Get up to speed on what’s going on in your destination with Global Voices

Here’s thanking Rolf for this insight into the art of travel, from the last installment in his Slate series on aboriginal culture in Australia.

As much as my visit to indigenous Australia has been an implicit quest for cultural novelty, true aboriginal authenticity was never mine to discover. This is because authenticity anywhere is an internal dialogue within a culture as it synthesizes its past with the present, hoping to better navigate a changing world. The job of the traveler, I reckon, is to slow down and listen so that he can hear snippets of that conversation.

If you, too, want to make listening-in your aim while traveling, you can tap into the conversation even before you arrive by browsing the posts at Global Voices: a global network of citizen journalists blogging about what’s going on in the places where they live.

Concerned by what they saw as thin coverage of international happenings by the English-language media, two fellows at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Media and Society conceived Global Voices:

1) To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.

2) To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.

3) To advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

What you’ll find on Global Voices is an eclectic mix of reports (many of them by professional journalists) from around the world on the arts, travel, news, even recipes.

–How do Mexicans feel about the recent push for more ethanol production in their country?
–It’s all over the news that a military coup has overthrown the Thai government, but what does that really mean for people living in Bangkok?
–Is Yahoo! India reviving the Hindi language, or vice versa?

Before you go, stop by Global Voices to find out.