Memos from the Past – The web-dissent in the MENA region (2004-2006)

18 Gen , 2021 Paola Caridi

The phenomenon is irreversible. Blogs in the Arab world are not only an acquired, consolidated and growing reality. They are first and foremost the expression of socio-political and socio-cultural changes very deep-lying although not yet fully decipherable in their impact. The product of a subsoil of forums, chat and newsgroups[i], blogs budded in the restricted community of the very first Arab “surfers”. Of those few, that is, who in the last decade had the economic and cultural opportunity to access the Internet and to possess therefore the technological tools to do so: a community therefore restricted for income and education, often – indeed- displaced with regard to the region because part instead (temporarily or permanently) of the Arab Diaspora in Europe or America.

Simple, flexible tools, inexpensive and very visible, blogs are in actual fact ‘virtual diaries’ which any individual user can set up very easily, posting on the web anything he or she wants people to see. From personal reflections to artistic works, from audio-visual material to simply digital photographs. But especially links to other material produced by the Internet, usually information. The vast possibilities for their use of immediately revealed the worth of blogs compared with the ways of virtual communication and interaction which went before them in the evolution of the Web. And they rapidly expressed their potential in the Arab world in an extraordinary manner considering the number of Web users, relatively low if compared with that in the West known not only as the region with the widest diffusion of advanced technology accessible to a large number of people, but also as a geopolitical system of political representation, modelled on democracy and citizenship.

Blogs in the Arab world, to be brief, began to spread and continue to do so at an amazing speed since – as one blogger Ahmad Gharbeia puts it – publishing on the net became as easy as sending an email”[ii].

What is more the swift diffusion of blogs happened in spite of serious cultural, technological and educational shortcomings affecting the region and which have if anything become more rather then less acute in recent years [iii]. Aside from trends experimented also in other geopolitical contexts and the simplification of blogging today from the technological point of view, the most important reasons for such an unstoppable spread can be traced to a dimension of identity.

This is not the place to detect which overriding identity pushed so many Arab netizens to set up such a great number of blogs in such a short space of time, mainly during 2005. If, namely, it was mainly the generically pan-Arab, Islamic, political, civil connotation at the root of many decisions made by bloggers. Certain, however, was a need to communicate one’s individual and/or community identity  over and above patterns and stereotypes. A necessity directly connected, in blogs of a more obvious political character, to their identity as citizens, addressed – in this case – not to an audience tendentially non Arab, on the whole Western, but rather to other citizens-netizens.

It is precisely in blogs of marked political and civil connotation that the question of communication and passing of information becomes central. From the analysis of blogs and their development in the past year it emerges that the drafters of these virtual diaries have three needs: a) a need to communicate, to build bonds with other bloggers whom they sense are similar, construct a “virtual café culture”, according to the definition used by Alia, of saudigirl.blogspot.com; b) the need to supply information which differs from the news which passes through other channels, such as the typical media (including satellite TV channels), and lastly c) the need to build a common culture.

Communicate, inform, create

Communication in a context such as that of blogs, which initially appeared magmatic and charged with the euphoria of its first stirrings, soon channelled to form a community of bloggers, chiefly by means of the typical tool of the aggregator. Most communities formed so far have a minimum national common denominator above par to diversities, even profound, of political-sociological character. Non religious, followers of political Islam, neosocialists,  and defenders of human and civil rights, anti-West or pro-American reformers, the bloggers, political and civil, aggregate mainly by country.  Aggregators have already put together communities of bloggers increasingly referred to as Tunisian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, Bahrainian, Kuwaiti. National borders are stepped over, if anything, by partially regional identities such as the Maghrebi identity[iv], which brings together groups of bloggers who bear on their shoulders the longest experience from the temporal point of view, which began with Tunisian and Moroccan surfers.

What consolidated national communities of bloggers was mainly the flow of information through these “virtual diaries”. Information which, after a first confused and multipurpose stage, focussed on the description of a local social and political situation seen through eyes other than those of the regime or print or television journalism (including that of Al Jazeera and the other Arab allnews satellite TV channels). What brought the bloggers together, in this case, was not a generic sharing of intentions, but rather the proof in the field of what could be achieved. More specifically, it was the so-called Arab Spring that drew together bloggers who, independently, had decided to inform about protests and initiatives of reform happening in different countries of the region.

