Blogosphere of influence

Ed Lake

The Emirati blogger Ali Gargash, the author of Dubai Nights, says he sees no place "destrcutive criticism" in the blogosphere. Randi Sokoloff / The National

The internet has thrown up a lot of ugly coinages since it emerged 20 years ago, but for sheer gruesomeness, few can rival the colloquial name for online diaries, the “blog”. “Blogosphere”, admittedly, runs it a tight race and its other derivatives – blogger”, “vlog” (a blog on video) and so forth – aren’t much better. Yet the thing itself is a marvel: a literary form and public medium unrivalled in history for flexibility and ease of access. User-friendly writing platforms such as Wordpress and Blogspot have made pundits out of everyone with an internet connection and two thoughts to rub together, a fact that has changed the shape of news media, political discourse, academic research and a good deal else. The rise of the blogger was a watershed moment in the internet age. And yet... “blog”.

Lucky Arabic speakers, then, who get all the medium’s reverberating power and not too much of its naffness. Online diaries are known in Arabic by the rather graceful word moudawanat, and you can expect to hear a lot more about them as the moudawanosphere continues its rapid expansion. A recent study undertaken by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University identified 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, plus several thousand more in a mixture of Arabic and other languages. Bloggers from across the Arabic-speaking world offer anecdotal evidence for the explosion in blogging’s popularity over the past few years. “When I started five years ago we were like a bunch of 10 or 15 people blogging from Saudi Arabia about Saudi Arabia,” one interviewee told me. “Today we have more than 10,000 Saudi blogs, so it’s quite different now.”

Who are the Arabic bloggers? According to the Berkman report Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent, they are mainly male, mainly young and mainly Egyptian or Saudi.

Moreover, to judge from the paper, the biggest surprise for the researchers was that the Arabic blogosphere doesn’t really see itself as a Pan-Arabic phenomenon at all. “Those that write about politics tend to focus on issues within their own country,” it claims. “Domestic news is more popular than international news...” It notes, however, that the situation in Gaza is a major topic of interest across the Arab world. And there was one discovery that must have reassured its American readers: to appearances, the bloggers aren’t, for the most part, terrorists. “Across the map,” the authors explain, “Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of violent extremists... We consider this a positive finding”. Alas, the flies in the ointment for potential terror targets include the plausible thought that those with violent inclinations might prefer not to announce themselves on Livejournal, and the old quibble about who qualifies as a terrorist as opposed to a freedom fighter. As the report suggests: “This complex issue merits additional research.”

Source: The National, Blogosphere of influence