On Arab blogs and their cultural relation with the new panarab allnews networks , i.e. Al Jazeera (part of an essay on Arab blogs written in 2005)
In this first stage, characterised by expansion and experimentation, it is evident that the strongest core of Arab political and/or civilian blogs is characterised not so much by artistic production (although present and very interesting), but by the exchange and circulation of different information, which is not institutionalised. The choice proves how much these bloggers (and not only them) are not only the children of the Internet. They are instead the children of new forms of communication (political and informative), which in the Arab world has emerged with all-news satellite TVs.
This is primarily a chronological fact, pertaining also to simple vital statistics: bloggers are mostly young. The age range is up to forty years of age, but in great majority it refers to young people until their thirties. “The majority of the Arab blogger community is overwhelmingly youthful, with many of them being students or aged 20-40”, says Haitham, of Sabbah’s blog, one of the most famous and linked “virtual diaries” of the Arab world. “Youth is one of the striking characteristics of bloggers in the Arab world”, explains Haitham. Whereas in the USA for example many bloggers are long-established journalists, commentators and political troublemakers, such personalities in the Arab world do not yet generally have blogs. Maybe this is partly because younger people have fewer inhibitions about mixing their writing about politics with contributions on more personal matters”[i].
Bloggers are, at least from the vital statistics point of view, the children of communication in the Arab world, the children of Al Jazeera and her “sisters”, if it is true that at least from 2000, when Al Aqsa Intifada started, they received information not through anachronistic State-controlled televised news[ii]. Their unconscious relationship with such a different type of information thus makes them ready to use non-conformist modalities to produce information through communication channels different from television, precisely, like blogs.
However, Arab bloggers reject the idea of being the children of Al Jazeera. They primarily reject that there is a cause-effect relation between the Al Jazeera’s revolution and blogs’ revolution[iii]. The answers to a questionnaire sent by the author this summer to dozens of bloggers, from Morocco to Bahrain, are indicative of this perception. The majority tend to make precise and exact distinctions between the world of the Internet and television. In fact, the classic differentiation between these two worlds is applied, in the way in which a message is transferred. In one-way mode, from sender to receiver, like in the relation between TV and viewer. In two-ways mode, and essentially in typical agora’s communication, inside the Web.
Moreover, the distinctions which the bloggers adopt, are clearly made to give a political value to these two communicative platforms: the TV (Arab national TV stations or satellite channels and pan Arab ones, like Al Jazeera) as a medium with a passive response, controlled from the top[iv]; Internet, instead, is a platform on which it is possible to build Arab democracy. Actually, the majority of bloggers think Arab democracy is being built through interlinking virtual diaries, at least within the social stratum, which can afford the access to the Internet, from an economic and educational point of view. In this respect, Arab bloggers are on the same wavelength as those on the other side of the Atlantic who theorise the capacity of “virtual diaries”, to be able to challenge television or institutionalised information. Moreover, many of them entrust bloggers not only to make alternative information, especially on the local level, but also to monitor the information coverage provided by the mainstream media.
Little space for reflections is also given to a completely different interpretation, like the one offered by Jon Anderson, who in 1999 overturned the prospective talking about a TV forged on the ”Internet model, which features seeking over reception, levels senders and receivers, circumvents authority or is self authorising, and interactive in practice”[v].
Certainly, a great part of politically oriented bloggers recognises Al Jazeera as a revolutionary contribution to the Arab media world. “Al Jazeera put the Arab street in front of the proper reality, i. e., the censorship imposed from the top and the self-censorship accepted by the base. Al Jazeera liberated the Arab discourse and radically changed the whole traditional media stage”, admits Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia, founder of Fikr@. “It is clear, he says, that the information provided by Al Jazeera and its provocative method to present them have had effect to the generation of young bloggers”[vi].
