Between Everyday Life and Political Revo PDF

Nuova Serie, XCI 1 – 2011
________________________________________________________
ORIENTE MODERNO
RIVISTA D’INFORMAZIONE E DI STUDI
PER LA DIFFUSIONE DELLA CONOSCENZA DELLA CULTURA
DELL’ORIENTE SOPRATTUTTO MUSULMANO
NUOVA SERIE, ANNO XCI, 1, 2011
BETWEEN EVERYDAY LIFE

AND POLITICAL REVOLUTION:
THE SOCIAL WEB IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Edited by
Armando SALVATORE
CONTENTS
Armando SALVATORE, Before (and After) the ‘Arab Spring’: From

Connectedness to Mobilization in the Public Sphere 5-12
Dale EICKELMAN, Media, Homeland, and Community in Islamic
and Area Studies: A Social History and Emerging Trends 13-22
Albrecht HOFHEINZ, Nextopia? Beyond Revolution 2.0 23-39
Eugenia SIAPERA, Bridge Bloggers in the Middle East 41-60
Charles HIRSCHKIND, From the Blogosphere to the Street: Social
Media and the Egyptian Revolution 61-74
Teresa PEPE, From the Blogosphere to Bookshops: Publishing
Literary Blogs in Egypt 75-90
Maha TAKI, Why Bloggers Blog in Lebanon and Syria?
Methodological Considerations 91-103
Enrico DE ANGELIS, Syrian News Websites: A Negotiated Identity 105-124
Elisabetta COSTA, Online Journalism and Political Activism in 125-138
Lebanon
Sarah JURKIEWICZ, Of Islands and Windows – Publicness in the
Lebanese Blogosphere 139-155
ARMANDO SALVATORE
BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’:

FROM CONNECTEDNESS TO MOBILIZATION
IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Old and new media in the ‘Arab Spring’
T he ‘Arab Spring,’ which started in Tunisia at the end of 2010 but fully
erupted through the Egyptian revolutionary events of January and Febru-
ary 2011, has had the merit of triggering a set of interrogations not only con-
cerning the role of ‘new’ media in the revolutions, but also and more broadly on
the key question of how to transform the connectedness built among people
through communication forums and media into a sustained political mobiliza-
tion.
No doubt the role of new media in the uprisings immediately struck actors
and observers alike, at the evident risk of overestimating their impact. The revo-
lution has been dubbed the revolution of the ‘street’, but also the revolution of
šab…b al-feisbuk (‘the youth of Facebook’), and, not least, the revolution of al-
Jazeera. Neither should we neglect the role of literature, movies and TV serials.
The Yacubian Building, originally a novel by bestselling author Alaa al-Aswani,
and which made a splash in all three genres (the film was the most expensive one
ever produced in Egypt), depicted a few years ago in dramatic tones the corrup-
tion of several layers of Egyptian society and especially of a crucial component of
the Egyptian bourgeoisie centered on the nouveaux riches, famously dubbed ‘the
fat cats’ after Sadat’s launch of infit…| (economic opening) in the mid-1970s.
They came to dominate the ruling party by building a sort of compensation
chamber of corrupted crony-capitalism supported by a diffuse state thuggery,
and were in more recent years epitomized by nobody less than the son of Hosni
Mubarak, Gamal, who became a candidate to his father’s succession as Egypt’s
president: an issue which the Egyptian public crudely but correctly dubbed
tawr†Å (inheriting). Not surprisingly Gamal Mubarak became one of the first
and favorite targets of revolutionary anger.
As reminded by Enrico De Angelis in his contribution to this collection, a
similar situation triggered off the revolt in Syria, whose initial spark was ignited
by the simple fact that some children copied on a wall a revolutionary slogan
that they saw on al-Jazeera, likely taken from an Egyptian graffiti: al-ša¼b ya¡na¼u
Åawratahu: ‘the people stages its revolution’. Clearly the image of the Middle
East surging to the attention of a global audience was this time substantially dif-
ferent from the familiar stereotypes retrieved by serial headlines on events usu-
Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 5-12

© Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino – Roma
6 ARMANDO SALVATORE
ally privileging extremism and repression, thus telling stories of political violence
without political progress. As stressed by Eugenia Siapera in this volume, while
official media and public intellectuals in the West have historically failed in con-
veying a dynamic view of the region, web activists and bloggers (particularly the
‘bridge bloggers’ interfacing, also culturally and linguistically, between the re-
gion and the wider world) have shown during the last few years a capacity to
perform better in creating and disseminating plausible narrations about the con-
cerns of people, and particularly of the youth, in the Middle East. Such recent
developments have increasingly shown that activism and coverage are strictly in-
tertwined to determine the success or failure of a public sphere. Not by chance
the so-called social web (blogs and social networks) has become the best incarna-
tion of the ‘foreign elements’ evoked by besieged dictators as the agents sowing
discord and subversion in a purportedly healthy and docile social body: an accu-
sation that does not (or no longer) hold even just as a caricature. Evidently the
role of new media and particularly of the social web in the revolutionary out-
break should be carefully weighed by looking at the growing importance of these
media in the everyday life of several social and political groups in North Africa
and in the Middle East.
On the other hand, one should shun the impression of the blogosphere and
of social networks as the agents of a sudden surge of virtuous public sphere dy-
namics. Unlike countries ruled by other authoritarian regimes, in Egypt a public
sphere of connectedness and discussion has been in the making particularly since
after the 1990s. In this decade the media arena became more plural than in the
1980s, i.e. during the first decade of Mubarak’s era, when state-owned TV sta-
tions and state-controlled newspapers held the monopoly on information and
tiredly chewed on government paroles. It is important to remind that this devel-
opment occurred in the long decade of the 1990s, only interrupted by 9/11,
when the ‘civil society’ wave spilled over from Eastern Europe to the Muslim
world and furthered hopes for democratization in face of the perpetuation of
various types of autocratic regimes, variably associated with the ongoing neolib-
eral globalization and then with the ‘War on Terror’.
The early enthusiasm for civil society as a panacea against corruption and au-
thoritarianism was clearly misplaced, not least because many of the same West-
ern governments and donors that were ostensibly supportive of the ideal where
in fact undermining it through the continued support of authoritarian regimes
or via aid policies that weakened rather than strengthened associative bonds of
basically spontaneous cooperation (Salvatore 2011a). Yet while the role of civil
society, soon to be identified with Western-certified NGOs, became less obvi-
ous, the classic kernel of the public sphere showed a capacity to revitalize itself.
Several newspapers saw the light especially in the late 1990s, mainly published
by young journalists. The watershed of the launch of Al-Jazeera in 1996 cannot
be overestimated: the new TV channel started to broadcast all the news which
state-owned TV did not give and, most critically, to frame them via the public
perception of the fading legitimacy of their governments. They did so also
through such innovations like online polls and call-in programs where the audi-
BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 7
ence could debate with the TV guests. Satellite TV impacted over time tremen-
dously on the entire spectrum of old and new media, also affecting internet and
the booming blogosphere from its beginning.
By the mid-2000, also pushed by the Iranian experience, some bloggers in
Egypt started to play the role of citizens ready to mobilize fellow citizens on
matters of common concern. They partly followed the lead of Al-Jazeera in de-
vising new forms of connectedness and participation, often culminating in what
has been named ‘citizen journalism’ (Onodera 2011). In so doing they often re-
sorted to different registers of colloquial forms of speech, sometimes paired with
a ‘global-ecumenical’ type of English, thus marking, as stressed by Charles
Hirschkind in this volume, a sharp distance from the language of all official ac-
tors in the public arena, a disconnection from ‘the system’ (al-ni©…m) as a whole.
It is worth stressing that also many young supporters of the Muslim Brother-
hood or of other Islamist groups showed their appreciation for this type of com-
munication. As a result, the divide between a secular and an Islamist camp,
which had been earlier shrewdly exploited by the Mubarak regime, started to
show an increasing porosity. As evidenced by Hirschkind, it was less a matter of
rallying the two main blocks of the opposition on a common program than the
even more significant move towards finding an overlapping language expressing
common resistance to the abuse and violence of the regime.
Seeds for a new transversal public reason were sown ever since, which were
to provide the basis of a common resistance by a ‘disfigured social body’. Blogs
became icons of this disfigurement. Footage on abuse of the population by secu-
rity forces projected visually the new tunes of a vernacular language often bor-
dering on registers of vulgarity, which however, far from scandalizing even the
most pious components of their audiences, were considered an adequate reflec-
tion of collective injury. Words regained their mighty sense as sounds of vio-
lence. At the same time, bloggers firmly kept the bar of their activities on a con-
ception of the ‘common good’ (ma¡la|ah ¼ammah) that resonates well with the
Islamic discursive traditions.
From everyday communication to political revolution

The question of the relation between everyday communication and political revo-
lution is not entirely new, but the coincidence between the eruption of the ‘Arab
Spring’ and the final stage of the parallel research projects that are bundled in
this issue of Oriente Moderno pushed us to raise the question of connectedness
and mobilization with sharper eyes and perhaps also with a new confidence in
the transformative capacities of socio-political actors in the region. By reviewing
at the beginning of this collection the increasing significance of media studies re-
lated to Islamic studies and the Arab world through the lenses of autobiographi-
cal materials, Dale F. Eickelman, a pioneer in conducting and promoting re-
search about new media in the Middle East, provides us the necessary historical
depth in discussing what between the 1960s and the 1990s began to be identi-
fied as ‘new’ media (from audiotapes to videotapes up to satellite TV and cell-
phones) and how people skillfully learned how to appropriate and use them even
8 ARMANDO SALVATORE
in spite of diffuse and enduring authoritarian rule. Eickelman reminds us how

he, a leading anthropologist of Islam and the Middle East, got drawn into new
media and public sphere issues and encouraged a discussion of the different ways
in which media studies and Islamic studies might weigh off and interpret the
impact of novel modes of communication on the inherited structures of religious
and political authority in the region. More broadly, this research trend has
helped reformulate the crucial question of how a public sphere can emerge and
take form even before the onset of any deep transformation of the political sys-
tem. In parallel, this is also the issue, on the scholarly side, of how individual re-
search trajectories and targeted institutional investments may affect the capacity
of sociology, anthropology and Islamic studies to capture and convey the mean-
ing of the ongoing transformations. Yet not all research can be promoted and
planned. Scholars should also learn how not to be caught by surprise.
To Eickelman’s deeper background and experience I wish here to add my
own, more recent, field-related incidents and insights. In one of my latest stays
in Egypt I was asked by a friend and fellow sociologist, Ahmad Zayed, at the
time Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, to give a presentation on
nothing less than the ‘public sphere’. This happened at the presence of col-
leagues and students on a sunny Christmas day, at the end of 2007. After lazily
pushing a few powerpoint slides showing commonalities and differences be-
tween public sphere dynamics in the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ (with the inevitable
glimpse on paintings of coffee houses from London to Istanbul), I concluded
with a few remarks on the potentially positive role of the social web, including
social networks like Facebook, a website I had just stumbled into and become
member of, mainly for idle curiosity.
My mentioning of blogs and social networks was met by my Egyptian col-
leagues, mainly fellow sociologists, with a sense of disarray, or even with an ill-
concealed outrage. My remark was taken by them as a further proof of the van-
ity of the latest Western justification of the idea of the public sphere as an arena
of democratization, based on the assumption that through a sheer cumulative
discussion and critique of authoritarianism and corruption key socio-political
changes can be affected. The most obvious and legitimate critique leveled at my
conclusion was: what is the merit of ‘chatting’ and so connecting powerless pri-
vate rooms if the public space par excellence, the street, is inaccessible for politi-
cal protest? Indeed what both Western and Arab media had started years earlier
to dub the ‘Arab street’ was ever more painfully away to be under the control of
citizens willing to manifest their grievances. Under the state of emergency exist-
ing since 1981 it was prohibited that more than five people publicly gather with-
out prior authorization. The security apparatus of the Mubarak regime appeared
at the time of my presentation as efficient as ever. After the lecture I was asked
by some other Cairo University colleagues, this time political scientists, to give
some seminars to further deepen the issue, but I declined since I felt that it
might be a losing enterprise: repression, torture and a tight security control, in-
ternationally legitimized by the fact that the Mubarak regime postured as a re-
gional bulwark against terrorism (and his regime equated almost every form of
opposition to it), was evidently drying up the terrain itself on which a public
sphere could thrive, by turning connectedness and discussion into tangible mo-
bilization.
Yet then, just a few weeks after my delusional performance on the potential
role of social networks in the public sphere at Cairo University, the ‘Facebook
girl’ took the center stage. As also mentioned by Albrecht Hofheinz in this vol-
ume, on March 2008 Esraa Abdel Fattah, a quite inexperienced activist, decided
to support a strike in a textile factory by launching a Facebook group that rap-
idly gained tens of thousands supporters among the mainly young Egyptian
members of this social network, who thus far had appeared to be busier with the
more futile applications available on it rather than with mobilizing people under
a common political banner. A feedback effect was induced among the most mili-
tant component of the internet activist and blogger community, who eagerly
joined the initiative. Good last, a broad coalition of oppositional groups and par-
ties cutting through the leftist-secular/Islamist divide jumped on the wagon and
on the key day, April 6, 2008, declared their support for the initiative. Going
much beyond the original intent, the mobilization on that day targeted the cor-
ruption of the regime and the deteriorating economic conditions of the vast ma-
jority of the Egyptian population. Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath
of the protest day the girl was arrested and the official press accused Facebook of
harboring an anti-national conspiracy. Nonetheless, the 6th of April group was to
become a crucial symbolic rallying point of all oppositional initiatives well into the
2011 revolution.
That the ‘street’ could not be conquered by the activities of social networks
alone was confirmed the following year in the Iranian case, with the unsuccessful
protests that followed the contested presidential elections of June 2009. Yet in
Egypt the balance was turned around in the mobilization that followed the bru-
tal murder of Khaled Said which occurred in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, at the
hands of two members of the Egyptian security forces. The event triggered off
an unprecedented momentum of popular mobilization especially among the
youth, the biggest and best covered one prior to the ‘Arab Spring’. Khaled Said
was a computer programmer who, on an early summer day, was working on the
second floor of an internet café in his home neighborhood in Alexandria. Two
officers from the Sidi Gaber police station entered the premises and brutally beat
him to death, also by knocking his body against the stairs of the building while
he was pushed outside to their car. Apparently he was killed for having posted
on internet sensitive footage showing those officers intent on sharing the booty
from a drug seizure.
After the death of what soon became the single most famous young šah†d of
the internet era in Egypt, his martyrized face was adopted as a profile picture by
a growing number of Facebook members. Numerous testimonies were collected
on various websites and blogs, which added to and magnified the impact of the
uninterrupted flow of denunciations of the previous years against the brutal ac-
tions of police and security forces. Now the circle between the web and the
‘street’ was finally about to close. Several public events were convened in various
10 ARMANDO SALVATORE
Egyptian cities, where long lines of young men and women, standing at a dis-
tance of several meters from each other (so as not to constitute a ‘gathering’ un-
der the Egyptian emergency law), lined up along the banks of the Nile or the
Mediterranean, in order to remember Khaled and his brutal murder, by simply
taking with them and reading a book of their choice. Mostly dressed in black, as
documented by a number of videos uploaded on internet, some took with them
a Koran, other many other books. Visibly girls with headscarf intermingled with
unveiled ones. It was an impressive demonstration of transversal solidarity and
common resistance.
New actors, fresh strategies

