blogging the 4th Arab Media Forum in Dubai
and Impressions on the 4th Arab Media Forum
It’s over. Apart from the official dinner and prizes tonight, the conference and sessions have just finished. We’ve had our bloggers’ session this afternoon and it was brilliant! Good organisation, good attendance and very good questions from the audience.
Chairing the panel was Ms. Dalia El Farra, Ms. Anisa Al-Sharif, a UAE national and personal blogger, tackled the experience of blogging and how some blogs were quite literally stepping into traditional media spheres. She specifically brought to our attention the “Jar Al-Qamar” blog which was the first to break the story of the sectarian strife in Alexandria, and stressed that this will not be the last that we will find bloggers publishing news as it happens.
Dr. Emad Basheer, the director of the Lebanese University’s College of Media came all prepared with a good 7 pages for his talk which was very worthwhile. He described the start of blogging with the Sumerians in about 4000BC! And explained the various eras it went through. He of course was treating the “phenomenon” of blogging as diarists; looking at it this way, I can see where he was going. Anyway, he explained the distinct 4 eras of blogging as starting in ancient times with the Sumerians as it was them who first developed the act of writing, then it went on to the creation of the Gutenberg Press in the 1400s – if you discount the Chinese and Japanese printing presses which are supposed to have predated the Gutenberg Press in the 1100s and 1200s. Onwards to 1946 when the first computer was invented, and then of course with the prevalence of the dial-up communications and then ultimately the internet.
Following on from his presentation – which I will try to get and post here as it is interesting – I started where he finished and said that I started blogging in 1986!
Well it’s true! I had created one of the first BBSs (bulletin board services) in the area and called it Stray Cats BBS. We had quite a few members at that time and what we did is very similar to blogging today, it was a collection of chronologically organised entries to which people commented. After that we went into forums and then as we have today the current structure of the blog. Sure, the terms “weblog” and “blog” only came a lot later than ’86, but if we take Dr. Basheer’s paradigm, then a lot of us (dinosaurs!) have been blogging since the BBS days.
My talk (which lasted a lot shorter than Dr. Basheer’s I might add, and I told the audience to clap when I felt that I had bored them enough :)) concentrated on the issues of credibility and anonymity in blogging. Core issues which have been discussed time and again in virtually all the sessions at the conference. I explained that credibility in blogs is gained by peer-review, in which if any reader disagrees with anything that a blogger has written, it is very simple to call him up on the facts by commenting on the piece. If commenting is not allowed on that particular blog, then a link is created into the objector’s blog referring back to the original article and he would expose his thoughts and why he thinks that the other writer is wrong. Through this process, the community itself takes care of reviewing and ensuring credibility is only granted to those who deserve it, that of course is evidenced by the number of links there are to a particular blog or article, and it is this that created good feedback sites like Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear’s EcoSystem which track these links.
As to the anonymity question, I maintain that the best way to gain credibility is to fully disclose who you are, and that you must stand behind your beliefs and writings. Once people actually get to know who you are, they can completely discount you and concentrate on your message. If they don’t know who you are, then that’s just another question-mark that lingers in their minds, detracting them from the idea you are discussing.
However, I also recognised that in our particular world it is not always practical to be known and I gave the example of Rabah Al-Quwayi who has simply called for taking nothing for granted in one of the many online forums in Saudi and he got a message-wrapped brick thrown at his car’s windshield! The message was a death threat. His troubles didn’t stop there, for when he went to the police station to lodge a complaint, the religious police at the station apprehended him and threw him in prison because “his beliefs were in doubt!” So the danger is always present not only from the governments, but even more from the community itself.
So in my personal view, the ideas are the most important things, rather than the person writing them; however, it does generally add to the story’s credibility if its author is known.
Questions from the floor were very interesting again, and once again continued to try to find ways to delineate blogging from traditional journalism, using the credibility issues, the immediacy of electronic publishing without an overseer, the absence of a code of ethics for bloggers, etc. These questions of course were raised by journalists rather than bloggers, who were almost absent form the forum! I’ve only met a couple of them who bothered to identify themselves as bloggers (some where even very guarded and wouldn’t give me their URLs – hint hint!) Nevertheless, I think discussing these issues are very important indeed, as it is the first step in getting traditional journalists to hear our views on the subject first-hand, and hopefully will transmit these thoughts to their readers that we are real people whose intentions are not far removed from “real” journalists.
That is not to say of course that there are no trivial blogs floating around, or trivial posts for that matter. Of course there are, and that is fine because blogging – may I remind you once again – is nothing more than a chronologically sorted personal diary entries. It could be as mundane as that, but I think as blogging became much more accepted now, even to the extent of having an ancient and trusted news agency like Reuters sourcing blogs, some are more serious than others, and it is up to the reader him or herself to make up their minds as to the credibility of the information presented, and how it is to be consumed by them.
