I first saw Lokman Tsui in 2006 at a conference on the “Hyperlinked Society” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenburg School for Communication, where he is a graduate student studying the internet’s impact on society. We also had the chance to briefly exchange ideas at the 2007 meeting of the International Communication Association in San Francisco, and again in 2008 at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest. Across those conversations, along with dozens of blog posts and emails in between, I have come to appreciate his approach to studying new media more than any other researcher I’ve met.

hospitality |ˌhäspiˈtalitē|
noun
the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

Lokman is studying international journalism from the perspective of hospitality. Yes, hospitality … as in offering a guest a glass of water, or taking your shoes off when you enter a house in Asia. This makes sense when you think of hospitality less in terms of established social rules and more in terms of attentiveness. When we are hospitable we are attentive to the needs of others. But the field of journalism has long been selective, or discriminatory, with its hospitality. It opens its doors widely for particular groups – politicians, think tanks, human rights organizations, research centers, celebrities, designers, models, chefs – but closes them and shuts off the porch lights when less mediagenic groups are seen approaching.

Lokman sees the role of journalism less as the investigation toward objective truth and more as the facilitation of conversation around particular issues. As our world becomes smaller – that is, as important discussions across distinct cultural groups become unavoidable – it is worth studying how and where those discussions take place most peacefully and effectively. Which is why Lokman is currently playing the role of ethnographer in the Global Voices community. He participates as a volunteer author and translator, but he also manages to step back and observe how managerial decisions are made, how editorial policy is shaped, and how hospitality is distributed – both internally, and in terms of the bloggers and stories we amplify on our website.

It has always troubled me that some of the most insightful members of the Global Voices community are the ones who speak up the least in our virtual newsroom (our IRC chat room and our torrential mailing lists). For newcomers, Global Voices can often seem much more western than it actually is because the westerners are those who tend to speak up the most.

I told Lokman of a useful script that Boris once used during one of our editorial IRC chats to create a tag cloud visualization of how much each attendee participated. At the end of the chat the North Americans had much larger bubbles around their names than those from elsewhere. I am reminded of a remark I heard by one of the speakers at last year’s Interdependence Day conference in Brussels. To paraphrase: “What the West is best at is lecturing to others. We publish essays, we organize conferences, we write books, we send over movies. There is a constant flow of lecturing from the West to the rest of the world. But we struggle to listen. The rest of the world is also talking, but we’re not listening.” We’re not, in other words, being hospitable.