The most striking moment was certainly the Lebanese Cedar revolution, with a flourishing of blogs focused on demonstrations taking place in Beirut, with photographs, film, written and audio testimonials inserted on the web. Building in this way a store of alternative-information typical of Western protest movements.  However alternative-information through blogs had already begun in an aggressive manner in Tunisia, which can rightly claim to be the country which started the phenomenon. Above all because the Tunisian Internet gave the Web and Arab e-dissidents the man whom bloggers regard as their first martyr: Zouhair Yahyaoui, the father of the famous Tunisian online magazine Tunezine. Yahyaoui died at the age of 36 of heart failure in March 2005 after being released by the authorities. He had been arrested and detained in prison for eighteen months. To free him and to defend his freedom of expression, many international human rights associations made him a symbol. The symbol of freedom of expression on the Web. A symbol which, after the man’s death, quickly became a myth. The myth of the first  e-martyr, with virtual concurrent wakes (vigils) bounced from one blog to another, from the Maghreb to the Arabian peninsula, like in a pinball machine gone haywire.

Tunezine, to tell the truth, had little to do with the Arab Spring of  2005. Whereas in the Tunisian case it was all-in. The only case of an information revolution coming totally from above, the one dreamed of by president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali for his tiny country, the first African nation to link up to the Internet in 1996. In the president’s view the future of tiny Tunisia – a mere ten million people pinned between two at least geographical giants Algeria and Libya – was to be built on computers, software, bytes. Creating a qualified labour force on the cheap. After ten years this impressive personal computer policy Ben Ali’s revolution gave birth to the children of the revolution. Young people who have information technology in their blood so to say and who, precisely for this reason, have had enough of the rigid restrictions of a regime very harsh with anyone who desires freedom. Freedom for example to surf the Web. In a word, after tasting the freedom offered by the telematic agorà, the cyber-sons of Ben Ali, immediately rebelled.

In a country where press and TV are under control, where censorship is capillary, initially the Internet was a refuge. “The censorship exercised by the Tunisian regime on all discordant voices pushed the Opposition and Tunisians in general to exist on the Web ”, says Mourad Dridi, IT engineer now living in Paris who started the Tunisian Association for the Defence of Cyberspace. Because at a certain point censorship found its way even there inside the virtual world which many Tunisians had carved out for themselves. This is why many Opposition websites cannot be seen in Tunisia because access to them is blocked by the authorities.

Parallel to the Lebanese case and Tunisian one, alternative information by bloggers has had at least four countries in which it has expressed itself at a high level. In Bahrain, to follow the case of the three creators of Bahrainonline, arrested and tried between February and March 2005 and freed after two weeks of detention. In Kuwait, where writers of virtual diaries informed about the battle for women’s voting rights, coining also the definition blue revolution adopted by journalists who then reported on the process of parliamentary approval. In Syria, where most bloggers are also dissidents, their work concentrated on the activity of lobbying before the Baath Congress in June 2005. Symbol of the task undertaken within the party of the regime to renew it from inside, the telematic work of Ayman Abdel Nour, the most famous Baathist reformer and author of the newsletter most read by the Opposition. His All4Syria, fifteen thousand daily e-mail dispatches of All4Syria, is now a consolidated phenomenon, despite a long “cops and  robbers” chase with the Syrian authorities who tried to block both the site and the electronic newsletter itself.

Egypt however has been the real laboratory for the creation of parallel information, in certain sectors professionally interesting in journalistic terms, to give a different interpretation of the whole political process which began with the Kefaya protests, continued with the constitutional referendum on 25 May, violence against Opposition members and the two electoral campaigns for presidential elections which reconfirmed Hosni Mubarak, and then for the renewal of the People Assembly. So-called citizens journalism had in Egypt in ferment of 2005 a terrain in which to emerge and to experience. What is more. It was precisely the type of information passed through Egyptian blogs which served as a first adhesive among bloggers, creating the bond necessary for starting the building – among Egyptian bloggers – of a common political culture, not in ideological terms, but rather as a frame within which to give birth to a new community of citizens in search of political reform.