The effectiveness of the protest, despite numerous arrests, led Mona Eltahawy (a
journalist and activist of Egyptian origin writing from the US, who was on her
way to become a global spokesperson of the rebellion of the Arab youth against
their corrupt and violent regimes), to publish on August 7, 2010 an article in the
Washington Post in which she proclaimed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter
had become the new means of manifestation of political protest in the Arab
world. Eltahawy attacked those critics who dubbed such media platforms as
mere outlets for venting out the frustrations of young people in those countries.
She was sanguine in seeing in such dismissive criticism no more than the latest
version of an orientalist and ultimately racist image of ‘apathetic’ Arab masses, as
ever at the mercy of regimes that, while clearly anachronistic in terms of global
standards of democracy and governance, were considered as aligned with the
purportedly backward cultures of the majority of their populations. She stressed
that the silent yet massive protests against the brutal murder of Khaled Said
proved exactly the opposite trend, namely that the web activists were finally
able, after many of them had been fighting hopeless struggles and paying a high
price in blood, to conquer real public space (Eltahawi 2010).
At this juncture another character took possession of the scene, soon des-
tined to become one of the main personalities of the revolution of January 25,
2011. Wael Ghonim, a thirty year old computer engineer, since January 2010
head of the marketing division for Google Middle East and North Africa (and
therefore a young rich professional), in the wake of the June 2010 events moved
rapidly towards becoming one of the most popular web activists in Egypt while
working from his home in Dubai. After the assassination of Khaled Said he
launched a blog and a twin Facebook page, each with a double name: El Shaheed
(‘the martyr’), and We are all Khaled Said/kullun… ³…lid Sa¼†d.This page gath-
ered evidence on assassinations and other violence and abuses perpetrated by se-
curity forces (as well as protests against them), and it did so also by aggregating
pre-existing materials found on scattered blogs. Wael Ghonim returned to Egypt
to participate in the mounting protests during the month of January 2011 with
the excuse to take a vacation from his work for Google in Dubai. He was among
the several dozens of web activists that the Egyptian security forces arrested in
the night between January 27 and 28, on the eve of the ‘Friday of rage’ in which
the protest swept through the streets of Egyptian urban centers and the security
forces killed hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young people. Detained for 11

days at an undisclosed location, in a subsequent interview after his release he
stated that the January 25 revolution was developing as Wikipedia, since each
participant contributed content, while the names of the contributors remained
unknown. For this reason he dubbed it ‘Revolution 2.0’. He concluded by
claiming not to be a hero, for the simple reason that no one can be the hero of a
similar revolution.
Such statements, which he made in the 60 Minutes TV show with Harry
Smith (see the article of Hofheinz in this volume), followed a quite dramatic in-
terview on a popular private Egyptian satellite TV channel (Dream TV): such
appearances reveal a singular combination of intellectual ingenuousness and po-
litical ingenuity by a fine knower of the technical, rather than political potential
of social media who happened to be, almost in spite of himself, a revolutionary
activist. No surprise that his role in the revolution was quickly wrapped in a
thick curtain of conspiracy theory, this time spun less by Egyptian authorities
than among global media scholars and activists. The event, the protagonist and
the responses speak new meaning to established patterns of representing intellec-
tual authority in the region. This is reflected by the way the probably most fa-
mous (self-appointed or otherwise) speaker for ‘European Muslims’ whom the
University of Oxford in 2009 called to a chair endowed by media-savvy Qatari
institutions, Tariq Ramadan, reacted to the event. Whether he was thinking of
Wael Ghonim or not, in a key-note speech he gave at the American University
of Beirut in early April 2011 Ramadan espoused the thesis that the revolution
had been steered by social media manipulated from outside Egypt. One was in-
evitably reminded of the allegations, during the days of the uprising in Egypt, of
former head of intelligence and, for just a few days, vice-president Omar Sulay-
man, who stated that ‘foreign elements’ were behind the revolt: a weak yet famil-
iar pattern of official propaganda variably staged, in the following weeks and
months, by the rulers of such countries like Libya and Syria.
Yet apart from the inevitable focus on (and initial puzzle with) the ‘Arab
Spring’ and the much too easy rhetoric on the ‘Revolution 2.0’, the longer se-
quence of events shows that in just two years, between April 6, 2008 and June 6,
2010, on the hard ground of politics occurred what my Egyptian colleagues and
I could neither predict nor hope for in December 2007: virtual and public
spaces came into a mutual synergy and produced a formidable potential for mo-
bilizing a broad variety of actors; a mobilization that, though costing a certain
loss in terms of the kind of ‘political subjectivity’ that was typical of earlier revo-
lutions of the modern and contemporary eras (Salvatore 2011b), seems to fulfill
in unexpected ways the promises the public sphere (Salvatore 2007). The imme-
diate sparks of revolution, namely socio-economic grievances, are certainly not to
be associated with the web, but the preparatory work and the ability to transform
a rather passive connectedness into active mobilization are the outcome of a cu-
mulative activity in which no single activist can easily exercise a formal leader-
ship. This phenomenon also concerns those spheres where intense blogging has
12 ARMANDO SALVATORE
not (or not yet) been matched by revolutionary outbursts, as shown by the con-
tributions of Maha Taki and Sarah Jurkiewicz in this volume.
From the raw language and violence-exposing footage of the blogosphere run
by enthusiastic activists and targeting the crimes of the security forces (well doc-
umented by the contribution of Charles Hirschkind in this volume) to the more
subdued yet also ritualized and often carnivalesque atmosphere of Facebook (Ra-
himi 2011), creating connectivity between young people whose participatory ac-
tivism is rather latent, a new public sphere with an unexpected revolutionary po-
tential has emerged to world attention and has become the epicenter of a new
internationalism. An important collateral effect in the short term and on the
global level has been a growing solidarity between the young activists of the ‘Ar-
ab Spring’ and several young scholars around the world who have voiced and
echoed worldwide the protest slogans in the decisive days of the revolution, dur-
ing which access to the internet had been blocked by the Egyptian regime. This
has been a living example of ‘critical networking’, now providing a precious crit-
ical window to area studies and Islamic studies (Chambers 2011).
References
Chambers, I. (2011) “Cultural Studies, the Social Web, and the Analysis of Po-
litical Transformations”, paper presented to the workshop Between Everyday
Life and Political Revolution: The Social Web in the Middle East, Naples, 21
March.
Eltahawy, M. (2010) “In Egypt, Twitter Trumps Torture”, Washington Post, 7
August, p. A13
Manoukian, S. (2010) “Where Is This Place? Crowds, Audio-vision, and Poetry
in Postelection Iran”, Public Culture, 22, 2, p. 237-263.
Onodera, H. (2011) “Raise Your Head High, You’re an Egyptian! Youth, Politics,
and Citizen Journalism in Egypt”, Sociologica, 5, 3.
Rahimi, B. (2011) “Facebook Iran: The Carnivalesque Politics of Online Social
Networking”, Sociologica, 5, 3.
Salvatore, A. (2007) The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam,
New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
––– (2011a) “Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal
Connectedness”, Third World Quarterly, 32, 5, p. 807-825.
––– (2011b) “The Elusive Subject of Revolution”, The Immanent Frame, 16
February (available online at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/16/the-elusive-
subject-of-revolution/).
DALE F. EICKELMAN
MEDIA IN ISLAMIC AND AREA STUDIES:

PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS
There are decades when nothing happens,

but there are weeks when decades happen.
Attributed to V. I. Lenin
T he new communications media are transforming what it means to be part

of the global Muslim community (ummah) and the meaning of home. The
‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 is a visible and dramatic manifestation of changes in ideas
of person and society that have been underway for well over two decades. Like
many great transformations, the cumulative effect of shifts in the role of media
in society are more visible in retrospect than when first introduced.
The term ‘Arab Spring’ is an analogy borrowed directly from its 1968 ante-
cedent. The ‘Prague Spring’ began in January of that year, and the Soviet mili-
tary occupation crushed it in August. The ‘Arab Spring’ of more than 40 years
later may also be reversible – at least in some countries and in the short term.
Nonetheless, as Claude Lévi-Strauss might have said, the analogy is good to think
with (bon à penser). It suggests a family resemblance that spans historical epochs
and reaffirms the importance of considering the rapidly shifting role of the new
media and their implications for religion and community.
The ‘Arab Spring’ is occurring in the context of several key factors. For the
Arab Middle East and North Africa, 60 percent of the population is under 30
years old. In spite of declining birth rates since 2000, the proportion of under-
30s in the region’s population will remain high for at least another decade (Si-
latech 2009: 13). This population is under- or unemployed. Emigration has
ceased to be the safety valve that it was in an earlier era, and in the states rich in
natural resources, meaningful employment remains increasingly in short supply.
Second, the region is much better schooled. Since the mid-twentieth century,
access to secondary and post-secondary education has steadily risen throughout
the region. Mass higher education has enabled large numbers of people to talk
back in public to the political elite, or at least to imagine and articulate alternate
social and political realities (Eickelman 1992). Third is the greater accessibility
of the new media. Mobile telephones and computer use is now ubiquitous, and
the ways in which people can create networks of belonging have multiplied. Yet
the new media do not merely project reality, they become what Manuel Castells
(1996) has famously called ‘real virtuality’, in which digital images become not
just a channel through which the appearance of reality is communicated, but the
experience itself.