In spite of recognition, there is a clear refusal among bloggers of a possible paternity of Al Jazeera. It is not only because of the indisputable diversity of communication tools, based on their nature’s “genetic” diversity. It is not only because netizens consider themselves and the Net as a world of its own. For many bloggers, there’s an essential distinction between the institutionalised information and the counter information, which has to be born from the base, from the Arab civil society. Bloggers are the first to say that the community which keeps online diaries is still too “restricted”, and refers to more educated professions that sometimes organise themselves in real guild blogs. In Maghreb countries, for instance, there are blogs of medical doctors, journalists, managers, and even two business blogs in Morocco, as explained by Anouar Ouali Alami, 27, engineer, a blogger at www.anouar.org, and one of the members of aggregators www.maghreblog.net and www.marocblog.com. Although small and nationally fragmented, however, Arab blogosphere (especially the civil/politicised part of it) perceives itself in some ways as an avant-garde, in some others as a butterfly in a cocoon, waiting to liberate itself and forge the Arab Renaissance[vii].
For many bloggers, the quality of Al Jazeera information is also open for discussion. It may be true, in fact, that “Al Jazeera brought along with it the willingness to broach contentious subjects and even air unpopular opinions”, says Raja Abu Hassan, the author of lebaneseblogger. “Now that the organisation is approaching 10 years of age (if not more), it has, at least in my own opinion, become somewhat conformist – says Raja Abu Hassan. Moreover, people have even questioned its claim of objectivity. Consequently, they have searched for alternative media of communication and sources of information – one of which is blogging”.
According to the common opinion in the bloggers’ world, Al Jazeera, as well as Al Arabyia, does not differ from CNN or BBC, Western information networks which the bloggers follow parallel to TV news broadcasted from Doha or Dubai. On the contrary, a great number of bloggers stress that Arab netizens were educated by Al Jazeera as much as by other Western countries’ broadcasters. Due to censorship, education and even residence (for the Arab Diaspora), they had the opportunity to tune to channels beyond the Mediterranean, obtaining information different from the ones broadcasted by Arab State-controlled TVs or newspapers.
However, bloggers’ views are different when opinion is required about the influence which the revolution led by Al Jazeera had, has and will have upon Arab bloggers. For example, Haitham, of Sabbah’s blog, is convinced of the effect, which the Doha satellite network continues to have especially due to the fact that “most if not all Arabs see it as the first open-debate channel that touches on taboos, similar to what Arab bloggers do touch on”. In this value’s appreciation of talk shows broadcasted by Al Jazeera, Haitham in fact agrees with Faisal al Kasim, creator of The Opposite Direction, who in an interview with Donatella Della Ratta, in February 2005 mentioned that programmes like his have capacity to educate the Arab street to dissent. Even more, it was he who launched the comparison with Eastern Europe before 1989, claiming the role, which Radio Free Europe had. “They tell me that my programme does not tempt people to change regimes, to make a real opposition politics, and I say: Wait and see”, says Kasim. “Give us time. I think that people cannot act without being educated, and we are educating them through this programme, but we are only eight years old”.[viii]
Yet, this recognition given, bloggers move immediately away from Doha satellite network, and generally from all satellite TVs that broadcast information in the region. Haitham points out one of the main reasons for the difficult relationship between bloggers and Al Jazeera. “Sometimes one has the impression that young Arab bloggers cannot believe the attitude of the older generation and especially figures of authority locally and internationally”, says Haitham. “And these are often challenged on Al Jazeera, but do not represent the Arab bloggers’ views, which means that it does not represent the mass of educated and ignored young generation. In fact, I believe that young generation has no presentation in the Arab media “revolution”, except few, very few Arabic newspaper articles here and there, on the other hand, much more attention from the Western media”[ix].
Mohamed, 23, a physicist, shares Haitham’s pessimism. He is a blogger of From Cairo, with Love, a site inactive since 30th September 2005, when its creator abruptly left his audience. “Al Jazeera is just another mass media outlet, we can't get our voices through Al Jazeera or her sisters, we can only be on the receiving end”, says Mohamed with disillusion. “It has its biases as any other media outlet in the world, so why should we feel connected in anyway to it?”[x]
The creator of Sabbah’s blog convincingly describes two sides of the same coin: on one side it is this young generation that learned unconsciously from Al Jazeera the fundamental of contradictions from broadcasts like The Opposite Direction, the cult programme of Faisal al Kasim, and the value of information which is not submitted to preventive censorship. At the same time, many bloggers denounce that it is exactly that generation which is being ignored by Al Jazeera, if not in its most extraordinary expressions: when the young are protagonists of conflicts, like Israeli-Palestinian one.
