In The Blogging Revolution Antony Loewenstein takes us on a personal journey through some of the more difficult places in the world to blog. Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China.
It’s a timely book on the importance and necessity of blogging and the open web given recent un-informed opinions by writers like Christian Kerr.
The book is also important in that it more thoroughly expands on ideas expressed in David Burchell’s clumsy opinion piece in the Australian in July of this year where he attempted to contrast the “pseudo-expertise and vituperation” of Western bloggers with their counterparts in the less democratic corners of the world; using Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez as an example.
The most impressive thing about Sanchez is her complete disregard for the bad habits of Western bloggers. She refuses to engage in histrionics, vainglory, pseudo-knowledge or personal posturing. Instead she trades in the gentler arts of allegory and satire.
Sanchez is also mentioned in The Blogging Revolution and Burchell is right. She does not engage in the histrionics of so many Western bloggers (mea culpa) but then again our personal circumstances are different to those that live in repressive states.
Are critics like Burchell and Kerr right? Are non-Western bloggers really better than their western counterparts? Are they less vituperative and undergraduate in their opinion? Does living in an information poor society mean that their views can be nothing more than that of a pseudo-expert? What do non-Western bloggers sound like? The Blogging Revolution gives us a peek behind the government filters.
Throughout the book Loewenstein introduces us to writers like Caesar, an Iraqi blogger he met in Damascus.
Reading his story, we find that Caesar’s father was an officer in Saddam’s army who fought the Americans in the 1991 Gulf War, but as Caesar states, “my father wasn’t fighting for Saddam, he was fighting for his country” - that kind of distinction comes up repeatedly in different contexts throughout the book.
We also hear that Caesar was a bought man when it came to supporting the American invasion and had even worked for them as a translator for a time before fearing for his life as a collaborator. This soon saw him and his family leave for the relatively safer confines of Syria.
From Caesars and many Iraqi’s perspective, who wouldn’t want to see Saddam overthrown? All media was under state control there was no real ability to openly express your frustrations and views on your society or even to write about that girl you liked.
Similar to many Western bloggers, Caesar writes about issues of both a personal and political nature, his blog covers sexual politics as much as political events, in fact his blog is titled “In Iraq, sex is like snow”.
Is this vituperation and an undergraduate tone, Iraqi style?
As a result Caesar has an online reputation as some kind of “sex maniac”, an odd description given that he is a self described virgin. Then again context is everything and in his world he just may be someones sex maniac.
Caesar also uses his writing to describe what his country looks like, or should look like. In his case it shows what a liberal Iraqi looks like and if blogging is anything at all it’s liberal; in the freewheeling unmediated sense of the word. And while he may be far less freewheeling than many of his Western blogging counterparts his writing is probably no less confronting to the Burchell’s and Kerr’s of his world.
As Loewenstein states:
Blogging was almost invented for people like Caesar. It is unpretentious, revealing and transparent about daily life - and thankfully doesn’t require a tentative editor to censor the explicitness or rawness of the material. Hearing about his displacement in Syria and longing for his homeland made me feel ashamed of our culpability in the Iraq disaster. Those in power in the West have taken no responsibility for the effects of their actions, as if the tragedy was a natural disaster over which they had no control. Without his blog Caesar’s eloquence in the face of such horrors would never have been seen or heard.
Not being seen nor heard is another one of the recurring themes in The Blogging Revolution, outside of a few star non-western bloggers adopted by the mainstream media we have not heard from many others in the growing mass of bloggers in places like Syria and Iran, why? Is it because these voices don’t subscribe entirely to our mainstream media’s political view of the way the world ought to work?
I’m not alone in thinking our mainstream media would better serve us by airing the views of an Iranian female writer who identified as a Muslim secular atheist than that of Lindsay Lohan, but then again why not cut out the increasingly untrustworthy middleman and head right to the source, it is a media revolution after all.
Make no mistake, many of the non-Western bloggers and writers portrayed in the book want much of what we have but on their terms. A thought repeatedly expressed in the book is that they want these things at a different pace, one determined by them, not one forced on them from the outside without their overwhelming approval and they want these things to fit naturally into their specific cultural and political contexts.