14 DALE F. EICKELMAN
The personal dimension

My direct personal experiences with Middle Eastern and North African media
began in 1966 with my first visit to the region. That summer, Cairo became al-
most silent when Umm Kulthum sang on state television, followed by a speech
by Gamal ¼Abd al-Nasser. Again in Cairo in 1966 in Roxy, the mixed Coptic/
Muslim quarter, the evening outdoor cinema in a vacant lot was a good for my
Arabic. Few people had televisions, but most evenings the cinema offered old
black and white Egyptian films, with any fez in the film rubbed out with cen-
sor’s ink. The fast-paced dialogue was too difficult for me, but a neighboring
photographer, a refugee from Port Said, gave me a stepped-down basic transla-
tion that I could understand. Younger members of the audience, familiar with
the film, talked back to it. Television in private homes and cafés long ago re-
placed the impromptu cinema of the quarter or village.
Also in September 1968, villagers in ¼Afaq in southern Iraq, regularly sat in
a café midday listening to a literate šay² read from the daily newspaper. Rural
Moroccans in early 1969 occasionally asked me to translate the ‘radio’ Arabic of
the main midday newscast into colloquial Arabic. These time-bound images
now belong to the past, replaced today by near-ubiquitous cell phones, pervasive
satellite channels, and in most cases a greater ease of travel or at least transna-
tional connections to friends and family.
Since the late 1940s, the older model of Oriental studies based primarily on
texts was gradually replaced by the more open structure of text- and context-
based Islamic and area studies (Eickelman et al. 2011). Many aspire for area
studies to realize their potential as complementary to the core academic disci-
plines including history, anthropology, sociology, and the emerging field of me-
dia studies. As member of a selection committee for fellowship proposals at a
major foundation in the early 1980s, I recall that social science referees from
some U.S. universities justified their candidate’s lack of knowledge of Middle
Eastern languages as inconsequential. In their view, languages and even history
were just a tool that could be picked up on arrival for field research.
Although this argument is not posed in equally stark terms today, this atti-
tude has not entirely gone away. In some academic fields, however, the conver-
gence of established disciplines and area studies is more pervasive. The confer-
ence in Berlin at which an earlier version of this article was presented in 20101
shows the benefits of dissolving the ‘great divide’ between the social sciences and
Islamic studies. It is hard to imagine what a study of contemporary Islamic dis-
course or the importance of language would look like devoid of attention to lan-
guage and socio-historical contexts.
The ‘old eras’ of both ‘Oriental’ and ‘area’ studies was more time- and con-
text-sensitive than contemporary invocations of them allow. In the American
context, Ford Foundation funding led to the creation of the Foreign Area Fel-
lowship Program (1950-1966), jointly administered by the Social Science Re-
————
1 – www.bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de/events/medialisation/index.html, see also Schneider and Gräf 2011.
MEDIA IN ISLAMIC AND AREA STUDIES 15
search Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
In 1957, the ACLS-SSRC private initiative was followed by the U.S. National
Defense Education Act, Title VI of which was devoted to international area
studies and remains active, albeit with reduced funding.
The Foreign Area Fellowship Program initiative was as powerful in reshaping
international education in the 1950s as was a MacArthur Foundation initiative,
begun in 1984, to reshape international peace and security studies with a similar
reconfiguration of academic and policy fields. In the late 1980s, a MacArthur
Foundation director told me that the foundation put more money into recon-
figuring security studies in the U.S. than all other government and private pro-
grams combined. Largely as a result of this initiative, climate change, shifting
demographics, epidemics, nanotechnology, and even my field – characterized in
policy circles as ‘language and culture’ (Eickelman 2009) – began being seen as
necessary components to thinking about security issues.
Some of the new dynamics of area studies has come from outside Europe
and North America. A succession of inter-university Islamic and area studies
programs launched in Japan in the late 1980s gave a powerful boost to interna-
tional area studies in that country and beyond and served as a model for inter-
university cooperation among Japanese universities in the humanities and social
sciences. Other initiatives such as the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Mod-
ern World (ISIM, 1998-2008) in Leiden showed both the strengths and pre-
cariousness of combining language and area studies with disciplines; its life span
was only a decade. The Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
(www. bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de), founded in 2007 and operational in 2008, brings
together several leading Berlin-area universities and research institutions and in-
tegrates disciplinary with area studies. At the other end of the continuum was
the U.S. Social Science Research Council. Not long after the end of the Cold
War in 1991, the SSRC abolished its long-standing area studies committees.
This dissolution reflected the triumph, at least for the short term, of ‘rational
choice’ theorists in international studies. Just like early modernization theory in
the mid-twentieth century, a one-size-fits-all rational choice theory appeared
conveniently to explain all that needed to be known about global developments
without significant reference to language and culture (Eickelman 2000). ‘Ra-
tional choice’ theory, predominant in economics, assumes that individuals use
the most cost-effective means of achieving a goal regardless of its worthiness.
Thus any study of cultural values or historical understandings is immaterial. As
one rational choice theorist (cited in Cumings 1997) famously said at the time,
“why do you need to know Japanese or anything about Japan’s history and cul-
ture if the methods of rational choice will explain why Japanese politicians and
bureaucrats do the things they do?”
Socialization into academic fields

Few of us get our bearings by looking at a discipline or a field as it developed
linearly over time. Instead, each cohort of scholars and graduate students takes
their cues from the introductory lectures that their mentors offer to new stu-
dents (Ortner 1984). I got my initial bearings in anthropology from an under-

graduate teacher – a very good archaeologist – who in 1962 used his 1946 lec-
ture notes from a Harvard graduate course on “Culture Change” to teach a Dart-
mouth course with the same title (Eickelman 2010). The anchor reading for the
course was Malinowski’s posthumously published Dynamics of Culture Change
(Malinowski 1945). Later, in my initial year in anthropology graduate studies at
the University of Chicago in 1966-1967, Clifford Geertz brilliantly reproduced
his own introduction to the discipline as offered by Harvard’s Social Relations
program in 1950 (Eickelman 2005: 63-64).
I got personally interested in media studies before the field began to assert it-
self as a discipline in its own right. In the 1960s attention to the media figured
neither in my text-based Islamic studies training at McGill University or subse-
quently in graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. One
faculty member in 1966 advised me that my knowledge of written and formal
Arabic was a ‘handicap’ because intellectuals and schoolteachers, among others,
would give me a distorted view of ‘real’ culture as opposed to Arabs who could
speak only their local dialect.
Independently of academic work I had practical experience with media. In
1960-1961 I worked professionally in radio at an AM (amplitude modulation)
station licensed to broadcast only from sunup to sundown. One day a week I
took charge of everything for the entire broadcast day, and my working hours
clearly varied with the seasons of the year. The local police knew me, as I called
them regularly for local news, and I obtained a Federal Communications Com-
mission third class radio operator’s license so that I could do the engineering, at
least in theory. This license also required the ability to transmit and receive
Morse code at 15 words per minute, a skill today valuable for giving me practi-
cal experience in the communication habits of an earlier era in which messages
were usually reduced to the essential minimum, condensed at origin and ex-
panded on reception. News came over a telex at 60 words per minute and when
cable links or equipment broke down, or the telex jammed, I had to figure out
how to keep everything going until we went off the air at sundown.
When I went on my first visit overseas, to Addis Ababa in summer 1961, I
could understand the pre-digital technical setup at the national radio station that
I visited with an Ethiopian student friend in the daytime. When we returned af-
ter dark to the station to borrow some dance records for a party at the univer-
sity, we were chased away at bayonet point. There had been a failed coup d’étât
in December 1960, and the control of radio was a sensitive issue. On my return
to Dartmouth in 1961, one of my favorite courses was ‘Propaganda’, taught by
an academic who worked for the US Office of War Information during the Sec-
ond World War. The course taught me not only how press information was
prepared and filtered; it also taught me how to assess the limits of deception in
‘information’.
By 1968, when I made an initial to Baghdad – I had intended to do field re-
search in Najaf – my daily measure of the political climate was a walk past the
radio station in the upscale Karradet Miriam quarter, now better known as the
Green Zone. Were the guards from just two military services there, or more? Did
their rifles and submachine guns have ammunition clips or not? At the time,
Iraqi soldiers were normally not issued ammunition within the capital area.
In the Sultanate of Oman in 1979, one of the most secure building com-
plexes in the country was the Ministry of Information compound. One day a
Dhofari ex-rebel, who was then Director of Information – I have called him
Chief Censor in my field notes – invited me to the daily print media censorship
meeting. Local news in Oman was always delayed by a day. The workers were
Egyptian journalists and they looked terrified because their boss inexplicably al-
lowed an American join their meeting. They were acutely aware of the shadow
role of a British advisor who managed the country’s information (see Groueff
2003: 618-29). At least for that day, I got to see the internal government sum-
mary on what was going on that day, and the resulting news fit to print.
By the 1990s I began to present papers on the new media in the Middle
East, including Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination (Eickelman
1992) and others (for example, Eickelman 1999). Others I co-authored with
colleagues. Some of this work came to the attention of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion. Early in 1994 one of their senior officials called to ask me about my cur-
rent interests, and then I was asked how my work could be accelerated. I sug-
gested a ‘Noah’s ark’ form of workshop that would bring together a combina-
tion of religious figures willing to speak under Chatham House rules, censors,
human rights activists, and academics to discuss the possibilities and limits of
expression and dissemination of ideas in Muslim majority countries. At the
time, photocopy machines, fax machines, and audiocassette tapes were state of
the art. E-mail and Listservs were just beginning to have an impact. Al-Jazeera
Satellite Television was to begin broadcast only in November 1996.
I was initially cautious of the offer of Rockefeller fast track funding for a
conference at their Bellagio center. To allay my reserve, I was shown notes docu-
menting a high-level meeting of key people from several international founda-
tions held after the June 1989 Tianmen Square massacre. The initial goal of the
meeting was what could be done to promote democracy and human rights in
China. Someone raised the same question about the Muslim majority world.
Several participants commented that meaningful reform in such countries was
unlikely. A few participants strongly disagreed. One meeting outcome was a
Rockefeller Foundation project begun in 1993 – but unknown to me at the time
– that assessed how museums in these countries represented the past, contempo-
rary art movements, and women’s networks. My role, I suppose, was to assess
the changing media ecology in Muslim countries and its implications for poli-
tics, religion, and society. The proposal for the workshop held in March 1995
was the shortest I ever wrote and the fastest approved, and the outcome was rea-
sonably successful (see Eickelman and Anderson 1997). I always try to include
students in projects, so one each from Italy, Morocco, and Bangladesh. All now
follow academic careers.
In 1996, I visited Syria to learn more about publishing related to religious
topics. I went with a former ambassador and journalist from an Arabian Penin-
sula country, a |…fi© (memorizer of the Quran) among other skills, who enabled
me to do much more than would have been possible on my own. After an initial
unexpected middle of the night interview with the head of security for the Arab
Ba‘th Socialist Party – a Syrian friend later called this my ‘inoculation’ – I met
with other party officials, religious leaders, publishers, intellectuals, poets, book-
store owners who explained the difference between distributing books ‘above’
the table (authorized distribution) and ‘below’ it (unauthorized but tolerated).
Analyzing media is a highly collaborative enterprise, and it would not have
been possible without the cooperation with a large number of colleagues in
many countries. Al-Jazeera now stages organized tours, but in 1998, when I first
visited their studios, visitors were still rare. Due to a misunderstanding, an early
al-Jazeera advertising brochure from that year mistakenly claimed that I was us-
ing the Syrian broadcaster Faisal al-Kassem’s program, “The Opposite Direction”
(al-ittiÞ…h al-mu¼…kis) as the basis of a for-credit course at Dartmouth. I gave John
Burns of the New York Times the idea of how important the rise of Arab satellite
television had become. He got his ‘scoop’ on 4 July, 1999 (Burns 1999), a day
that Americans have the leisure (he said) to read long articles. He later explained
to: “We don’t use footnotes. But you’re the only Western scholar mentioned in
the article. That’s your thanks.” For a while, the article served as a calling card
that I could use to meet with other Middle Eastern media professionals.
Emerging trends
Formal academic writing often downplays the element of chance in how re-
search develops. Many opportunities come not just through calculation, but by
having the languages, discipline, and ability to work with others needed to un-
derstand new or unusual situations – including the rapidly changing media ecol-
ogy. With the advent of Web 2.0, anthropologist Michael Wesch explained in
late 2008,2 ‘mediation’ is more than content. It becomes a readily accessible,
compelling part of reality itself, forming communities and spreading ideas in
ways not always predictable. No one could have predicted the rapid growth of
the social media and their potential for reconfiguring ideas of community, faith,
and authority. The June 2009 Iranian demonstrations showed the power of
Facebook and Twitter to confront state authority, at least briefly. In return, state
authorities are not devoid of the skills and resources to locate and block even the
most dedicated of regime dissidents—in Iran in June 2009 and in the 2011 ‘Ar-
ab Spring’.
In collaborative work with Jon Anderson (Eickelman and Anderson 1999,
2003) and Armando Salvatore (Salvatore and Eickelman 2004, Eickelman and
Salvatore 2007), we have tried to pay increasing attention to the rapidly shifting
organizational and communicative structures by which ideas are spread and
movements take shape. The result is the enhanced interest in ‘new’ interpreters,
media, and the public sphere, with innovation occurring in increasingly rapid
————
2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&feature=player_embedded.
cycles (Anderson 2009). Practices conventional in the late 1990s and early twen-
ty-first century have already become outmoded.
The most profound transformations in the Muslim world today occur
through the actions of middle class professionals and religious intellectuals not
trained in the conventional religious sciences. They are taking charge of develop-
ing their faith and practices for a modern, even postmodern, world that is as chal-
lenging for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. We are familiar with fundamental-
ists, radicals, and secularists, but less so with intellectuals rethinking religion out-
side traditional boundaries, organizers shaping new movements, others working
quietly behind the scenes in support roles, and reformers facing the institutional
challenge of going public.
The focus on ideas and organizational forms has been well studied. Less well
known is the impact of the concrete sets of skills and aptitudes now being culti-
vated among members of the educated middle classes, religious and non-reli-
gious, clerical and non-clerical, in majority Muslim countries. These skills con-
tribute to mainstreaming Islam, the production of what is less exotic and there-
fore more normal and acceptable, which is itself a form of social and religious
tolerance.
Four major skill sets are associated with mainstreaming. First are intellectuals
who take charge of developing ideas and persuading large audiences in states
where organized non-governmental movements are strongly discouraged. In Syr-
ia, for example, intellectuals who act on their own, whether religious or secular,
have until recently been allowed considerable liberty to write provided that they
avoid criticism of the government. These include such thinkers as Muhammad
Shahrur, the secularist Sadek al-¼Azm, and the Kurdish-speaking Damascene tel-
evision preacher, Sa¼id Ramadan al-Buti.
The second set of skills is the overt, upfront organizing of people and com-
municating effectively. States, both liberal and totalitarian ones, depend on mid-
dle class professionals just as successful religious and civic movements do, in In-
donesia like in Morocco. State-sponsored efforts at religious dialogue, such as
the Saudi-initiated 2008 interfaith conference in Madrid,3 and the intrafaith
2004 ‘Amman Message’ of Jordan’s King ¼Abdallah calling for moderation are
organized and managed by middle class professionals,4 like non-state initiatives
such as the interfaith initiatives of the followers of Fethullah Gülen in Turkey
and elsewhere.5 Forums and associations that promote ideas and the exchange of
ideas, such as the Arab Thought Forum for Palestinians,6 represent such upfront
organizing. The civil society debate intersects with organizing for mainstreaming
Islam, but it is not simply identifiable with that debate since the focus is not on
civility in itself or democratization, but with the selling of the ideas and practices
of a certain way of putting faith to work in society.
————
3 – www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2008/0718/p04s07-woeu.html, accessed 30 April 2011.
4 – www.ammanmessage.com/, accessed 18 March 2010.
5 – www.fethullahgulen.org/, accessed 30 April 2011.
6 – www.multaqa.org/, accessed 30 April 2011)
A third related skill is working quietly behind the scenes to further an inter-
est or cause where weak forms of civic empowerment are linked to strong forms
of structure, such as in the United Arab Emirates, where major state-sponsored
initiatives are underway to use the Islamic studies curriculum of primary and
secondary schools to create a template for inculcating values of critical thinking,
gender parity, and religious tolerance. Likewise, the February 2004 revision of
Moroccan family law, the Mudawwanah, to enhance the rights of women, was
in preparation for years but enacted only in the wake of the May 2003 terrorist
attacks in Casablanca, an event that empowered the monarchy to undertake a
bold major initiative without significant opposition.
A final skill is that of publicity trumping secrecy. Turkey’s Fethullah Gülen
has inspired a network of schools, newspapers, and radio and television outlets
that convey to his followers a respect for educational excellence and religious tol-
erance. Publicity can overcome secrecy and suspicion, and in this way contrib-
utes significantly to ‘normalizing’ groups and ideas.
Mainstreaming, however, also exacts a price. The advocates of mainstream-
ing can be criticized for downplaying cultural specificities in favor of gaining
wider audiences. Opponents to mainstreaming can be tenacious. Nonetheless,
the gravity of discussion has significantly shifted with the factors discussed in
this article, including the spread of mass higher education, the growing perva-
siveness and ease of access of the new media, and the greater ease of travel and
communications in general.
The convergence of new media and the mainstreaming of Islam signals a ma-
jor change from below. It does not just emanate from key thinkers and religious
leaders. Resistance to such transformations can be uneven, contradictory, and
raw, but there is also growing explicit acknowledgment of such conflicting views
in public space and a wider tolerance for dissent and controversy. As the new
media develop, the significance of media studies as a distinct field of inquiry
arising initially from the margins of existing disciplines becomes more clear. To
paraphrase the Hungarian composer, György Ligeti (1923-2006; personal com-
munication 16 May, 2001), creativity comes through the endless repetition of
the familiar. Media studies will come to the foreground of social thought and Is-
lamic Studies as they persuade wider audiences in existing disciplines and the
general public why a focus on the media is important and that such knowledge
and the frameworks in which it is conveyed will influence work in one’s own
field and neighboring disciplines. The ground rules for how media studies will
take shape as a primary field of inquiry are the same as for older, established
fields. As Adam Pzreworski and Frank Salomon (1998 [1988]) wrote over two
decades ago, persuasive social science tells us something new, persuades us that it
is important to know, valid, and has the capacity to influence others in the field
and in neighboring disciplines and a wider public. Media studies at the intersec-
tion of area and Islamic studies are now poised to make such a contribution.
References
Anderson, J.W. (2009) “Blogging, networked publics and the politics of commu-
nication: another free-speech panacea for the Middle East”, keynote address pre-
pared for the conference “New Horizons: Obama and the Global Media”, Univer-
sity of Arizona, Tucson AZ, 23 January (available online at http://nmit.word-
press.com/2009/01/31/197/.
Burns, J.F. (1999) “Arab TV gets a new slant: newscasts without censorship”, New
York Times, 4 July, p. 1.
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Boston, Blackwell.
Cumings, B. (1997) “Boundary displacement: area studies and international studies
during and after the Cold War”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 29.
Eickelman, D.F. (1992) “Mass higher education and the religious imagination in
contemporary Arab societies,” American Ethnologist, 19, 4, p. 643-655.
––– (1999) “Communication and control in the Middle East: publication and its
discontents”, in Eickelman D.F. and J.W. Anderson (eds.), New Media in the
Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, p. 29-40.
––– (2003) “Isurâmu Chiiki-Kenkyû Purojekuto: Gurôbaru to Rôkaru na Shiten”
(Islamic area studies project: global and local perspectives), in Tsugitaka, S. (ed.),
Isurâmu Chiiki-Kenkyû no Kanôse (The Scope and Potential of Islamic Area
Studies), Tokyo, University of Tokyo Press, p. 243-255.
––– (2005) “Clifford Geertz and Islam”, in Shweder R.A. and B. Good (eds.), Clif-
ford Geertz by His Colleagues, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 63-75.
––– (2010) “Elmer’s Tune: How I Became a Social Anthropologist”, Unpublished
paper, 4 March.
Eickelman, D.F. and J.W. Anderson (1997) “Print Islam and civic pluralism: new
religious writings and their Audiences”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 8, 1, p. 43-62.
nd
––– and ––– (eds.) (1999, 2 edition 2003) New Media in the Muslim World: The
Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Eickelman, D.F. and A. Salvatore (2007) “Public Islam as an antidote to violence?”
in Jenkins J.C. and E.E. Gottlieb (eds.), Identity Conflicts: Can Violence be Regu-
lated?, New Brunswick, Transaction, p. 79-90.
Eickelman D.F., R.W. Bulliet, J. Bacharach, and I. Allon (2011) “General report:
Committee for the Evaluation of Middle East Studies Programs”, Jerusalem:
Council for Higher Education (http://www.che.org.il/template/de fault_e.aspx?
PageId=572, accessed 24 April 2011).
Groueff, Stephane (2003) My Odyssey, New York, Writers Advantage.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1945) The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race
Relations in Africa, London, Oxford University Press.
Manoukian, S. (2010) “Where is this place? Crowds, audio-vision, and Poetry in
Postelection Iran”, Public Culture, 22, p. 244.
Ortner, S.B. (1984) “Theory in anthropology since the sixties”, Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 26, p. 126-166.
Pzreworski, Adam, and Frank Salomon (1995 [1988]) The Art of Writing Proposals.
New York: Social Science Research Council (www.ssrc.org/publications/view/
7A9CB4F4-815F-DE11-BD80-001CC477EC70/, accessed 30 April 2011).
Salvatore, A., and D.F. Eickelman, (eds.) (2004) Public Islam and the Common Good,
Leiden, Brill.
Schneider, N.-C., and Bettina Gräf, (eds.) (2011) Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching
Change in Times of Media Convergence, Berlin, Frank and Timme.
Silatech Index (2009) The Silatech Index: Voices of Young Arabs, Doha, Silatech and
The Gallup Organization (http://www.gallup.com/ poll/120758/silatech-index-
voices-young-arabs.aspx).
Skovgaard-Peterson, J., and B. Gräf, (eds.) (2009) The Global Mufti: The Phenome-
non of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, New York, Columbia University Press.
ALBRECHT HOFHEINZ
NEXTOPIA? BEYOND REVOLUTION 2.0*
Revolution through the ever latest technology?
“I f you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet”. This is what
Wael Ghonim, Google executive and Facebook activist, told CNN on 11
February 2011, the day Hosni Mubarak resigned as President of Egypt. If you
want to know “what’s next” after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, “ask
Facebook” (Cooper 2011). Wael Ghonim’s statement is illustrative for the great
hopes for liberation and democratization that have driven much of what has
been published for over a decade now on the impact of the use of the internet in
the Middle East. These hopes for liberation and democratization have often been
cast in the mode of ‘revolution’, and a fascination with ‘revolutions’ in technol-
ogy has facilitated the impetus to discover the ‘revolutionary’ effects that tech-
nology might have on state and society. One of the preeminent journals in the
field, Arab Media & Society, was created in 2007 with the proclaimed goal of Re-
porting a Revolution (Pintak 2007). Granted, those who unreservedly believe in
the power of new media to change the world are mostly activists or journalists.1
But also much of the academic literature has oscillated between the search for
revolutionary developments and the admission that all too high hopes for radi-
cal, techno-driven political change have not been borne out. But this admission
has not killed the dream. It was rekindled in force by the ‘Twitter’ and ‘Face-
book revolutions’ in Tunisia and Egypt in January and February 2011, and cer-
tainly has not died despite the lack of revolutionary progress in Algeria, Sudan,
or China, to name but a few countries where ‘Facebook revolutions’ had been
scheduled after the Tunisian model.
The belief that ‘revolutions’ in communication technologies will lead to rad-
ical social and political change predates the internet, of course. I could mention
how television, back in the 1950s, was regarded as a harbinger of modernity
(Lerner 1958). And I could easily go back further, to radio, print and writing,
and it would be obvious to most that technological inventions have indeed had
————
* This article is a revised version of a presentation to the Seventh International Conference on
Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication, Vancouver, Canada, 15-18 June
2010 (Sudweeks et al. 2010: 187-197). An online version is being published simultaneously in
the International Journal of Communication, 5 (2011). I wish to thank the conference partici-
pants and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. The issue raised here has
meanwhile also been addressed by Lynch (2010) and Christensen (2010; 2011).
1 – Mona Eltahawy is currently one of the most eloquent among these; see http://www.mona
eltahawy.com.

