Ushahidi and Crowdmap: micro-streaming as time-binding media

Andra Keay

Ushahidi is a Web 3.0 open source crisis-mapping application, developed in 2008, which is being used for humanitarian purposes around the world. Cultural studies calls for a critical approach to ‘the internet’ and its applications. This article considers whether or not Ushahidi could be a ‘liberation technology’ or a ‘disruptive technology’ using Harold Innis’s methodology and compares Ushahidi and Crowdmap with Foursquare and Facebook, to describe how the differences in the applications at the material, semiotic and sociopolitical levels, could help categorise and understand them. This involves a broad appreciation of many fields including the rapid technological shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. An ethical evaluation of the balance of time-binding and space-binding characteristics in these applications is beyond the scope of this article, however attention is drawn to the ways in which life-streaming or micro-streaming applications like Facebook and Ushahidi are performing time-binding to great cultural and political effect.