In my last post I touched upon the issue of language in cross-border projects intended to encourage and facilitate discussion and dialogue between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. However, even when taken into account, that doesn't mean that online platforms are going to be effective, especially when Internet penetration remains low in the region. Costs are coming down, of course, but connection speeds are still slow and unreliable. My own, for example, varies between 0.4-0.8 mb/s and costs $33 a month, and even examining access statistics for online media in Armenia reveals that few people actually use it as their main source of news and information.

Although admittedly a holiday, some news was published online yesterday, but only 25, 661 people accessed Regnum, the most popular outlet of the day. The figure was even lower for the main pro-opposition outlet, A1 Plus, a former TV station deprived of its broadcasting frequency in what many consider was a politically motivated decision less than year before the bitterly disputed 2003 presidential election. Yesterday, A1 Plus received 3,761 visits. Holiday or not, in a country of over 3 million people, that's not encouraging at all. Indeed, even during the past two weeks before the New Year, the highest number of visits to the site only amounted to 13,940 on its most popular day while Regnum hit 48,229.

However, it's also likely that many of those accesses came from outside Armenia and, indeed, statistics show that only 9 percent of traffic to Regnum originated from inside Armenia in the past month while A1 Plus fared better with 66 percent. Therefore the most popular online media sources in Armenia appear to be News.am and Tert.am, with the former managing 49,862 visits on its most popular day in the past 2 weeks and the latter reaching 27,605. In the past month, 53 percent of traffic for News.am and 70 percent for Tert.am originated inside Armenia. True, that's higher than the 6,353 Haykakan Zhamanak, the main opposition daily newspaper, managed at its peak, but it does call into question official government statistics putting Internet penetration at 47.1 percent.

Unofficial estimates from one IT specialist instead put the figure at around 12 percent, and given that social networking sites are likely to represent the most popular use for the Internet, it is notable that there are currently only 106,540 Facebook users in Armenia according to the site's own data.

Neighboring Georgia, which has the luxury of faster, lower cost Internet has 421,920 users, but despite the significantly higher figure, it nonetheless reports an Internet penetration of a more realistic 28.3 percent as of June 2010. Indeed, the use of online social networks perhaps clarifies the situation in light of what seems like some very misleading official statistics. According to Alexa.com, for example, Facebook is the most popular site in terms of traffic in Georgia while it is second only to Google in Armenia. Interestingly, the days of the Russian-language Odnoklassniki social networking site seem to be numbered. Alexa.com ranks it at just 4th and 5th in Armenia and Georgia respectively. In Azerbaijan it is 11th.

Which leads me on to the point of this post. That is, in such an environment of low, albeit increasing, Internet use, how can peace building initiatives maximize their reach? Obviously, with blogs and narrowly specific sites unable to even match the relatively low figures for the web sites of traditional media outlets, there's an urgent need to diversify mediums through which to communicate information. It's something I've tried to do with my own project, for example, especially relying on online social networks and quoting Skype interviews in articles for niche market online publications dealing with the Caucasus such as Osservatorio Balcani e Caucasus and Transitions Online.

Blog posts from my project have also been republished by outlets such as EurasiaNet, but even so, I'm under no illusion that the actual reach of my project is incredibly small and that there's the urgent need to engage the public through the traditional media and alternative strategies. Such a point is not lost on Two Tin Cans, the blog of what looks to be an incredibly interesting project to "build, prototype and propagate new ways of engaging with populations" later this year. Indeed, in a post calling for such an approach, it even mentions how my personal project could benefit from doing so.

Most communications innovation in peace-building and population engagement focuses on mobile phones. They’re a growing market, they’re inherently interactive, and their potential for social change is enormous. But in our enthusiasm for the new, let’s not forget the utility of the old. Here’s a first step towards bringing the humble newspaper back into the innovation fold.

 

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Perhaps peace-building blogging projects, like Overcoming Negative Stereotypes in the South Caucasus, could hook up with newspapers in their localities, to really stitch their projects into the fabric of daily information flow within their conflicted communities.

A valid point, perhaps, but things aren't that simple in the Caucasus, especially when the readership for physical printed newspapers is even lower than that of online sites. Moreover, recent studies on media bias in Armenia and Azerbaijan show that there is no space for neutral or objective coverage of the Karabakh conflict or inter-country relations. Instead, it is almost as if journalists have become combatants or at least the willing purveyors of propaganda. Yet, as one study by the Caucasus Resource Research Centers noted, "without more accurate and unbiased information […] free of negative rhetoric and stereotypes, Armenians and Azerbaijanis will continue to see themselves as enemies without any common ground."

Still, despite the obstacles, my project has tried to take into consideration all of these points, and towards the end of last year resulted in an experimental article made up only from field work conducted for it and quotes from guest posts published on the main site. Of course, it didn't represent such views as the majority opinion in either Armenia or Azerbaijan and also set the more negative reality that hangs like a dark cloud over attempts to bring Armenians and Azerbaijanis together. Although the article, published online by the American-Armenian Ararat Magazine, was unlikely to have reached tens of thousands of people, it was probably the first time that many English-speaking readers heard such views.

Tragically, though, more such articles need to be published by the traditional media in Armenia and Azerbaijan, even if only online, and the real breakthrough will probably only come when television stations in both countries broadcast more objective news and neutral coverage. And it is possible. Internews and Conciliation Resources, for example, put together a number of joint Armenian-Azerbaijani documentary films which could undoubtedly change the perceptions and opinions of the majority if shown on air. Instead, relegated to small public showings and uploaded online, but barely managing more than a few hundred views, it's probably for that reason alone that television stations in either country won't touch them at all.

And thus, with an information vacuum in place, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues, which is why diversifying the delivery of alternative streams of news and information is imperative. Projects might also benefit from the use of traditional online tactics and strategies such as the use of banner ads of the type I'm now also attempting for my own. Of course, and going back to the issue of language, I should also probably make it available in Russian too, but even so, popularizing online content, especially in this area, is going to be an uphill struggle.