This was the birth of dissent, ever less solitary and individual, and ever more aggregated. The construction of this common political culture in the different Arab national contexts is, therefore, passing by way of the blogs, the simplest and economically most accessible way of collating  thoughts and persons, and avoiding as far as possible censorship by government authorities. This is the present-day way of unifying dissent through the diffusion of e-samizdats, virtual samizdats as it has happened – to make a comparison perhaps somewhat exaggerated at this stage, but certainly paradigmatic – in the period between the 70s and 80s in Eastern Europe under pro-Soviet regimes, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  Instead of a typewriter or a pen to copy the outlawed samizdat, the Internet proved a much easier way of reproducing and spreading copies of texts outside institutional cultural channels. Not only in Arabic, but also in the old English and French languages of the colonisers.

E-samizdat for Arab revival

Comparison with eastern European dissent is useful for a better understanding of what is happening in groups still marginal and elitist in a society– such as the Arab one – which is often instead in the West considered completely stagnant and lacking any endogenous cultural thrust. In Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, very small groups of intellectuals radiated dissent through anti-institutional means of communications with an important literary and cultural production passed through the world of the samizdats. Samizdats were cultural products of various types passed from hand to hand among groups of dissidents and which were also used – even if with extreme caution– to draw into the dissidence other people. Hand-written or more often typed at home, at night, by the individual reader who made a copy of the samiszdat for himself and then passed it on to the next reader. Building up in this way, a personal, private library, extremely dangerous for the owner’s safety.

Samizdats with their diffusion were not only one of the pivots of Eastern European dissent. They were also the theoretical background of leaders who came to power to replace communist regimes especially in the first period after the fall of the Iron Wall. Furthermore, precisely the most important authors of samizdats were the ones who came to power. As was demonstrated by the exemplary and memorable case of Vaclav Havel, whose Moc bezmocných [The Power of the Powerless]  samiszdat of 1978[v] was considered, before and after 1989, one of the manifestos of opposition to eastern European pro-Soviet regimes.

As with Eastern Europe, also in the case of the Arab world dissidence is extremely elitist. No connection, in short, between the masses and the intelligentsia, like the one constituted by the solitary and fundamental example of the Poland of Solidarnosc.

The virtual writing of Arab dissent, whether of artistic or political nature, is generally anonymous or under a pseudonym. Bloggers, in short, often hide their identity behind a pseudonym to escape the censorship and meshes of national regimes some of which are showing that they are not happy with the way the blog phenomenon is spreading, as was seen by the Saudi authorities’ decision early in October to block blogger.com refusing to give a reason but at the same time admitting that in this way they had blocked 400,000 sites[vi]. The behaviour of the Saudi authorities immediately revealed the reason why bloggers have to use anonymity to protect their personal data from people (namely Internet censorship police) for whom it is now much easier to trace the identity of Web users. This does not rule out however that the mask of a pseudonym may also be, for some bloggers, a means of protecting themselves not so much from the authorities as from the virtual community

Whatever the case, precisely the connection between blogs and anonymity is considered by some involved in the phenomenon the element which “instigated the novelty of public discourse between individuals on all sorts of topics”[vii]. A fundamental difference with samizdats which were circulated underground but, at the same time, had an author who used his real name and surname to express the force of his opposition.