24 ALBRECHT HOFHEINZ
tremendously important social and political consequences. But the term ‘com-
munications revolution’ really only seems to have gained currency in the 1990s,
with satellite television and the internet. Whenever technological innovations
have been increasingly dubbed ‘revolutions’, it became more and more common
to think of them as social and political ‘revolutions’ as well (Rheingold 2002). In
the Arab world, the satellite TV station al-Jazeera, established in 1996, became
the first emblem of this trend. Towards the end of the 1990s, with internet pen-
etration in the region creeping towards the one-percent mark, some placed their
hopes for rapid change on the ‘information super-highway’. But then the dot-
com-bubble burst; descriptions of the digital divide gained currency; and the in-
formation revolution lost its initial impetus. It appeared, by 2004, that we were
perhaps rather looking at “information without revolution” (Wheeler 2010:
193; Id., personal communication, 2004).
But change was gonna come. In 2005, blogging emerged as the new flame of
hope in the Arab world.2 After blogs in neighboring Iran had blossomed in the
wake of a state crackdown on the liberal press, and shown the potential of the
platform to undermine state control over information flows (Alavi 2005), Egyp-
tian bloggers took the lead in the Arab world by publishing reports on police
brutality (see also Hirschkind’s contribution in this volume) that not only
aroused international attention, but also led to a court case and the conviction of
two police officers for torture – an unprecedented event in the country (¼Abb…s
2006b; Anon. 2007).3 In a further step, bloggers were decisive in reporting
about a mass sexual assault on women during a religious holiday in downtown
Cairo in October 2006, with the police not intervening and other media keep-
ing quiet for three days (Al Husseini 2006).4 Eventually, this led to greater pub-
lic debate about sexual harassment, and in January 2010 a draft law on the issue
was submitted in the Egyptian parliament (Abou el-Magd 2010; Hassan 2009).
Across the region, governments demonstrated their nervousness by cracking
down harder on bloggers. Meanwhile, the “blogging revolution” (Loewenstein
2008) failed to topple a single régime, and by 2008 David Faris noted “a fatigue
with Egyptian blogging” that he attributed to the hyper-prominence of a few
(three!) bloggers which made it “difficult for new voices to be heard”.5
Again, however, a savior had already appeared on the horizon: “Social net-
working sites where 12-year-old girls trade make-up secrets have become breed-
————
2 – Even podcasting, the latest craze in 2005, was not spared the question, “Will podcasting
bring democracy to the Arab world?” “I think yes”, answered Mohammed Ibahrine (2005),
then a doctoral student of communication and political culture in Hamburg.
3 – The two officers were released in 2009 after serving a reduced sentence, and reinstated into
active service; an appeal against their reinstatement was turned down in January 2010 (al-
Qaransh…w† 2010).
4 – The story became public news after it was leaked impromptu on a popular satellite TV talk
show (al-¼ƒširah mas…½an, on Dream TV; cf. W…½il ¼Abb…s, 2006a).
5 – The three bloggers were Hossam el-Hamalawy (http://www.arabawy.org), Wael Abbas
(http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com), and Nora Younis (http://norayounis.com).
NEXTOPIA: BEYOND REVOLUTION 2.0? 25
ing grounds for revolution”, the co-editor of Arab Media & Society declared
(Pintak 2008). Facebook became “the next generation” platform and was re-
garded as the new way out that “might work better” than political parties for or-
ganizing social action, since allegedly it was more community-oriented, not least
because it reduced the transaction costs for group-formation (Faris 2008). This
new enthusiasm was ignited by what in Egypt became known as the ‘Facebook
Party’, founded, or so it was reported, by the ‘Facebook Girl’. Where traditional
political parties had failed, where blogging fatigue had set in, Facebook groups
were going to succeed, even if the participants were unaware of the momentous
change the researcher was uncovering: “revolutions without revolutionaries”.
“Esraa Abdel Fattah probably had no idea she was going to create a global phe-
nomenon when she started a Facebook group in March of 2008” (Ibid.). The
group6 – membership of which exploded to over 70000 in a few weeks, or al-
most ten percent of all Egyptians on Facebook at the time – was calling for soli-
darity with the 6 April strike planned by workers in Egypt’s largest public sector
textile company in al-Ma|allah al-Kubrà. The workers’ strike – the largest in a
series of labor actions that Egypt had witnessed for years – was suppressed by se-
curity forces; the ‘Facebook Strike’ – which had called on people to stay at home
– was interpreted as a success by eager commentators. A few critical voices
pointed out that it was not entirely clear whether Cairo streets were emptier
than usual on 6 April due to a sandstorm, combined with people’s fear of ending
up in confrontations with the police. The government was wary enough of the
new platform to arrest the Facebook Girl and push her into public submission.
Pro-government papers published an avalanche of articles denouncing Facebook
as undermining the good morale of the Egyptian people.
But activists themselves knew better. In particular, ðus…m al-ðamal…w† (the
blogger of 3arabawi) of the International Socialist Tendency pointed out that it
was grass-roots movement on the ground rather than a mouse click on Facebook
that accounted for the making or breaking of a successful strike (al-ðamal…w†
2008c). And he was proven right faster than he may have wanted. In the wake of
their 6 April euphoria, Facebook activists called for a strike on 4 May, President
Mubarak’s eightieth birthday. When that call went unheeded, research con-
cluded that “[t]he trouble with relying on past successes in social activism is that
it often does not work the same way the second time around” (Faris 2008). A
year later, in 2009, the ‘Facebook Revolution’ was declared dead: “Facebook ac-
tivism is now dismissed as useless at best, and the failure of the 6 April group to
engender a lasting political movement has come to symbolize the futility of even
trying” (Faris 2009). The ‘groups’ that were celebrated in 2008 as the Web 2.0
improvement on political parties due to the low transactions costs of forming
them were now derided as “engender[ing] extraordinary low levels of commit-
ment” (Ibid.). The prominent Egyptian blogger SandMonkey described Face-
————
6 – “April 6 Youth Movement” (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9973986703).
book activism, in 2009 as a “form of masturbatory self-congratulating cyber ac-

