Columbia Journalism Review

"Last summer was...a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within."

This article spotlights the increasing use of weblogs (blogs) - especially among young people - in the Middle East, which is opening up these societies, building bridges between people, and possibly sowing the seeds of political action.

Author Gal Beckerman notes that the Arab "blogosphere" has been growing for a few years now. Although only 10% of the Arab world has internet access, that figure represents a 5-fold increase from 2000. Still, most analysts and bloggers put the number of Arab bloggers at fewer than 25,000. While most blog in Arabic, bloggers say that a particularly interesting alternative space is being formed on the sites composed in English.

Beckerman traces the history of the development of blogging, noting that the first one was created by a Swarthmore College student in January 1994, and then spread throughout America in the late 1990s. In the Middle East, it was the then-29-year-old Salam Pax whose English-language blog "Where is Raed?", launched in 2003, "captured an emotional, lived experience of the war, one that evaded most journalists covering the conflict." By the time of the invasion, 20,000 people were reading Pax regularly. Beckerman notes that blogs from Jordan began to emerge in the wake of Iraqi blogs; according to the organisers of Jordan Planet, what was only a handful of blogs in 2006 is now a few hundred. The same is true of Lebanon: "There, the blogs came in waves, with the first arriving in early 2005 during the Cedar Revolution....The second wave came this summer, during the war with Israel. Egypt, and other, more conservative countries in the Arab world, have far fewer but equally vocal bloggers. Yet even in those nations the numbers have increased in the past year. In Saudi Arabia the number of blogs tripled last year to an estimated 2,000, according to a recent Washington Post article."

Beckerman contrasts the use of blogs as a communication medium by comparing the American and Arab blogspheres. "In the American blogosphere, opinions and life tales blossom a millionfold every day. But against the background of a largely party-line mainstream local Arab media, and the absence of avenues for national conversation, these Arab bloggers, most of whom are anonymous for their own safety, commit small acts of bravery simply by speaking their minds." To illustrate this point, Beckerman cites the example of Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian blogger who was forced into exile in September 2005 for his democracy activism. Abdulhamid contends that the power of the medium will come when bloggers - the majority of whom are from the highest strata of society - find a way to "'cross the bridge between the elite and the grass roots' - a process that is already beginning, through a few organized demonstrations coordinated by bloggers, online campaigns, and the posting of information about police brutality or sexual harassment." Beckerman argues that the centrality of politics and history in Middle Eastern people's lives makes the commentary shared through blogs much more "complex and interesting" than the diary or personal-op-ed-style of "so many American blogs".

"To hear the bloggers themselves describe it, blogging has taken off in the Arab world because it presents an opportunity to reclaim individuality. In a region where leaders, be they Hassan Nasrallah or Ismail Haniya, claim to speak on behalf of all Arabs, a blog is a chance to contradict, to undermine, and to assert" - an opportunity described by one blogger quoted here as "something you don't always find in Lebanese media". In the context of this observation, Beckerman describes the state of Arab media, noting that - while mitigated in some ways by the advent of satellite channels like Al-Jazerra and Al-Arabiya in recent years - most local media there are "either directly state-controlled or subject to such intimidation by the government that journalists and editors rarely challenge authority." Beckerman cites a number of examples of political action carried out through blogging that have left several bloggers jailed, explaining the trend of anonymity in the Arab blogsphere.

Beckerman characterises the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah as a defining moment in the growth of Arab blogs, using it to illustrate a key strategic lesson in the use of this medium. He explains, "The blogs did what they do best. First, you had full descriptions from individuals of their experience under the bombardment, both physical and psychological....In addition to this outpouring of real-time testimony, you could read actual discussions, and often heated arguments, taking place in the comments sections of certain blogs, in which Lebanese and Israelis engaged each other at the deepest levels about the politics of the conflict, their fears, and sometime even their hopes for the days after. Those provided an important outlet for many people, even when the rhetoric was belligerent. At least we're talking, bloggers frequently pointed out. One site, lebanesebloggers.blogspot.com, created in February 2005, became one of the main destinations for such conversations, and during the month-long duration of the fighting, received a quarter of a million page views."

Beckerman concludes the piece by asking: "Is this hopeful? Yes, as long as one keeps in mind, once again, what a small segment of the population, both Arab and Israeli, is sitting in front of glowing screens and reaching out to the 'other.' The bloggers will say, universally, that revolutions almost always start with a tiny elite. But we are a long way from this revolution’s doorstep. Instead, this blogosphere feels more like a small community of open-minded young people who have discovered pathways that were previously closed."