Although it involves the great majority of bloggers, anonymity has however important exceptions such as the one represented by Ammar Abdulhamid, Syrian, tireless producer of e-samiszdat, mostly poems, but also reflections. Considered one of the leading young Arab dissidents, one hundred percent secular, creator of the Thawra Project (“independent initiative” for a “forum to identify the aspirations and address the concerns of the various different ethnic and religious minorities living in the Arab world”), he is also the author of amarji.blogspot.com, “heretic’s blog”. Abdulhamid never hid himself. He never used a pseudonym. He did everything in the broad daylight (virtual) day of Damascus. Behaviour which, in the end, cost him exile in Maryland with his family and the continuation of his blog from a PC in the United States.  Diverse the behaviour of the Egyptian Baheyya (baheyya.blogspot.com), one of the most popular bloggers and not only within national borders but also beyond in the throng of Arab intelligentsia, not only virtual. Baheyya is not an artist but her brief writings are considered among the most incisive in political analysis of the Egyptian situation.

For this reason Baheyya is admired by bloggers who are younger and whose cultural baggage is non-specific. Those who are, however, moving from e-dissidence to real opposition, a changeover unexpected and with which not all bloggers are in agreement. The changeover concerns mainly a few of the most prominent Egyptian bloggers, such as Alaa, one of the two founders of the main aggregator, manalaa.net. Some authors of “virtual diaries” have taken to the squares of Cairo especially during the electoral campaign which preceded Hosni Mubarak’s reconfirmation as president and in particular during the Kifaya demonstrations. Those were the places where bloggers lifted the Web mask and revealed their proper identity, and started a community no longer simply virtual, but one which has not forgotten the Internet. Indeed. It continues to use blogs both to transmit information and to tell how their Web communication made the changeover to reality. In the Tunisian case instead, the bloggers meet once a month in a public place in the capital, about a hundred, a quarter of them women, to speak about blogging, to meet new bloggers, to be together.

The necessity to meet also outside the virtual agorà, as also its widespread Web behaviour, speak of an Arab blogosphere less individualistic than that of the West. A community of readers and writers which intervenes frequently, sending comments, linking and welcoming new bloggers warmly. The need for aggregation and growth, so evident on the Arab Internet appears at times to stem from a widespread perception of isolation and misunderstanding on the part of the world which lies beyond the region’s boundaries.

Al Jazeera is not my mother!

In its first stage, marked by expansion and experimenting, obviously the main core of these political and/or civil blogs is characterised not so much by artistic production (although present and very interesting), as exchange and diffusion of different non institutionalised information. A choice which shows that bloggers of this type (and others) are not only children of the Internet. They are also children of the new forms of communications (political and informative) which have appeared in the Arab world with allnews satellite TV.

We have first of all chronological data: most of these bloggers are young. The range does include bloggers of 40 but the great majority are young people under 30 years of age. “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 most linked “ virtual diaries” in the Arab world. “Youth is one of the striking characteristics of bloggers in the Arab world –Haitham explains. 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”[viii].

These bloggers, then, are – at least from the point of view of personal data – children of communication in the Arab world, of Al Jazeera and its “sisters”, if it is true that at least since the Al Aqsa intifada of 2000 they have digested information not through the anachronistic news programmes of state television companies[ix]. Their relationship (unconscious) with this sort of diverse information, to be brief, makes them ready to use non conformist means of making information through channels of communications other than those of television. Such as blogs, precisely.

Nevertheless, Arab bloggers reject the idea that they are children of Al Jazeera. They deny, above all, the suggestion of a relationship cause-effect between the Al Jazeera revolution and the blog revolution [x]. Answers to a questionnaire sent out last Summer to a few dozen bloggers, from Morocco to Bahrain, are indicative. Most tend to make accurate and precise distinctions between the world of the Internet and that of television channels. In substance, they apply  the classical distinction between the two worlds, the manner in which the message is transmitted. In an univocal manner, from the sender to the addressee in the case of TV channels. In a bi-univocal manner, and essentially in the communication typical of the agorà, on the web.

The distinctions adopted by the bloggers, moreover, are made purposely to give political value to the two communicative platforms: TV channels (a world in which state Arab broadcasters and trans-Arab satellite channels such as Al Jazeera are coupled) impose totally passive reception controlled from the top[xi]; the Internet is the authentic platform on which it is possible to build Arab democracy (already being built, in the opinion of most Arab bloggers). At least within the social sector which from the point of view of economic means and instruction can afford access to the Internet. In this, Arab bloggers are on the same wavelength as those on the other side of the Atlantic who theorise about the capacity of  “virtual diaries”, to challenge television information, or in any case institutionalised information. Indeed many claim that it falls to bloggers not only to produce alternative information, especially at the local level, but also to monitor information coverage supplied by mainstream media.