tivism that doesn’t really cost you any time or effort”.
Again, however, a new technology platform gave rise to “some hope”. The
failure of 6 April was only the “end of the beginning”, for Facebook was a mere
digression: the “focus on Facebook also appears to have missed the apparent
shift of online dissent from blogs to Twitter” (Faris 2009). Twitter had already
been noted in the aftermath of the 6 April 2008 events when an American stu-
dent, James Buck, twittered his way out of police custody in Ma|allah. “Twitter
Saves Man From Egyptian Justice” was the headline in TechCrunch, the world’s
leading blog on Web 2.0 technologies; CNN helped to spread the news to the
whole world (Arrington 2008; Simon 2008). Hardly anyone commented on the
fact that it was only the US citizen Buck, with legal help organized by his home
university at Berkeley, who was released from the police station – his Egyptian
translator stayed behind along with 42 others who had been arrested during the
demonstrations. Even the otherwise skeptical ðus…m al-Hamal…w†, on whose
blog news of Buck’s arrest were published two minutes after the original tweet
(al-ðamal…w† 2008a), excitedly exclaimed: “The Revolution will be Twitter-
ized”! (al-ðamal…w† 2008b).7 The dream of the ‘Twitter revolution’ (Micek and
Whitlock 2008) materializing in politics was rekindled first in Moldova (Moro-
zov 2009b), then in Iran in 2009. Internet guru Clay Shirky (2009) declared:
“[T]his is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted
onto a global stage and transformed by social media.” Here we have it again, the
“global stage”, the “global phenomenon” that Egypt’s Facebook Girl was said to
have created. But note that more than about actual events on the ground in
Iran, Clay Shirky was excited about how “the whole world is watching”, i.e.
about how Twitter allowed international media users the breathless feeling of re-
ceiving and forwarding minute-by-minute updates on unfolding events. Revolu-
tion here ran in danger of being reduced to a mere media event, while the actual
regimes were not revolved from power. While people in New York cafés were
forwarding tweets that gave them the thrilled feeling of partaking in a revolu-
tion, Iranian conservatives tightened their grip on power by using YouTube vid-
eos and other internet evidence to identify and arrest opposition activists. Critics
therefore concluded that the Twitter revolution mostly was America’s Twitter
revolution, or a boon to Twitter’s business plan (Forte 2009). Evgeny Morozov,
who (in spite of being a critic of techno-determinism and cyber-utopianism; cf.
Morozov 2009a) had been the one responsible for coining the expression ‘Twit-
ter revolution’ for the events in Moldova, subsequently became so disillusioned
that he published The Net Delusion (Morozov 2011a), warning that the Western
obsession with promoting democracy by digital means could backfire as authori-
tarian governments use the internet to hone their surveillance techniques, dis-
————
7 – Repeated, the year after, by Andrew Sullivan (2009) exclaiming with regard to Iran: “The
revolution will be twittered”.
seminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital en-
tertainment.
And then it happened. Again. A ‘Twitter revolution’ in Tunisia; a ‘Facebook
revolution’ in Egypt. And this time, it was for real. Presidents did leave, regimes
have been changing, even if grudgingly and all the while trying to preserve as
much of the ancien régime as possible. And while this was still ongoing, one of
the public faces of the Egyptian revolution,8 Wael Ghonim, updated the old
concept to its Web 2.0 incarnation: “This is Revolution 2.0. No one was a hero,
because everyone was a hero.” Like Wikipedia, “everyone” was collaborating in
the Egyptian “Revolution 2.0”, contributing in small or big ways, and at the end
of the day, “from just an idea that sounded crazy”, just like they had built “the
largest encyclopedia in the world”, people created “one of the most inspiring sto-
ries in the history of mankind.” Revolution 2.0 had “completely changed” a
country and a people that “for thirty years had been on a downhill”, where “eve-
rything was going bad”.
Yet, nothing was happening. (…) The reason why everyone was si-
lent was (…) the psychological barrier of fear. (…) And that psycho-
logical barrier of fear has worked for so many years. And here comes
the internet. Technology. Blackberry. SMS. It’s helping all of us to
connect. Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us
a lot, because they basically gave us the impression that, ‘Wow – I’m
not alone!’
And thus the Egyptian “everyone” showed that “the power of the people is
stronger than the people in power” (Ghonim 2011).
Wael Ghonim wasn’t just anybody. He was Google’s Middle East and North
Africa marketing director, and his detention and the emotional interview he
gave after his release on a popular talk show on Dream TV on February 7, 2011
turned him into a celebrity. In June 2010, he had been one of those who set up
the Facebook group We are all Khaled Said (see the article of Salvatore in this
volume) that quickly grew into the biggest Egyptian political protest group on
Facebook and became one of the most important public platforms mobilizing
for the January 25 demonstrations that marked the beginning of the end of the
Mubarak regime.9 His excitement about “Revolution 2.0”, his conviction that
“if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet”, is typical for
————
8 – I am using the term ‘revolution’ here because it has been adopted by the actors themselves,
and because it can be justified in its broad meaning of “any and all instances in which a state or
a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregu-
lar, extra-constitutional and/or violent fashion” (Goodwin 2001: 9).
10 – Kullin… ³…lid Sa¼†d (http://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed). Another important Face-
book page (although attracting considerably less ‘likes’) was “6th of April Youth Movement -
ðarakat Šabāb 6 Ibrīl” (http://www.facebook.com/shabab6april), where starting on 18 Janu-
ary 2011, Asm…½ Ma|f™© posted a number of videos calling for mass demonstrations on 25
January, videos that have been regarded as being one of the important mobilization factors for
the demonstration. See also Kirkpatrick and Sanger (2011).
many online activists. They are convinced that what they are doing is changing
the world in a radical, unprecedented way. They are looking back on 30 years in
which “nothing was happening”, and see that now, with their activities, with
their online activities, things are happening. They look back on the 30 years that
often is their own age, 30 years in which they grew up feeling that old régimes,
led by old men, were denying them every realistic option of real participation in
determining how their countries, and often their lives, were run. The old leaders
were posing as father figures who knew best, father figures who were protecting
their people from their own immaturity that would lead them into chaos if they
were allowed to rule, if unfettered democracy would be put in place. And for
those who were not convinced, the paternalistic regime had a variety of sanc-
tions in store, police brutality being just one of them. The 30-year-olds had
grown up beneath this “barrier of fear”, this |…Þiz al-²awf: “If I speak up, I will
be beaten up”. I could end up like Khaled Said. So the experience that using the
internet and Facebook to mobilize against police corruption and brutality could
be successful was a mighty one. It is therefore understandable that Wael Gho-
nim and many internet activists are profoundly sincere in claiming that it was
the internet that broke this barrier of fear, that it was the internet that had
brought them freedom.
A preoccupation with the ‘new’ and the ‘political’

But in observing and understanding this excitement, we shouldn’t forget that we
have seen high hopes and deep disappointment before, alternating in rapid suc-
cession. Remember how, in 2009, Facebook activism was “dismissed as useless at
best” by the very people who only a year earlier had hailed its revolutionary po-
tential? Remember how the man who saw a ‘Twitter revolution’ in Moldova be-
came convinced, a year later, that we were all in danger of falling victim to a Net
Delusion?
The fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian régimes has led to a fresh flurry of ex-
changes on the role of the internet, and in particular of the ‘social media’, in
these events. Cyber-skeptics Morozov (2011a) and Gladwell (2010) were de-
rided as hopelessly yesteryear: ‘See? Here is your Facebook revolution!’ The skep-
tics replied: “We never said that social media did not play a role; we just pointed
out that it is a mere tool, a tool that can be used by protesters and governments
alike, and where big brother may turn out to prevail in the end!” To which the
other side retorted: “But we never said that that social media alone can bring
about a revolution; it is a tool, but a highly important tool that changes the dy-
namics of what’s going on on the ground.” And so this debate continued for a
while between two sides that were partly working with simplistic caricatures of
their opponents’ arguments, ignoring the finer points made by the other side
(Morozov 2011b). To an extent, the debate between ‘cyber-skeptics’ and ‘cyber-
utopians’ reflects the yo-yo pattern of alternating hope and disappointment that
appears to be a characteristic thread in how we have come to look at media im-
pact in the Middle East. I see two kinds of problems with this:
The first one has been pointed out by a number of prominent media re-
searchers in a report issued in August 2010:
Do new media have real consequences for contentious politics (…)?
The sobering answer is that, fundamentally, no one knows [– because
to] this point, little research has sought to estimate the causal effects
of new media in a methodologically rigorous fashion, or to gather the
rich data needed to establish causal influence. Without rigorous re-
search designs or rich data, partisans of all viewpoints turn to anecdo-
tal evidence and intuition. (Aday et al. 2010: 5)
In other words, we haven’t come past the stage of hypothesis building. In the
absence of more systematic research, cyber-utopians and cyber-skeptics will con-
tinue to throw anecdotes at one another to demonstrate how effective or not so-
cial media are in bringing about revolutions. And so here, to put research about
the political effects of new media on firmer ground, we need more systematic
data. As Aday et al. (2010: 3) suggest, research should focus on five distinct lev-
els of analysis, investigating how new media may
(1) transform (or not) individuals’ attitudes and willingness to engage in po-
litical action;
(2) “mitigate or exacerbate group conflict”;
(3) “facilitate collective action”;
(4) help regimes better to spy on and control their citizens; and
(5) “garner international attention”.
The second problem that I want to point out, however, beyond this call for
more systematic research on media’s impact on politics, is precisely that most of
us continue to be preoccupied with politics, with the question, “Do new media
have real consequences for contentious politics?”. In these revolutionary times it
may sound strange to have to stress that this preoccupation with politics has
slanted our understanding of the role of the internet in the Middle East. If we
look back at the main focus of the research that has been published so far in this
area, we find that much of it was initially driven by a hope that the internet
would be a decisive factor in bringing about political change in the region. When
such change was slow to materialize, research turned its attention to the public
sphere. As Marc Lynch, one of the foremost Middle East media scholars, rec-
ommended back in 2007: “Rather than focus on whether blogs alone can deliver
democracy or a political revolution, analysts should explore the variety of ways
in which blogs might transform the dynamics of Arab public opinion and politi-
cal activism”.
But this focus on politics, and the quest for revolutionary effects of new me-
dia that is often underlying it, is limiting our perspective. The horizon of our re-
search gets limited by a preoccupation with the new, exemplified in ‘new’ tech-
nologies and ‘new’ media, and a preoccupation with the political. ‘Will the in-
ternet, will blogging, will podcasting, Facebook, or Twitter bring democracy?’ –
it is almost as if we are continuously evoking political utopia through the next
generation of technology: a ‘nextopia’, if I may borrow the expression from a
Swedish marketing professor (Dahlén 2008). Long-term developments reaching
far back into history, and private and personal dynamics tend to fall off the radar
in this view.
Taking serious the social dimension of social media

