel comfortable in community tech centers in developing countries because of male customers viewing porn, and women aid workers, myself included, feel like there are assumptions made about them by locals if those locals have seen pornography, I found the turn this online community education project took very disturbing.