Little space for reflection is allotted to a completely different interpretation such as the one offered by Jon Anderson who in 1999 overturned the perspective by talking about TV built on “the Internet model which features seeking over reception, levels senders and receivers, circumvents authority or is self-authorising, and interactive in practice”[xii].

Of course, the greater part of the most politicised  blogger recognises Al Jazeera’s revolutionary contribution to the world of Arab media. “It put the Arab street face to face with its reality, that of censorship imposed from the top and self-censorship accepted at root level. Al Jazeera liberated the Arab word and overturned the whole traditional media scene”, admits Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia, founder of Fikr@. “It is clear – he continues – that the information covered by Al Jazeera and its challenging manner of presenting it has had an impact on the generation of young bloggers”[xiii].

Despite this recognition however the bloggers clearly reject any possible paternity of Al Jazeera. Not only because of the diversity of the medium of communication, and therefore the genetic diversity of its nature. Not only because netizensconsider themselves and the Net a world apart. It is for many a necessary distinction between institutionalised information and a counter-information which must come from the roots, from Arab civil society. Although (and the bloggers are the first to say so) the community of people who keep online diaries is still too “small”, and concerns the more qualified professions which organise themselves at times in proper blog co-operatives. In Maghreb countries, for example, there are blogs of medical doctors, journalists, managers, as well as two business blogs in Morocco, says engineer Anouar Ouali Alami, aged 27, the blogger of www.anouar.org and a member of the aggregatorswww.maghreblog.net and www.marocblog.com.

For many bloggers it is, for example, also the quality of Al Jazeera information which is queried. If it is 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, Lebanese blogger. “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 the author of …  Moreover, people have even questioned its own claim to objectivity. Consequently, they have searched for alternative mediums of communication and sources of information – one of which is blogging”. There is a widespread opinion in the bloggers’ world that Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia, are no different from CNN or BBC, from those western information networks which bloggers follow parallel to newscasts produced in Doha or Dubai. Indeed. A greater part of the bloggers tends to underline that Arab netizens were educated by Al Jazeera just as much as they were educated by the other media of western countries, because precisely for income, education and perhaps even residence (for Diaspora Arabs ) they had the opportunity to tune in to channels beyond the Mediterranean, and obtain information which differed from the news transmitted by State TV or newspapers.

Diverse, instead, bloggers’ positions when asked for a reflection on the influence which the Al Jazeera revolution had, has and will continue to have on Arab bloggers. Haitham of Sabbah’s blog for example is convinced about the effect which the Doha channel continues to have “specially because most if not all Arabs see it as the first open-debate channel to touch on taboos, similar to those on which Arab bloggers touch”. In this recognition of talk-shows broadcast by Al Jazeera, Haitham in substance agrees with Faisal al Kasim, the creator of Opposite Direction, who in an interview with Donatella Della Ratta in February 2005 said programmes like his had a duty to educate the Arab street to dissent. Indeed. He himself launched the comparison with Eastern Europe pre-1989, recalling the role played by Radio Free Europe. “They tell me my programme does not move people to change regimes, to engage in authentic political Opposition and I reply: just wait and see”, says Kasim. “Give us time. I believe people cannot act unless they are educated, and with this programme we are educating them, but we have only been doing it for eight years”.[xiv]  

Having said this however, the bloggers immediately distance themselves from Doha TV and all satellite TV channels which transmit information in the region. Haitham gives one of the reasons at the basis of the difficult relationship between the bloggers and Al Jazeera. “Sometimes one has the impression that young Arab bloggers cannot believe the attitude of the older generation and especially that of local or international figures of authority ”, says Haitham. “And these are often challenged on Al Jazeera, but do not represent the Arab bloggers views, which means it does not represent the less educated and ignored young generation. In fact, I believe the young generation has no presentation in the Arab media “revolution”, except few, very few Arab newspapers articles here and there, on the other hand, much more attention from the western media”[xv].