Due to the focus on political change, and the quest for political revolution, the
influence of the internet in the social and cultural domains has been much less in
the limelight.10 One finds occasional observations on how mobile communica-
tion and social networking threaten established models for appropriate gender
relations, and recently we have begun to see work on how literature (belles-
lettres) fares when published and consumed on the net. But overall, Walter
Armbrust’s (2007) plea has so far remained largely unheeded: “The last thing I
would like to see is a repetition of the sterile debate over the political effects of
al-Jazeera carried out in academic analyses of blogs.” An “old and familiar con-
cern for politics” structures much of Middle Eastern studies, including media
studies, and has come “at the expense of the rest of the content” that is being
communicated on the media. At a minimum – and still with an eye for public
politics – Armbrust called for looking at the internet “as a new phase in a long
evolution in hierarchies of authority” and to investigate its complex effects on
the social construction of authority in the region. These remarks are of prime
importance if we want to address what Armbrust termed a “stagnation in the
study of Middle Eastern media”.
What we need is not only to acknowledge but to take seriously the fact that
internet and social media are used for much more (and primarily other than) po-
litical activism or citizen journalism. While researchers dismissed Facebook after
the failures of 2009, the platform has been steadily rising in popularity. In 2010,
it became the second most popular web site after Google across the Arab world –
just as in the rest of the world.11 And all the revolutionary fervor notwithstand-
ing, it is primarily for maintaining and extending social relations and for enter-
tainment that Arabs go on Facebook – just like the rest of the world. To main-
tain and extend social relations and seek entertainment has been a prime reason
————
10 – A notable exception is Braune (2008).
11 – This is according to Alexa.com. In Dec. 2010, Facebook was the most popular website in
Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Sudan, and the second-most popular after Google in Maurita-
nia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain, the UAE, and Yemen. In Kuwait and Qa-
tar, it came third after Google and YouTube; in Saudi-Arabia, fourth after Google, YouTube,
and Windows Live. In Oman, it was pushed to rank six by the new Omani discussion forum
Sablat ¼Um…n; and in Syria, where it was only available via proxy from 2007-2011, it had ris-
en to rank 7 (up from 10 in February 2010). In Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Syria,
Yemen, and the UAE, its ranking had advanced since February 2010. The publicity around
Facebook during the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt gave a huge additional boost to its pop-
ularity; by June 2011, it ranked number one in Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt,
Sudan, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kuwait; number two after Google in Syria, Bah-
rain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen; and number three (after Google and YouTube) in
Saudi Arabia. In Egypt alone, Facebook user numbers jumped from five to over seven million
between February and May 2011, according to socialbakers.com. See also Eldon (2011).
for starting to use the internet long before Facebook; in the old days, it was
common to hear complaints that internet use was “80 per cent chatting”, or cli-
ché juxtapositions such as that while the West made good use of the net for
learning and business, Arabs were wasting it for entertainment (Fahm† 2006; ar-
ablibrarian 2007). Who did such dismissive ideas come from? It was people of
authority – parents, educators, ‘responsible’ journalists and researchers, police
officers, etc.12 My point here is not that the observation that a lot of people were
using the net for chatting and entertainment was wrong; it is the dismissive atti-
tude towards this type of more ‘harmless’ use. This is an attitude that attaches
greater importance to the ‘serious’, the public, the political than it does to the
private and the personal. It is an attitude that may be shared by people in au-
thority, activists in opposition, and political scientists alike. It is an attitude that
is betrayed even in innocuous statements such as in this quote from an Egyptian
blogger: “In most of other Arab countries blogs are personal not activist, Egypt
is exceptional”.13
Is this a correct description of the Egyptian blogosphere? I posit that it
would be more precise to say that in Egypt, the politically active bloggers have
gained more political attention and weight than in many other Arab countries,
but this does not mean that the majority of bloggers are activist. Courtney
Radsch (2008) must have realized this herself when she distinguished three
phases in the development of the Egyptian blogosphere: after experimenting
with the new medium (2003-05), activists exploited its full potential in particu-
larly propitious political circumstances (2005-06); when these circumstances
changed and the user base grew, the blogosphere after 2006 diversified and frag-
mented into a wide variety of ‘circles’ that included “citizen journalists, non-
denominational activists, leftists, Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists, culture
and art enthusiasts, open source technology activists, English language political
commentary and strictly personal.” However, even as she acknowledged that
blogging became “commonplace”, Radsch continued to focus almost exclusively
on the activist part of the blogosphere, thereby cementing the skewed image that
the blogosphere is mainly about political and media activism.
And this is the problem. We acknowledge that chat, blogs, Facebook, not to
speak of mobile phones, are increasingly becoming ‘commonplace’ in the Mid-
dle East. But in our research, we largely focus on a small subset of activist users
while ignoring what chatting and facebooking do to the majority. We have often
despaired over the glacial pace of political reform (al-¼Umr…n 2008) but we do
not know nearly enough about what the internet does to the dynamics between
children and their parents, between younger and older generations, between in-
dividuals and authorities. Here is a quote taken from the world of literature to
illustrate what Facebook does far away from politics. A publisher complained to
BBC Arabic:
————
12 – Hofheinz, interviews during field work in Egypt and Morocco, 2002-2005.
13 – Egyptian blogger Abd Al Moneim Mahmoud, quoted in Radsch (2008).
Dealing with the new writers, there’s a problem with them. But do
the problems get addressed in the proper way? (…) In the old days
(…) one would go to the publishing house, and the director of the
publishing house, and if there was a problem, one would talk to the
director. And if one couldn’t come to a solution with the director,
then one would try and figure out what other options one had. But
now we no longer have any of that. Now everyone as soon as they
have a problem, they always go and put it on Facebook! (H…šim
2009)
A change of attitude: individuals vs. authority

And this is the crucial point. It is the attitude that changes, the attitude of indi-
vidual users towards authority, a disregard for the long chain of authority, for es-
tablished hierarchies that used to structure decision making. We find this atti-
tude all over the Arabic internet; it is deplored by people in authority and posi-
tively asserted by ever more young users themselves. In the realm of religion, to
take another field, more and more people are asserting – sometimes implicitly,
sometimes explicitly – their right to question and dismiss religious authorities.
Like for example the ‘global mufti’ Y™suf al-Qaraÿ…w†, one of the most high-
profile and popular Islamic scholars of our time, a position he owes not least to
the satellite TV station al-Jazeera (Skovgaard-Petersen and Gräf 2009). He may
be very popular, but his authority is in no way undisputed. “You mentioned Sh.
Qardawy’s statement. Who is Sh. Qardawy? Isn’t he one like many others, since
we have no clergy in Islam?” (Sameh Arab 2001). Such attitudes are increasingly
expressed as a matter of course on the internet. “Praise be to God – religion has
been established by God and not by al-Sha¼r…w† or al-Qaraÿ…w† (the two leading
Islamic TV scholars since 1980), and if al-Qaraÿ…w† and al-Ša¼r…w† err it doesn’t
mean that the whole Islamic community follows them in their error” (¼Abd al-
³…liq 2009). Al-Qaraÿ…w† himself bemoans a
tragic disappearance of wise and knowledgeable ulam…½ capable of
properly basing their arguments on accurate testimony from the
Qur½…n and the Sunna. Their absence has given rise to inexpert, un-
qualified religious scholars and to disingenuous clerics (…). Under
such anarchy anyone can sell himself as an Islamic sheikh, and such
men have begun to give a religious verdict without scruple even on
the most complex issues. (Polka 2003: 7)
Authority is threatened by increasingly being called into question, not by fellow
authorities but essentially by ‘everyone’. Kullu man dabba wa-habba a¡ba|a yata-
kallamu f† l-d†n – every Tom, Dick and Harry have come to dabble in things re-
ligious, as critics complain (Y…sir 2009). If everyone can read the Scriptures, eve-
ryone can use them to measure presumed religious authorities by the standards
of these Scriptures – in practice, that is, by one’s own understanding of these
standards. And this is what is happening in internet forums every day. The atti-
tude coming to expression there is one of no longer unquestioningly accepting
what authorities decide but to check for oneself, come to one’s own conclusions,
make one’s own decisions. And this attitude is fostered by the structure of inter-
action on the net. On the net, it is the individual user who is doing the selec-
tion, who is choosing what to see and what not, and choosing what to forward
and what not. This may be purely copy and paste, and if you will, completely
unoriginal, but this copy and paste is what is increasingly important in today’s
attention economy, and it does shape the cultural horizon of people, the horizon
under which they act. What news they read, what they discuss, what they like
and what they think is authoritative is increasingly informed by what links are
forwarded to them by their friends on Facebook or what flies by them on Twit-
ter. Therefore, these arenas are places that we need more research on as far as
Middle Eastern users are concerned in order better to understand the dynamics
going on there.
But we can already see some structural elements that are inherent in the code
that structures communication on the net. Since it is individual users who do
the picking and choosing and forwarding, they thereby become more important
elements in the construction and reconstruction of cognitive and normative con-
tent – content pertaining to their social worlds, to religion, to culture, and also
to politics. Even those who are not adding their own voice but merely picking
and forwarding, thereby become more important actors in the social construc-
tion of knowledge than the likes of them have been before. “I’m a maker – not a
taker” is a slogan spread by the “Life Makers” campaign of the televangelist
¼Amr ³…lid, star among the young. This widely successful campaign draws on
and aims to strengthen the attitude that ‘I can actually make a difference’, I can
change things, at least in my own immediate circle, and the first thing I can
change is the attitude that we can’t change anything anyhow. This attitude has
grown for years on internet forums, even among those who were not planning
revolutions but only calling for a greener neighborhood or a little more say in
their own lives. And of course this “yes we can change things” got a huge boost
in the early months of 2011 when political revolution actually did happen: even
though in the true yo-yo spirit of hope and despair, no one had expected it to
happen so ‘soon’.14
The weight of individuals: a generational evolution

Prior to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, I had urged us to take seriously
the metaphor of ‘the next generation’. For a breathless focus on the latest and
newest technologies, often coupled with scarcely taking into account historical
dynamics before the emergence of the ‘new media’ in the 1990s, works to ob-
scure more long-term evolutionary developments. These are developments that
happen over many generations, human generations. And what happens through
generational change certainly is reflected, and may be propelled, by new media
technologies, though it has many more dimensions to it (Hofheinz 2005). So I
————
14 – Cf. al-¼Umr…n (2008, 2011); Ma|f™© (2011); Haykal (2011).
had argued that what we need is to look beyond the latest in technologies and
beyond politics when it comes to assessing the influence internet and mobile
communication have in the Middle East. And even though we now have wit-
nessed a revolutionary moment, carried in part by social media, I still believe
that we need to look beyond the momentary excitement of ‘Revolution 2.0’.
Yes, it will be important to analyze how Facebook, SMS, and Twitter (not to
forget blogs, discussion forums, and landline phones) were used to organize and
mobilize demonstrators, to circumvent state control, and to enlist a pan-Arab
and a global public imaginary. But the heyday of revolutionary activism will
pass; everyday life will return, and internet use will become less ‘revolutionary’
again. When that happens, however, it will remain just as important to look at
what ‘everyday’ internet use does to its users: to look at what growing up with
the net does to the dynamics between younger and older generations; how it
helps to increase the relative weight of communication with peers, and how that
strengthens more critical or distanced attitudes towards established authorities.
Therefore, I would like to see more research investigating my anecdote-based
hypothesis that internet users, implicitly but often also consciously expressed,
develop a feeling of
1) being in greater control over what they want to read and look at;
2) being entitled to judge sources of information and authorities;
3) having the right to express themselves publicly, to be active participants
in opinion-forming.
If such attitudes are gaining ground, then we are looking at a development to-
wards a greater role (or at least: a greater self-perceived role) for individual users in
the constitution of factual and normative knowledge.15 This is structurally rein-
forced through the mode of interaction with friends and peers in social net-
works, including social networking sites, and it means that the social self-
evidence of established authorities becomes more volatile. Of course, authorities
have at all times had to construct their authoritativeness through social proc-
esses; they have had to negotiate and legitimate their authority and prove it to
the social groups that they wanted to influence. Today, the ‘crowds’ they need
to take into account are becoming larger and faster than ever before. In other
words, the general fact that crowds and authorities are in a mutually dependent
dynamics has not changed, but the weight of crowds, and of the individuals that
————
15 – And lest we forget: these individual users are not one-dimensional entities, but human be-
ings with multiple, negotiated, and performed identities. If we take this seriously, we need to
make analytical room for the fact that Muslims, for example – and this includes Islamists –, do
not only act as Muslims. This may sound like a truism, but in practice our research often fo-
cuses too exclusively on the religious dimension of actors in the religious field, and thus risks
to over-simplify a more complex reality. Take for example the 16-year old Egyptian who was
among the first to post a video of a TV talk show where the Grand Šay² of al-Azhar was con-
demned for wanting to forbid the face veil – previously, this young man had commented posi-
tively on romantic music videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/mastk333). This is in line
with young users on Facebook who have no qualms declaring themselves fans of both Mo-
hammed and Madonna.
make up the crowds, has grown. Thus, with the increasing spread of social me-
dia and mobile communication, the social networks of knowledge construction
are becoming not only vastly bigger and quicker and less limited by space and
time constraints than they had been before, but also more of a threat to estab-
lished authorities.16
A development with roots in the eighteenth century