The dark side of the moon, i.e. the Arab youth which is not victim and in the meantime the leading actor of the various conflicts, is not yet under TV spotlights, not even of Al Jazeera’s. Allnews Arab TVs essentially don’t see the other side of Arab youth, whether the part which is not always politically oriented or the other part which is deeply involved in the opposition against Arab regimes. Bloggers’ accusation is as clear as the assertion that blogs were central in letting emerge this generation. It is the position of Issandr el Amrani, one of the members of arabist.net, one of the blogs most visited by journalists and scholars who are concerned with Arab world. There are hundreds of blogs “run by teenagers who write about their daily life”, says Amrani, a journalist in Cairomagazine and a collaborator of international newspapers. “Eventually, these people will have different interests. Providing an outlet for youth is incredibly important in this region, where almost half of the population is under 25. I think it is helping to challenge some long-standing cultural notions, such as the idea that children/teenagers/adolescents should not be heard”.
Conclusions
Despite the contrary opinion of bloggers, the Internet and traditional media also match in the Arab world, at an informative level, as communicating vessels, directly communicating with each other. It seems difficult to see the Internet without TV and now it seems difficult just to think about TV and newspapers without the support of the Internet. The role of the revolution produced by Al Jazeera is all in all recognised also by the protagonists of a overwhelming phenomenon like “virtual diaries”. However, decreased is the influence which Arab all-news satellite TVs has on the blogosphere, and especially diminished is their role in the so-called Blogistan, the Arab Blogrepublic which needs to affirm the proper diversity and proper autonomy.
However, while analysing the Arab blogosphere from the outside, what is evident is the presence of mainstream information. One recent example, to explain the relationship between two different, but still close, fields: the behaviour of the blogosphere and all-news TVs regarding the death of Pope John Paul II. Al Jazeera and the blogosphere reacted in a very similar way. Both gave extreme importance to the agony and the death of the Catholic Pope, emphasising the profound importance which the pontificate of Karol Woytjla had even for the Islamic Arab world, especially noting some of his legendary actions, like the entering the Omayyadi Mosque in Damascus barefoot and kissing the Holy Ku’ran. The drumbeat which went through blogs would not have had the volume and passion if there had not been the extensive and comprehensive coverage of Al Jazeera and her sisters. Arab satellite networks decided to cover the event with very long live broadcasting, deep analyses, and debates which had filled up the Arab screens for almost a week.
Bloggers did not speak about John Paul II because Al Jazeera spoke about him. But they reacted, especially from the point of view of the proportion of intervention, to a real media campaign. Bloggers’ reaction, anyhow, doesn’t reduce the originality of messages which the blogosphere hosts, neither the capacity demonstrated by the Internet to show the other side of thoughts going on in the Arab world. Those, in fact, of the youngest citizens of the region, almost always mortified in their intention to be aware of their positions and their role in the Arab renaissance.
Blogs are shelters and are so considered by their creators. They are also at risk to be a ghetto, or a glass roof which closes around and above them. It is the young and among them many women[xi], who are the real leading actors of a blogosphere which Ammar Abdulhamid considers to be, for a while, in its “infantile phase”[xii]. And their decisive refusal of being connected to Al Jazeera’s era and Arab allnews satellite TV networks revolution seems, for some reasons, to be a part of this assertion of their own diversity. Many of political/civil bloggers pretend to be the tools of an ongoing passage to a different chapter of the Arab cultural history. The chapter which, in case of political and civilian blogs means also the evolution of a dissent, which is virtual only in the selected medium, but it is easy to imagine it becoming real and material in its theoretical comprehensiveness.