Unfortunately the hour whizzed by, and as there was another session booked in the same room after us, we couldn’t take any more questions from the floor. Once I walked out of the conference room; however, I was cornered by KM Rakesh, the chief reporter at The Gulf Today for an impromptu interview, which lasted for more than half an hour, I hope he got the story he was looking for. Immediately after that I was cornered by “IN TV” crew for a television interview which again was off the cuff, the questions asked were good, and I hope that I have answered them sufficiently, but for a station whose newscast is not more than 6 minutes, they will have to do some serious editing to fit what I’ve said into their program… they’ll probably shorten it to the worst sound-bite in history! If any of you guys see it, can you let me know how it went? I don’t get that channel on the hotel’s TV…
In between the end of the session and the start of the interviews, I met a friend whom I have not met for about 6 or 8 years! It was wonderful to see Abdul Hamid Al-Zaidi, an old friend from Kuwait again. We have both moved from what we did all those years ago, and Abdul Hamid now manages a group of companies, one of which is – believe it or not – Arab Broadcast Forum to which he kindly invited me to participate in at their next session. I of course would love to, and shall give you more information about that whenever I receive them.
It’s 6:20pm as I write this, another hour before go to the presentation dinner which I am looking forward to. I so love meeting new people, and these intellectuals I have been privileged to meet and listen to them voice their concerns and suggest ways in which to fix our media situation, their thoughts on democracy, on extremism and the rest of the issues discussed is at worst enriching, and at best gives one hope that it is not all gloom and doom in the Arab world. As long as people like these worthy ladies and gentlemen are around, and as long as they are given a platform to share their ideas as in this forum, we will get there sooner than a lot of people think.
The train of reform has certainly left the station, and you’d better get on it and join the reform process, or get left behind.
One closing remark that I said for the IN TV interview I shall leave you with: I was asked – to the effect – what would happen if this reform stops and if it is effective for the various regimes in the Arab region; I replied that “we only have to look to our East to find out the results of not getting on the train, we only have to look at Kathmandu.”
Comments
Dear Mahmoud, I’ll re-visit this post since I don’t have much time to read it all but hey, you write a great synopsis and synthesized the whole tada very well. Good for you for your great contribution and I think that it must have shown that you are knowledgable and confident re. blogging.
There will always be the concerned (read, not knowledgable) journalist or casual internet lurker who will wonder about the credibility, but I think seeing that you for example or the religious policeman have your faithful following who think strongly about issues they comment on, you cannot be someone sans credibility. I read in the Wall Street Journal something about blogging and apparently only 8% of those blogs are political.
It is not necessarily about the blogger as much as it is about the audience who reads them; they want alternative and/or authentic voices and opinions, and they want to exchange it with theirs. On the whole, I personally believe they are more educated and more interested to find out about the heart of the matter than the average joe who just reads his local newspaper and only watches his local news.
So you can tell’m that next time it comes up!ha!
Mahmood,
I agree with your remark that you have more credibility when you fully disclose your identity and also that such full disclosure carries risks. Of course, you live in a particularly high risk locale for voicing a dissenting opinion, but that threat exists in a milder form here in the US as well.
For example, Michelle Malkin commonly attracts extremists from the Left who abuse her in the most vile way. A week ago, she published a flier for an anti-military recruiting protest that contained the names and contact info for the organizers. That angered the hard core leftists who ferreted out her home address and published it along with her contact info and photos of her neighborhood.
When you deal with the ideologues, they will try to intimidate you with implied or real threats.
On a lesser scale, many bloggers like me want to maintain a firewall between our personal & professional lives and our blogging lives. I don’t want some nutcake who disagrees with my politics to be calling me at 3 AM to harass me or to be showing up at my door or vandalizing my car.
Likewise, I don’t want my political opinions to be mixed up with my work life. The corporate world is full of politically correct people who will abuse their positions to harass people of a different political stripe. I want to make money at work, not converts.
Anonymity also gives you freedom to speak your mind. After all, who really is completely forthcoming among friends, family, and workmates? I don’t feel compelled to beat everyone I know over the head with my politics in real life. Some of my relatives are politically full of crap, but I don’t see the advantage in revealing this info to them, lest they carry a grudge for the rest of their lives. It’s very good to slip those restraints and let loose your opinions in full without it impacting your personal life.
Steve
Steve said
“Some of my relatives are politically full of crap, but I don’t see the advantage in revealing this info to them, lest they carry a grudge for the rest of their lives.”