Finally, when we look at what the internet does to the ‘next generation’ in hu-
man terms, we should not only have a longer breath but also a longer historical
perspective than has hitherto been the rule in internet studies in the Middle East.
Evolutions – which, as I am arguing, may be more important in the long run
than revolutions – take time. They happen over the course of generations. And
here I am not only talking about the future. I am talking about dynamics that
can be traced back over the past three centuries of Islamic intellectual history.
Indeed the deconstruction of scholastic hierarchies and the concomitant promo-
tion of a greater role for each individual believer is something that reaches back to
epochs long before the advent of the internet. It began to spread in earnest in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Muslim preachers (using, by the
way, the new technologies of the time, like pamphlets and vernacular language)
tore down a key concept that had dominated the conception of religious author-
ity for five centuries: that “the believer must be in the hands of his teacher like a
corpse in the hands of the one who washes it”, and therefore obey and comply
even if the teacher gives an order ostensibly in conflict with the prescriptions of
the Divine Law, the šar†¼ah. This was no longer acceptable to eighteenth-cen-
tury reformers who worked to spread the idea that every believer had the right
and duty to hold up presumed authorities to the standards of the Scriptures, and
therefore encouraged everyone to go back to the Scriptures instead of relying on
secondary sources. It dates from that time that growing numbers of people were
actually reading the Qur½ān and holding up the Scriptures against established
authority (Hofheinz 1996). Thus, what happens on the internet today can be
seen in part as a continuation of a much older story, where individuals are en-
couraged to judge authorities by a generalized standard that is accessible, in
principle, to everyone. Placed in such a wider historical context, the internet
may lose some of its ‘revolutionary’ mystique – but this may be just what is
needed to gain a more sober understanding of its impact in the Middle East.
————
16 – We must take care not to confuse the fact that the new crowds constitute a threat to es-
tablished, ‘self-evident’ authorities with a ‘flat’ nature of the networks constituted via social
media. In fact, internet networks like many other networks are generally regarded as ‘scale-free’
networks where, roughly, 20% of members get 80% of the attention, through ‘preferential at-
tachment’ of the many to the few who are most prominent.
References
¼Abb…s, W…½il (2006a) “al-Su¼…r al-Þins† ¼alà l-¼ƒširah Mas…½an”, waelabbas Chan-
nel on YouTube, 29 October (available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=XAFt E9ozk_0).
––– (2006b) “al-Qabÿ ¼alà ÿubb…¥ al-ta¼÷†b”, al-Wa¼y al-Mi¡r†, 25 November 2006
(http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/11/25/‫القبض‬-‫على‬-‫ضباط‬-‫التعذي‬.html).
¼Abd al-³…liq, Mu¡¥afà (2009) “A²¥a½a al-Qaraÿ…w† wa-l-Ša¼r…w†, wa-¡adaqa All…hu
wa-Ras™luhu”, comment on Šams al-B…r™d†, “³ala¼tu l-niq…b bi-na¡†|ah min
al-šay² al-Qaraÿ…w†”, Mu|†¥, 24 October (http://www.moheet.com/show_news.
aspx?nid=312009).
Abou el-Magd, N. (2010) “Sexual harassment law drafted in Egypt”, The National, 5
Jan. 2010 (http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100106/FO
REIGN/ 701059825/1002/NEWS).
Aday, S. et al. (2010) Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics, Washing-
ton DC, United States Institute of Peace (http://www.usip.org/files/resources/
pw65. pdf).
Alavi, N. (2005) We are Iran: The Persian Blogs, New York, Soft Skull.
Al Husseini, A. (2006) “Arabisc: Sexual harrassment [sic] and the Egyptian blogo-
sphere”, Global Voices Online, 30 October 2006 (http://globalvoicesonline.org
/2006/10/30/arabisc-sexual-harrassment-and-the-egyptian-blogosphere/).
Anon. (2007) “Egypt police jailed for torture”, BBC, 5 November 2007 (http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7078785.stm).
arablibrarian (2007) “¼Alà m…÷… yurakkizu mustakhdim† [sic] al-internet f† l-¼…lam
al-¼arab†?”, Maktab…t ¼Arabiyyah, 23 Apr. (http://arablibrarian.wordpress.com/
2007/04/23/).
Armbrust, W. (2007) “New media and old agendas: The internet in the Middle East
and Middle Eastern studies”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 39, p.
531-533.
Arrington, M. (2008) “Twitter saves man from Egyptian justice”, TechCrunch, 16
April 2008 (http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/twitter-saves-man-from-egyptian-
justice/).
Braune, I. (2008) Aneignungen des Globalen: Internet-Alltag in der arabischen Welt.
Eine Fallstudie in Marokko, Bielefeld, transcript.
Christensen, Ch. (2010) “The Mobile vs. the sedentary: social media and post-elec-
tion Iran”, unpublished paper presented to the Association of Internet Research-
ers, Internet 11, Göteborg, 21-23 Oct. 2010.
Christensen, Ch. (ed.) (2011), “Twitter revolutions? Addressing social media and
dissent”, forthcoming special issue of The Communication Review, 14 (2).
Cooper, A. (2011) “Mubarak steps down; crowds still at Tahrir Square” in Anderson
Cooper 360°, CNN, 11 February (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/
1102/11/acd.02.html).
Dahlén, M. (2008) Nextopia: livet, lyckan och pengarna i förväntningssamhället, Stock-
holm, Volante.
Eldon, E. (2011) “Facebook’s new growth in the Middle East: do more users mean
more protests?”, Inside Facebook, 17 March 2011 (http://www.insidefacebook.
com/2011/03/17/facebooks-new-growth-in-the-middle-east-do-more-users-ean-
more-protests/).
Fahm†, S…mi| M. (2006) “Ta½ammul…t f† istikhd…m…t al-internet f† l-¼…lam al-¼ara-
b†”, al-Id…rah wa-l-handasah al-¡in…¼iyyah, 18 June (http://samehar.wordpress.
com/2006/06/18/a618/).
Faris, D. (2008) “Revolutions without revolutionaries? Network theory, Facebook,
and the Egyptian blogosphere”, Arab Media & Society, 6 (http://www.arabmedia
society.com/?article=694).
th
––– (2009) “The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6 and the future of
electronic activism in Egypt”, Arab Media & Society, 9 (http://www.arabmedia
society.com/?article=723).
Forte, M. (2009), “America’s Iranian Twitter revolution”, Zero Anthropology, 17 June
(http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/06/17/americas-iranian-twitter-revolution/).
Gladwell, M. (2010) “Small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted”, The
New Yorker, 4 Oct. 2010 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/
101004fa_fact_gladwell).
––– (2011) “Does Egypt need Twitter?”, The New Yorker, 2 February (http://www.
newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-witter.html).
Goodwin, J. (2001) No other way out: states and revolutionary movements, 1945-
1991, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
al-ðamal…w†, ð. (2008a) “Updates from Mahalla: James arrested!”, 3arabawy, 10
April (http://www.arabist.net/arabawy/2008/4/10/updates-from-mahalla-james-
arrested.html).
––– (2008b) “The Revolution will be Twitterized”, 3arabawy, 24 April (http://www.
arabist.net/arabawy/2008/4/24/the-revolution-will-be-twitterized.html).
––– (2008c) “Some notes on the Mahalla Uprising”, 3arabawy, 27 April (http://www.
arabawy.org/2008/04/27/some-notes-on-the-mahalla-uprising/).
H…šim, Ya|yà (2009), Interviewee in “Who needs publishers?”, BBC Xtra (radio
programme on BBC Arabic Service), 15 November, minute 5:34-6:04.
Hassan, A. (2009) “EGYPT: Sexual harassment becoming a feast tradition?”, Los
Angeles Times, 1 Dec. (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2009/12/
egypt-sexual-harassment-becoming-a-feast-tradition.html).
Haykal, M. (2011) “al-Äawrah”, interview on al-Ma¡riyyah, 19 February (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_BWvS10II).
Hofheinz, A. (1996) Internalising Islam: Shaykh Mu|ammad Majdh™b, scriptural Is-
lam, and local context in the early nineteenth-century Sudan, dr.philos. dissertation,
University of Bergen (http://folk.uio.no/albrech/Hofheinz-Internalising-Islam-dr.
philos.version.pdf).
Hofheinz, A. (2005) “The Internet in the Arab world: Playground for political liber-
alisation”, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft / International Politics and Soci-
ety, 3, p. 78-96 (http://www.fes.de/ipg/IPG3_2005/07HOFHEINZ.PDF).
Ibahrine, M. (2005) “Will podcasting bring democracy to the Arab world?”, Arab
Blogs and Political Communication, Dec. 2005 (http://arabblogandpoliticalcom
munication.blogspot.com/2005/12/will-podcasting-bring-democracyto.html).
Kirkpatrick, D. and Sanger, D. (2011) “A Tunisian-Egyptian link that shook Arab
history”, The New York Times, 13 February (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/
14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?_r=1).
Lerner, D. (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East,
New York, Macmillan.
Loewenstein, A. (2008) The Blogging Revolution, Melbourne, Melbourne University
Press.
Lynch, M. (2007) “Blogging the new Arab public”, Arab Media & Society, 1 (http:
//www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=10).
––– (2010) “New media and contentious politics”, unpublished paper presented to
the 44th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, San Diego,
CA.
Ma|f™©, Asm…½ (2011) “M†¼…dun… yawm al-Þum¼ah ba¼d al-¡al…t f† kull may…d†n
Mi¡r”, YouTube, 26 Jan. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFdhE8KX m_g).
Micek, D. and Whitlock, W. (2008) Twitter revolution: How Social media and mo-
bile marketing is changing the way we do business & market online, Las Vegas,
Xeno.
Morozov, E. (2009a), “Texting toward utopia: does the internet spread democracy?”,
Boston Review, March/April (http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/morozov.php).
––– (2009b) “Moldova’s Twitter revolution”, Net.Effect: How Technology Shapes the
World, Foreignpolicy.com, 7 April 2009 (http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/
2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution).
––– (2011a), The Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Jackson, TN,
Public Affairs.
––– (2011b) [Twitter conversation with Zeynep Tufekci], 4 March 2011 (https://
twitter.com/#!/evgenymorozov/status/43774613213294592).
Pintak, L. (2007) “Reporting a Revolution: the changing Arab media landscape”,
Arab Media & Society, February (http://www.arabmediasociety.com/index.php?
article=23).
––– (2008) “The Princess and the facebook girl”, Arab Media & Society 5, (http://
www. arabmediasociety.com/?article=669).
Polka, S. (2003) “Da¼wa according to al-Qaraÿ…w†”, paper delivered to the work-
shop The Dissemination of Islam beyond and within Muslim communities: Theo-
retical, historical, anthropological and comparative perspectives, Beer-Sheva, Ben-
Gurion University, 10-11 June.
Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution, New York, Basic
Books.
al-Qaranš…w†, Š. (2010), “al-Qaÿ…½ al-id…r† yarfuÿu «fa¡l» ÿ…bi¥ «clip ¼Im…d al-Ka-
b†r» min wiz…rat al-d…²iliyyah”, al-Mi¡r† al-Yawm, 27 January 2010 (http://
www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=241815).
Radsch, C. (2008) “Core to commonplace: The evolution of Egypt’s blogosphere”,
Arab Media & Society 6 (Fall) (http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article= 692).
Sameh Arab (s-arab@menanet.net) (2001) “Re: To all Palestinian members of this
forum”, in: Focus on Egypt, 15 Sep. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/free-voice/
message/6692).
Sandmonkey (2009) “On Facebook status warfare”, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, 11
Jan. (http://www.sandmonkey.org/2009/01/11/on-facebook-status-warfare/).
Shirky, C. (2009) “Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran”, TEDBlog, 16 June
(http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php).
Simon, M. (2008) “Student ‘Twitters’ his way out of Egyptian jail”, CNN, 25 Apr.
(http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/).
Skovgaard-Petersen, J. and B. Gräf (eds.) (2009) The Global Mufti: The Phenomenon
of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, New York, Columbia University Press.
Sudweeks, F., H. Hrachovec, and C. Ess (eds.) (2010) Proceedings Cultural Attitudes
Towards Communication and Technology 2010, Murdoch, Murdoch University.
Sullivan, A. (2009) “The revolution will be twittered”, The Daily Dish, 13 June
(http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-revolution-
will-be-twittered-1.html).
al-¼Umr…n, A. (2008) “23 September, revisited”, Saudi Jeans, 23 September (http://
saudijeans.org/2008/09/23/saudi-national-day/).
––– (2011) “Egypt is free”, Saudi Jeans, 13 February 2011 (http://saudijeans.org/
2011/02/13/egypt/).
Ghonim, W. (2011) “Inside the Egyptian revolution”, TEDxCairo, 4 March 2011
(http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/04/inside-the-egyptian-revolution-wael-ghonim-
on-ted-com/).
Ward, W. (2009) “Social media and the Gaza conflict”, Arab Media & Society, 7,
(http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=701).
Wheeler, D. (2010) “Does the Internet empower? A look at the internet and inter-
national development”, in Consalvo, M. and Ess, C. (eds.), The Handbook of In-
ternet Studies, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 188-211.
Y…sir (2009) “Li-l-asaf”, comment on Rif¼at Raš…d, “al-Niq…b wa-l-¡a|wah al-isl…-
miyyah”, al-Mi¡r† al-Yawm, 18 October 2009 14:56 (http://www.almasry-al
youm.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=229709).
EUGENIA SIAPERA
BRIDGE BLOGGERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
T he Middle Eastern region is typically seen as characterized by political in-

stability, while its culture is still for the most part understood under the
prism of what Edward Said (1979) has referred to as ‘Orientalism’. Terrorist ac-
tivities, flag burning, veiled women, machine gun wielding children are some of
the images that mainstream media have associated with the region. Despite the
many attempts by public intellectuals such as Edward Said (1993) to redress this
imbalance, no significant changes have been marked. Since public intellectuals
have more or less failed, perhaps ordinary people may fare better. Indeed, recent
years have seen the rise of the ‘power of the people’, embedded in new technolo-
gies such as the Web 2.0 applications and so called social media, and show-cased
by the Time Magazine’s nominated ‘person of the year’ in 2006 as ‘you’. Within
this context, this article will look at the contribution of blogging in terms of re-
dressing stereotypes and building bridges between different cultures and religions.
Specifically, this article is concerned with the political and intellectual role of
a certain kind of blogger: the so-called ‘bridge bloggers’. In a 2008 article, Ethan
Zuckerman discussed the concept of bridge bloggers as mediating between dif-
ferent cultures and languages. Looking more closely at Middle Eastern bloggers,
this mediating role becomes crucial in two ways: firstly, in redressing some of
the problematic representations of the region, which are still caught up in Ori-
entalist thinking, and secondly, in providing a deeper understanding of the re-
gion’s politics and culture.
This article will attempt to examine the extent to which these blogs fulfil
their promises. In doing so, the first part of this article begins with a review of
the literature on Muslim and/or Arabic blogospheres. Further, it discusses the
concept of bridge blogging and its theoretical affinity with the sociological the-
ory of weak ties. The next section is concerned with a case study analysis of three
of the most popular bridge blogs. The concluding section seeks to draw all these
threads together and reach some conclusions regarding bridge blogging.
Research on the Arabic, Middle Eastern and/or Muslim blogosphere