At the moment we have the luxury of not having to negotiate our writing through levels of cultural and/or state based censorship, though we do have to deal with attempts at muting our voices through all too regular opinion pieces like Burchell’s and Kerr’s - opinions that seek to denigrate and deny us a growing legitimacy that they would like to preserve for themselves.
There was a quote early in the book which came from a prominent Iranian Shia cleric who recognised the power of the open web and blogging by saying, ‘blogging due to it’s very nature, has the capacity to nurture the spirit of vulgarity….[and is] a destructive plague’.
In this at least, Western mainstream media blog critics like Burchell and Kerr are not too dissimilar to an Iranian cleric or Cuban despot in recognising the inherent power of blogging and the voices it contains. Their motives? To maintain an economic market share not a religious or political one, though sometimes political motives are not to be discounted.
The Blogging Revolution is about introducing us to a different and difficult blogging world but Antony Loewenstein has also succeeding in produced a highly readable addition in the ongoing blogging and open media wars.
I’m uncomfortable with suggestions that blogging has some kind of pre-ordained purpose or mission that bloggers are uniformly aiming to fulfil, or that any meaningful generalisations can be made at all about blogging or bloggers.
Attempts to portray bloggers as people who have anything in common apart from the fact that they publish their thoughts online seem extremely problematic to me. I’m sure bloggers all have their own reasons for writing and their own thoughts about it having any larger purpose than a bit of a hobby (my wild guess … most would say “None” and many of the remainder would be seriously deluded). I read numerous blogs from the Middle East and Asia and while they are not representative of their home populations (being written in English), they are just as diverse as blogs from anywhere else.
Trying to write earnest analyses of ‘blogging’ as if it was a homogeneous activity seems more than a little silly to be honest, especially in the absence of anything remotely resembling useful data. Likewise the efforts to compile categories of blogs that erupt fitfully from time to time.
I sort of agree with Ken and sort of don’t. Antony’s book sounds like a useful corrective to the Kerr/Burchell line, and I’ll be interested to read it, but I still think there’s an element of conflation and projection in a lot of the debates about blogging. Nice review Phil!
Fair point Ken, and like Mark I’m inclined to agree but,….if that perception about the book was created by the review let me correct that here. It’s a snappy read and more than what I wrote here.
I’m a blogger writing a blog post about a book on blogging I thought it useful to go in this direction.
Antony has some interesting things to say about each of the places he visited and what he describes is different for each country.
China is a vastly different blogging environment to Syria and Cuba. And so are the people, the Chinese appeared energised, confident, the Cubans tired and beat.
Antony also covered issues like the corporate behaviour of companies like Goggle and Yahoo in many of these countries.
And if one thing does come through it is that some of the most repressive countries in the world (Cuba aside) can’t get the filters to work, Senator Conroy should take note, it’s a useless venture and ISP based filtering here is the thin edge of a wedge. The Govt is to be condemned for attempting this here.
I found the chapters on Syria and Iran to be very interesting, though it appeared that Saudi was a bit more difficult to crack.
Antony has his positions on specific issues but I think the book balanced in it’s approach with Antony observing that blogging is just one small part of the overall freedom equation for these countries, not the be all and end all.
Additionally, I do think a positive view on outcomes for this kind of media in those countries can be read into it.
Thanks for a terrific post, Phil.
In the 70s, cunning dissidents used [samizdat] roneoed sheets (in Eastern Europe) to try to spread their opinions. Around 1985, Romania had a Typewriter Law - from memory, every typewriter owned privately had to be registered with the police, with a sample of its typeface.
Seems to me, the electronic samizdat must surely be harder to monitor, filter, seize, etc.
Pamphleteering back in fashion: it must on balance be a good thing, eh?
I wonder how much blogging is simply a venue for opinionated people to look for an audience now that traditional venues like trade unions and political parties have become comparatively dysfunctional. Once upon a time a garrulous person with strong views was a natural to get elected the union delegate or even just bore the pants off everyone on Saturday nights in the pub but these opportunities are few and far between these days.