So, does this make you responsible for their actions?
Mahmood,
As soon as Im finished with school, I have sworn to travel the world HARDCODE this time around, and I will HAVE to drop by your corner of the the world and create a ruckus. 😉
Mahmood, was this talk given in Arabic or English?
-Ibn
Looking forward to it!
The talk was a mixture of both, and both languages were really interchangeable in an almost subconscious level!
Mahmoud: It’s too bad there weren’t more bloggers there; I know the feeling of being bombarded with the same ol’sht from mainstream journalists who just don’t get it. *sigh* So if I could have been there, I would’ve asked you how blogging has changed around these here parts in the last 2 years; not just in terms of the numbers (although that would be good to know), but also in terms of thematic issues, gender stuff, crosscultural stuff, differences between Arabic blogs and English blogs, how you can differentiate between commercial blogs and private ones (or even if that’s an important distinction).
And thank you thank you for your level-headed, insightful and entertaining summary of the events as they were happening! Where would be my head without you?!
I agree with Steve about the anonymity angle – it gives you the freedom to express yourself in ways that are restricted if your real name is known.
What I find fascinating and vital about blogs is the informed opinion that surfaces – with journalism, an event is reported then may be commented on in a comments column, which invariably has a political angle: a blog which reports the same event is likely to come from an individual standpoint and be coloured by the blogger’s own experiences, and is unlikely to toe any particular line, which gives it a lot more depth.
And blogs are so easy to use!
ByronB,
I second your opinion about the informed opinion that blogs present.
I took the mainstream media as gospel until I got into the military and could compare media accounts with intelligence accounts. It was pretty obvious that the MSM was partisan and uninformed. After I got my MBA, it was pretty obvious that most business and economic writing in the MSM was economically illiterate. And on some issues, the MSM is invincibly ignorant. I doubt there is one journalist in a hundred who knows what an assault weapon is, yet all of them editorialize on them in crime stories. There is never a story on aircraft accidents that does not contain errors immediately obvious to a competent aviator.
The problem is that almost no journalists have any expertise in anything except journalism. They are subject matter illiterate in most of the stories they write. Very few are interested in becoming experts in a subject and reporting knowledgeably about it. Most go into journalism to change the world, which is a high blown way of saying they want to use journalism to propagate their political agenda. So they use each story as an anecdote to further their agenda, cherry picking the stories to fit the larger political mosaic they are creating.
As bloggers, I think what most of us realize after a while is that everyone of us is knowledgeable, even an expert, on some topic. When we write on that topic, we can beat most journalists on their best days. When a news story flares up, it can draw a hundred knowledgeable bloggers who can outwrite and outthink the typical journalist and very often the very best journalists on that topic. The strength of blogs is assembling those voices quickly.
Steve
Will: “So, does this make you responsible for their actions?”
Well, Will, they haven’t done anything really harmful that I would need to intervene so it hasn’t risen to the level of terrorism.
For example, I have an aunt and uncle who were organizers in the Right To Life movement. They were always marching in anti-abortion parades. Worse yet, they would make their kids march with them. Sometimes they would make them carry little mock coffins. Their kids hated it. I’m not too impressed with parents who dragoon their kids to march along in their protests as if they had an independent mind and had come to the same conclusions as their parents.
My criticism came in the form of silence when they waxed rapturously about their exploits and gentle mockery when they could take it. I might enquire, for example, if the kids needed a new coffin as the old ones were getting dog-eared. When my aunt was arrested for picketing an abortion clinic I was going to ask her how the food was in the slammer but my Mom nipped that line of enquiry in the bud.
However, if they took their cause beyond peaceful protest and civil disobedience, yes, I would be responsible if I did not object. If they were taking photos of women going to abortion clinics and using them for harassment, as some nuts did, I would be responsible if I did not strongly object to them in person. If they caused harm to other people, I would be obliged to report them to the police.
Steve
I take your point Steve and concede that my remark was a little flippant.
I agree that anonymousness can be very liberating and also can detract from credibility if the reason for it is not obvious. The motives of the author are like food colour to water.
I think that the success of blogging is and will continue to be due to it’s immense diversity, responsiveness and adherance to the natural laws of selection. Caveat Emptor.
That’s entirely true. Blogs are a good mixing bowl. Generally, conservatives and liberals do not mix socially due to personal preference and Arabs and Americans do not mix socially due to geography. Blogs obliterate those barriers.
Steve
I am searching email and postal contact address of MP Jassim Al-Saidi who recently showned his concern about rising cost of living. I could not find it. I am an Indian national. Can I write him
Here you go, have fun and let us know how you get along.
Good luck!