MEDIA-MIDEAST: The Artful Bloggers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by William Fisher

NEW YORK, Mar 16 2005 (IPS) - The growth of personal websites, known as “blogs”, in the greater Middle East is raising questions about whether this technology will eventually become the area’s “new, new media” and provide an antidote to the one-sided “news” carried by government-controlled presses.

In democracies throughout the world, blogging has grown exponentially over the past few years. In the United States, there are literally millions of blogs. Their growth has been accelerated by five main factors.

First, the number of home computers has grown enormously. Some 61 percent of adults in the U.S. have Internet access at home and 71 percent have computers.

Second, access to the online technology for creating a blog has become easier and simpler.

Third, the U.S. has a relatively high literacy rate.

Fourth, for the past decade – but particularly after the historic and controversial presidential election of 2000 – U.S. citizens have become increasingly cynical about reporting by newspapers, radio, and broadcast, cable and satellite television controlled by giant corporations.

Finally, the United States has become a deeply divided nation politically and socially. Citizens with widely divergent points of view have found blogging a way to express their ideas and join or create communities of like-minded bloggers.

When satellite television arrived in the U.S. and elsewhere in the industrialised world, it was hailed by many journalism watchers as the “new media”. But, predictably, its novelty was short-lived. Now there are indications that, over the next decade, it may be the Internet generally, and blogging in particular, that will become the “new, new media”.

This has not yet happened in the greater Middle East, where satellite television has arrived relatively recently. Nonetheless, there are parallels between the Middle East and the industrialised world.

For example, blogging technology is available to anyone in the region with access to the Internet, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home computer ownership is still embryonic, the region is marked by the same kind of suspicion of government-owned media that spurred growth of the “blogosphere” elsewhere.

But there is at least one difference. In most Middle East countries, using a personal weblog to express political dissent can land you in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorised political protest in the public square.

Recently, an Iranian weblogger was jailed for 14 years for “spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries” after using his blog to criticise the arrest of other online journalists.

In Egypt, the webmaster of the English-language Al Ahram Weekly was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a sexually-explicit poem, and a 19-year-old student was sentenced to a month in jail for “putting out false information” after reporting a serial killer on the loose in Cairo.

In Tunisia, a prominent lawyer was arrested for posting an article online. In Bahrain, two online forum moderators were arrested.

But despite the risks, weblogs continue to proliferate.

A Bahraini site called “Sabbah’s Blog” organised a “Middle East Bloggers Meetup”. Dozens of enthusiastic comments were posted by readers. In Iran, an estimated 75,000 Iranians maintain online ‘blogs’. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way for Iranians to express dissatisfaction.

In Saudi Arabia, authorities block some 400,000 websites, and it is unclear how many blogsites exist. But those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

In Iraq, there are hundreds of blogsites, most run by Iraqis, some by U.S. and other coalition soldiers. They are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, Shiite, Sunni, nationalist and secularist. Their political positions range from full support for the U.S. invasion and occupation to rabid calls for jihad against the U.S. occupiers.

What are bloggers saying?

Typical is a Saudi site called “The Religious Policeman”. One recent posting said, “What Reforms? There aren’t any Reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women’s affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum…and in the National Human Rights Commission…the National Dialogue Forum…agreed to change nothing, the ‘team photo’ had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in tears.”

In Iraq, on the one-year commemoration of the start of the Iraq war, a 24-year-old woman computer programmer wrote in her “Baghdad Burning” blog, “Occupation Day, April 9, 2003: The day we sensed that the struggle in Baghdad was over and the fear of war was nothing compared to the new fear we were currently facing.

“It was the day I saw my first American tank roll grotesquely down the streets of Baghdad – through a residential neighborhood. And that was April 9 for me and millions of others…and the current Governing Council want us to remember April 9 fondly and hail it our ‘National Day’…a day of victory…but whose victory?”

In Syria, one blogger asked others to sign an online petition addressed to “The White House” and “The Elysees” (palace). “With the killing of Hariri in Lebanon” it said, “Syrian Ba’athists are out of control. Who’s next? Syria is inciting civil war in Lebanon.”

Another Syrian, calling himself “Kafka”, wrote that President Bashar Assad’s speech “made the Syrian people forget that (he) “never cared to give a damn about us since he came to power…”

Even in Afghanistan, poorest of the poor, blogging is beginning to catch on. An Afghan blogger reports, “During the Taliban we didn’t have the Internet, but now there are about 25 net cafes in Kabul, and also some in Herat, Kandahar, and Balkh provinces. People are really interested to use the Internet but it’s too expensive…only rich people can afford it.”

Mona El Tahawy, a columnist at the daily Asharq Al Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq “have inspired others in the Arab world…Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy”, she said, “bloggers are the voice of the true Arab street, especially the young.”

But U.S media critic Norman Soloman provides a cautionary note.

He told IPS, “Media technologies offer us no assurance as to content. It’s certainly wonderful when technologies can be used to break the repressive logjams of censorship. Wide-ranging debate and a free flow of information are inherently better than tightly centralized control of news and public discourse.”

“At the same time, we shouldn’t forget that bloggers are capable of putting out all sorts of misinformation and bigotry.”