[i]Answer to a questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[ii] To confirm unconsciously the connection between blogging and information is for example Mohamed of From Cairo, with love. “We are very young – he says -, and many of us first got involved in politics during the protests in solidarity with Palestinian Intifada and against the Iraq war, but Al Jazeera isn’t something we look up to. There’s Al Jazeera and there’re many other tv stations and there are many news sites and we can get the news much more easier. You might think that Al Jazeera liberated us from the State-owned TV and that’s why we are the sons of Al Jazeera phenomenon, but State-owned TV is ancient history to us now”.
[iii] It is a doubt expressed by Sami Ben Gharbia (alias Chamseddine), 38, a Tunisian blogger, and a political refugee in the Netherlands since 1998, landed to the Internet in 2000. Frequent visitor of forums and sites of “Tunisian cyberdissidence”, has later created his site www.kitab.nl, and then his blog Fikr@. Answer to a questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[iv] Cfr., for example, says Alia Khouri, blogger of saudigirl.blogspot.com, in an answer to a questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005: “Saying that Al-Jazeera promotes blogging is like saying that CNN promotes blogging. Al-Jazeera and its ilk belong to the still highly controlled sphere of that means of distribution which encourages passive consumption of information: satellite TV broadcasting. Blogs belong to the sphere of the Internet, which appropriates and assimilates all types of digital media. True to form, the blogger feeds off other content types and resignifies their meaning as he or she sees fit”.
[v] Jon W. Anderson, Technology, Media and the Next Generation in the Middle East, NMIT Working Papers, 1999. Cfr. Anche Jon Alterman, New Media, New Politics? From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World, Policy Paper #48, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998.
[vi] Although in his family they “managed to survive the satellite-dish craze which broke out in Egypt a little over a decade ago (nothing ideological)”, Ahmad Gharbeia (http://zamakan.gharbeia.org) says that “the constant showers of news that now pours into almost every home would sure motivate more and more people into ranting and commenting, and what a better way to do it than to blog!”. Answer to a questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[vii] Mohamed Marwen Meddah, of subzeroblue (www.subzeroblue.com): “with time the butterflies will be able to break free”. Answer to the questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[viii] Cfr. Donatella Della Ratta, Al Jazeera. Media e società arabe nel nuovo millennio, Bruno Mondadori 2005, p.212. Cfr. also K. Hafez, Arab Satellite Broadcasting: an Alternative to Political Parties?, TBS on line, n. 13.
[ix] Answer to the questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[x] Answer to the questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[xi] Cfr. Lone Highlander, a Libyan blogger (lonehighlander.blogspot.com), who started to write her virtual diary “to reach Western audience and show a small glimpse of Libya, but through our interaction I hoped to eventually learn more about myself and who I am. So you can say it is a personal trip with an agenda of dispelling some strange impressions about my country”. According to Highlander, “blogging has a lot to offer, the least being fresh opinions from a region traditionally mysterious, misunderstood and misrepresented in the media. Through blogging, the rest of the world could learn and make friends with teenagers, professionals, grown ups or whoever, without the need to go between, ‘au naturel’ sort of. The special challenges you refer too could mostly be technical. I’m not worried about my blogging, because I believe that I have managed to present a calm and well balanced image of Libya or other countries in the region as you say”. Answer to the questionnaire sent by the author in summer 2005.
[xii] Cfr. http://committeetoprotectbloggers.blogspot.com/2005/05/brief-on-blogging-in-arab-world.html. Abdulhamid said: “Arabs do take longer than others to catch the technological train. I would imagine that by mid 2006, certain serious inroads into the blogging community will have been made around here. The development of anonymous blogging tools might indeed help in this regard”.
Especially in Libya, Al Jazeera became iconic, as a symbol of that kind of information in staunch opposition with the servile approach followed by state-run TVs or state-linked networks. Many years ago, there was a heated debate on Al Jazeera as a new Panarab political agora. Although it is of course impossible to give Al Jazeera the responsability to create a political agora, due to the fact that TV public is – by definition – a passive audience, it is true that Al Jazeera broke the chains of a petrified political communication and information in the Arab world. Blogs are the sons of Ala Jazeera revolution. No doubt.