The pessimism of Haitham is echoed by Mohamed, aged 23, a scientist. He is the blogger of From Cairo, with Love, a site active until 30 September 2005, when its creator abandoned his public in a very brusque manner. “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, disillusioned. “It has its biases as any other media outlet in the world, so why should we feel connected to it in any way?”[xvi]

The creator of Sabbah’s blog is the one, however, who describes in a convincing manner both sides of the coin: on the one hand, it is precisely the youngest generation which learned unconsciously from Al Jazeera the basics of discussion, of Opposite Direction, the programme cult of Faisal al Kasim, and the value of information which does not yield to preventive censorship. At the same time, and this is denounced by many bloggers, precisely this generation is the one which is ignored by Al Jazeera, except in its most resounding expressions: when, to be brief, young people are the main actors in conflicts, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The dark side of the moon, the other side of the world of Arab youth not always politicised or at the centre of Opposition against the regimes, is not yet in the spotlight of TV channels. Not even of Al Jazeera. The bloggers’ complaint is clear and just as clear is the affirmation that blogs have instead the merit of helping this generation to emerge. This is the position of Issandr el Amrani, one of the members of arabist.net, among the blogs most watched by journalists and scholars who focus on the Arab world. There are hundreds of blogs “run by teenagers who write about their daily life –says Amrani, who collaborates with international publications -. 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 bloggers’ views to the contrary, the Internet and traditional media appear also in the Arab world– on the level of information – directly communicating vessels. It would seem difficult, that is, to see the Internet without a TV and, now , it is even difficult to think of a TV channel or a print media without the support of the Internet. The role of the revolution produced by Al Jazeera is, all in all,  recognised also by the actors of the sweeping phenomenon of “ virtual diaries ”. Weakened, instead, the influence of Arab allnews satellite TV channels on the blogosphere. And above all on that blogistan, that Arab Blogrepublic which states its diversity, its autonomous and original path.

Yet if we analyse the Arab blogosphere from outside, the presence of mainstream  information is evident. Just one example paradigmatic for explaining the relationship between two camps which differ but are still close: the behaviour of the blogosphere and allnews TV with regard to the death of John Paul II. Al Jazeera and the blogosphere reacted in very similar ways: giving the utmost importance to the agony and death of the Catholic pope, underlining in this manner the profound importance which the pontificate of Karol Woytjla had also for the Arab Islamic world, above all thanks to certain epoch-making gestures, when the Pontiff removed his shoes to enter Omayyadi Mosque in Damascus or when he kissed the Holy Koran. Grapevine information passed by blogs, however, would not have had the scope and the passion demonstrated, if it had not been for Al Jazeera’s extensive and exhaustive coverage with prolonged live links, in-depth reflections and debates which filled Arab screens for a least a week.

The bloggers did not speak about John Paul II simply because Al Jazeera spoke about him. But they did react, especially from the point of view of the vastness of intervention, to an authentic media build-up. However this reaction took nothing away from the originality of the messages hosted by the blogosphere or from the Internet’s proven capacity to show the underside of present day reflections going on in the Arab world. Those in substance of the region’s youngest citizens, nearly always thwarted in their attempts to make their positions and role in the Arab revival known.

Blogs are a refuge, as their creators want them to be. But there is a danger that they may become ghetto, a crystal roofwhich closes around and over them. Young people, and many are women[xvii], are the real actors of a blogosphere which Ammar Abdulhamid considers still for a few months in its “infancy”[xviii]. And their clear rejection of any direct derivation from the times and the revolution of Al Jazeera would appear, in some ways, to be part of this affirmation of their diversity, of the changeover they have made to another chapter of the history of Arab culture. A chapter which, in the case of political and civil blogs, signifies also the evolution of a dissent only in the chosen channel virtual, but which, it is easy to imagine, in its theoretical impact could become real and physical.

[i] See description by Mohamed, blogger of From Cairo, with love, a “virtual diary” last updated 30 September 2005. Mohamed explains “before blogs there were web forums, there were so many of them. Hundreds of forums where thousands and thousands of Arabs would talk, socialize, exchange ideas and debate. Why this never caught the eyes of foreign media the way blogs did, I have no clue. But many bloggers used to frequent forums before. Forums are still much more popular than blogs till this moment. But things are leaning towards blogs where there is no moderators’ censorship and there are no long meaningless arguments”. Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005..

[ii] Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005..

[iii] For data on the diffusion of information technology in the Arab world in the picture of the most exhaustive description of the world of knowledge in the Arab language region, cfr. United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States, Arab Human Development Report 2003.Building a Knowledge Society [AHDR 2003]. For a critical reflection on how AHDR 2003 describes the relationship between Arabs and new technology, cfr however Fatema Mernissi, Les Sindbads marocains: Voyage dans le Maroc Civique, Editions Marsam 2004, p.62 sgg.

[iv] For aggregators in the North Africa area, cfr. www.maghreblog.net.

[v]Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, M.E. Sharpe 1990. See also, Bronislaw Geremek, La Rupture. La Pologne du Communisme a la Democratie, Seuil 1991; From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis, edited by Ronald Dworkin and Janos Kis, Central European University Press  2004; Good-Bye Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing, edited by Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa; Timothy Garton Ash,  The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague, Vintage 1993.

[vi] It was Reporters Without Borders a which dealt with the matter, calling the Internet Services Unit (ISU), the agency that manages Web filtering in Saudi Arabia, “to explain why the weblog creation and hosting service blogger.com has been made inaccessible since 3 October, preventing Saudi bloggers from updating their blogs.

“Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the Internet the most, but blog services had not until now been affected by the ISU’s filters,” the press freedom organisation said. “The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet.” The Saudi authorities acknowledge blacklisting more than 400,000 websites. A very wide range of sites are affected, including political organisations, non-recognised Islamist movements and publications containing any kind of reference to sexuality”. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15201

[vii] This is the opinion of Raja Abu Hassan, aged 25, one of the members of The Lebanese Bloggers (http://lebaneseblogger.blogspot.com). Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[viii] Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[ix] Unconscious confirmation of the connection between blogging and information comes, for example from 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 soemthing we look up to. There’s Al Jazeera and there are many other tv stations and 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”.

[x] This doubt is expressed, for example, by  Sami Ben Gharbia (alias Chamseddine), Tunisian blogger aged 38, political refugee in Holland since 1998, who landed on the Internet in 2000. Frequentor of forum and sites of “Tunisian cyberdissent”, he then created his site  www.kitab.nl and later started his blog Fikr@. Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005

[xi] Cfr what is said, for example, by Alia Khouri, blogger of saudigirl.blogspot.com, in response to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005. “Saying that Al-Jazeera promotes blogging is like saying that CNN promotes blogging. Aljazeera and its like belong in the still highly controlled sphere of that means of distribution which encourages passive consumption of information: satellite TV broadcasting. Blogs belong in 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”.

[xii] Jon W. Anderson, Technology, Media and the Next Generation in the Middle East, NMIT Working Papers, 1999.  Cfr. Also 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.

[xiii] Although his family “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 shower 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 circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[xiv]  Cfr. Donatella Della Ratta, Al Jazeera. Media e società arabe ne nuovo millennio, Bruno Mondadori 2005, p.212. Cfr. also K. Hafez, Arab Satellite Broadcasting: an Alternative to Political Parties?, TBS on line, n. 13.

[xv] Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[xvi] Answer to a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[xvii] Cfr. Lone Highlander, a Libyan blogger  (lonehighlander.blogspot.com), who started writing his virtual diary “to reach a western audience to 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 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 for go betweens, ‘au naturel’ sort of. The special challenges you refer to 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 a questionnaire circulated by the author in the Summer of 2005.

[xviii] Cfr. http://committeetoprotectbloggers.blogspot.com/2005/05/brief-on-blogging-in-arab-world.html. Abdulhamid says: “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”.

La foto è di Paola Caridi

Paola Caridi