The spread of the new media has given rise to high expectations regarding their
potential to democratize and open up closed societies, including some of those
in the Middle East. Theorists such as Anderson and Eickelman (2003), Bunt
(2000; 2003) and Mandaville (2001) argued that the new media shifted the cen-
tre of power within Muslim societies, particularly, though not exclusively, con-
cerning religion: both religious and political authorities within oppressive re-

42 EUGENIA SIAPERA
gimes have been challenged, criticised and often bypassed by various internet
users domestically and in the various diasporic centres. At the same time, the
new media provided an environment that extended and reframed Muslim prac-
tices, such as interpreting hadith, or networking with other Muslims (Bunt
2009). Bunt (ibid.) argues that the internet has led to a ‘rewiring’ of Islam,
which is often disruptive – for instance through the proliferation of jihadi dis-
course – but which overall can be seen in a positive light. In general, although
we cannot report any measurable and tangible political gains in most Muslim
majority countries brought about by the new media, it may be more broadly ar-
gued that they have created new opportunities for openness, for debate and criti-
cism, which will hopefully be followed by political change.
These hopes have been rekindled with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of
the social media. Most research here can be mapped along three dimensions. Al-
though there is some overlap, as most studies in fact make use of both empirical
and theoretical material, we can classify these studies on the basis of the empha-
sis or priority they place on each of these dimensions. First, the empirical stud-
ies, seeking to quantify and map the blogosphere (Etling et al. 2009; Zuckerman
2008); secondly, research that examines specific case studies and their more lo-
calized impact: most research can be placed here; thirdly, the more abstract, the-
oretical perspective that seeks to understand the contribution of the Muslim
blogosphere in broader terms – work such as Bunt (2009) and Siapera (2009)
attempt to assess the impact of social media, at a rather macro-level, on Muslim
identities, Islam, and its relationship to the ‘West’.
Specifically, in a research project, Etling, Kelly, Faris and Palfrey (2009) pro-
vided a network map of the Arabic blogosphere. They reported the existence of
about 35,000 blogs, of which 6,000 were closely connected in networks, which
corresponded with the different countries of the MENA (Middle East and
North Africa) area. They then hand-coded about 3,000 blogs and reported their
findings in terms of the various national clusters that developed. The larger clus-
ters were found in Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, while within each national
cluster there were smaller clusters classified on the basis of their themes and gen-
eral outlook. For instance, the Egyptian cluster includes sub-clusters, such as a
secular reformist one and one apparently gravitating around the Muslim Broth-
erhood (Etling et al. 2009). In Saudi Arabia, bloggers were more likely to blog
about personal matters, while in Kuwait, the blogosphere was divided into an
English and an Arabic-speaking one, with the former more likely to advocate
political reform and to support women’s rights. They further found that blog-
gers tended to be young and male, while the biggest concentration of female
bloggers was found in Egypt and Jordan. Some of the most interesting findings
of the study documented that blogging in the Arabic blogosphere is primarily
concerned with personal matters, using entries and posts as a personal diary. Re-
ligious themes are very popular, and they are discussed in terms of personal ex-
periences and reflections, while political themes, such as the role of the USA and
terrorism are often touched upon, but are not really dominant. The one most
BRIDGE BLOGGERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST 43
common political theme across this blogosphere is Palestine. Another popular

theme concerns the issue of human and civil rights across the region.
Notwithstanding the division of the Arabic blogosphere into national clus-
ters, this study identified a cluster consisting of bloggers mainly from the Levan-
tine region, including bloggers from Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.
These bloggers use English either exclusively or in addition to Arabic, and they
constitute one of the most political clusters of the Arabic blogosphere. They are
very critical of the US, although they are also quite supportive of it: about 18%
are critical while 7% supportive compared to the whole network’s rates which
stand at 4% and 1% respectively (Etling et al. 2009: 33). Etling and his col-
leagues refer to this cluster as a bridge cluster, because it provides a bridge from
the Arabic to the international blogosphere. Another multilingual, albeit smaller
cluster was the French/Maghreb one, which provided links to the French web;
this is also quite political and critical of both local and foreign leaders and terror-
ism, while supporting Palestine. At the same time, both clusters discuss cultural
and religious issues, as well as poetry and literature, themes which are common
across the Arabic blogosphere. Given their work in providing bridges to other
parts of the blogosphere, we may consider that these blogs are doing important
work in connecting different parts of the blogosphere and hence different cul-
tures, perspectives and outlooks.
In another empirical study, Ethan Zuckerman (2008) looked at the various
national or regional blogospheres that develop around the world, with the Ara-
bic one emerging as one of the clusters in the global blogosphere. While his
work is not as comprehensive as the study by Etling et al., it is highly suggestive
of a few blogging trends in the Arabic region. Firstly, despite their strong na-
tional and regional identity, many bloggers in the region blog in English, pur-
posely addressing an international audience. Secondly, their activities have often
been the target of state repression, with bloggers such as Tunisian Zouhair Yah-
yaoui having served prison sentences. Specifically, Zuckerman discusses the vari-
ous English-speaking blogs, which he understands as building bridges between
the Arab and the Western worlds, and reflects on a few examples. The English-
speaking Iraqi bloggers are often linked to by US bloggers, reflecting patterns of
political division: Baghdad Burning and Iraq the Model are linked to by left and
right-wing bloggers respectively (Zuckerman 2008). However, it is not clear
whether these blogs are actually read by a domestic audience, while in some in-
stances they have generated a heated and hostile debate. For example, in the af-
termath of the Amman and London bombings in 2005, a number of blogs host-
ed by Global Voices, a blog and blog content aggregator (see below for a more
detailed discussion) were confronted by a series of hostile reactions mainly from
the US, despite the fact that the Global Voices blogs were unanimously con-
demning the attacks.
While this strand of research seeks to describe and map the entire (Arabic or
Muslim) blogosphere, other studies more modestly focus on case studies and at-
tempt to reveal the specific micro-dynamics of blogging and its implications in
the context of the Muslim and/or Arab cultural areas. Although this strand is far
44 EUGENIA SIAPERA
too diverse to be fully described here, its results can be understood in terms of
two main dimensions: blogging and processes of identity formation, and blog-
ging as politics and alternative journalism. Concerning the first dimension, vari-
ous researchers, bloggers and commentators on Arabic and Muslim blogs have
pointed out the ways in which blogging and cyberspace have broadly created a
more liberal space for the articulation of identity, especially those identities that
may be repressed in offline contexts (e.g. Derakhshan 2005). For instance,
women bloggers are often thought to have found new ways of expressing them-
selves and to talk in public about issues that concern them (Hermida 2002). On
the other hand, Alexanian (2006) reports that her Iranian bloggers even when
residing in California still live by the social norms of Iran, and they also adhere
to them in online environments. One way for them to circumvent these norms,
especially talking about sensitive personal or political matters, is to post entries
that are vague or metaphorical or, in a more drastic way, to operate a blog that is
known to none of their immediate social environment (Ibid.). For Alexanian,
these findings indicate that Iranian identities constructed through blogging
stand in contrast with the American tendency to self-narrate and to disclose in-
timate details; secondly, that offline norms dominate online environments, as
Iranian bloggers were acutely aware of what they were writing and the kinds of
taboo subjects they should never broach. Rather than blogging constituting a
technology of freedom, it often helps reproduce dominant frames and norms. At
the same time, however, Alexanian’s blogger-respondents were quick to point
out that blogging is an activity that is potentially liberating in helping people to
learn to express themselves and open up – this in turn was linked to freedom of
expression and democracy. From this point of view, blogging is a politically rele-
vant activity.
But blogging in the Middle East has been more explicitly political in com-
menting upon and criticizing political leaders, decisions and even whole political
systems. For instance Rahimi (2008) offers a succinct account of the role of
online commentators in Iran and the brutal ways in which they are often re-
pressed. Indeed, the almost 20-year prison sentence imposed to Hossein Derak-
shan, the well-known Iranian ‘blogfather,’ in September 2010 is an indication.
Lynch (2007) discussed Arab blogs in terms of activism, in which blogging is
seeking to mobilize or coordinate political action. Lynch’s taxonomy further in-
cludes public sphere blogs which although not affiliated with any parties or
movements comment broadly upon political systems. Political bloggers often
bear the brunt of repressive regimes: in Egypt, in 2007 blogger Kareem Amer
was sentenced to three years in prison and was released in November 2010.
Wael Abbas was similarly prosecuted in March 2010 for exposing police brutal-
ity in his blog. In Bahrain, Mahmood Al Yousif found that his blog was blocked
for a considerable time only to be made available again in 2006 while blogger
Adbel Imam was detained by the authorities only to be released when bloggers
organized street protests (Douai 2009). Douai (Ibid.) concludes that the rise of
the Arabic blogosphere contributes to a shift towards citizen journalism in a re-
gion in which freedom of speech is not a given – there is often a high price to be
paid, but the availability of the internet and the accessibility of blogs mean that
they will remain a forum for dissent.
While these strands of research have considerably enhanced our knowledge
and understanding of the relationship between the blogosphere and the Arab
and Muslim world, we still need to consider them in broader, more theoretical
terms. What may be the long term implications of the rise of the Arabic blo-
gosphere? How might we connect developments in the field of the new media
and Muslim and Arab societies, cultures, and politics? For Bunt (2009), Muslim
bloggers, although comprising a very diverse group, may contribute to the ex-
pansion of the Muslim public sphere precisely through their mixing of the per-
sonal with the political. At the same time, blogging allows Muslims to reflect on
theological and social matters, which may then introduce important changes to
Islam more broadly. In this manner, blogging is an activity that both builds up-
on Islam’s ‘open source’, collaborative legacy, and expands it considerably.
While Bunt looks at the implications of blogging for Islam itself, other works
have looked at the wider implications of Muslim blogs. In my own work, I have
tried to locate the theoretical significance of the Muslim blogosphere in expand-
ing, negotiating or amending Western modernity in ways which accommodate
Muslim subjectivities. Specifically, a discussion of classic sociological conception
of modernity in terms of rationality, publicness and individuation alongside a
discussion of blogging practices revealed that Muslim blogging complements
rationality with emotions and re-orients it towards understanding rather than
instrumental solutions. In addition, Muslim blogging appears to extend the pub-
lic sphere towards incorporating private elements while remaining open to dis-
sent and critique. In terms of identity, Muslim blogging appears to initiate a
combination of politics of identity actualization with a politics of emancipation
(Siapera 2009).
On the other hand, the exponential rate at which the blogosphere (and more
broadly the social media sphere) is expanding along with the entrance of more
diverse users poses important questions for all three strands of research. With the
exception of the very extensive Etling et al. study, most research on blogs tends
to focus on a few case studies or examples and to draw general conclusions. To
what extent can we say that these findings and conclusions apply to the Muslim
and/or Arabic blogosphere as a whole? Do all blogging practices contribute to
the negotiation of the key terms of modernity? Can we say that all blogging
practices are equally important in terms of identity formation and politics? It
seems that the time has come for a more focused kind of research that will seek
to differentiate between the different functions of blogs, and identify their dif-
ferent contributions. The following section will discuss one blogging category,
bridge blogging, its emergence, justification and functions.
Bridge blogging and social network theory

The problem in developing a blogging taxonomy should not be underestimated:
which kinds of parameters should be chosen and why? Research here is confus-
ing. Krishnamurthy (2002) classified blogs according to two dimensions, per-
46 EUGENIA SIAPERA
sonal versus topical and individual versus community-oriented. This classifica-

tion produced four kinds of blogs: online diaries and support groups which are
placed along the personal-individual and personal-community dimensions re-
spectively, and enhanced column and collaborative content blogs found along
the topical-individual and topical-community dimensions. In another study,
Herring et al. (2004) classified blogs on the basis of their purpose: they found
that personal blogs were the most dominant form, followed by filter blogs (those
that comment on events), mixed blogs (serving many purposes), and k-logs
(knowledge blogs, on specific fields or knowledge areas). While useful, these
classification schemes do not offer insights on the specificity of the Arabic blo-
gosphere or the kind of political and cultural work different blogs do.
Looking at the Arabic blogosphere research, Etling et al. differentiated the
Arabic blogosphere in terms of the networks that emerged therein, mostly clus-
tered around nations. While Etling et al. describe the specific national blo-
gospheres, it would be more informative to see the kinds of functions different
blogs serve, especially those that are more politically oriented. Mark Lynch’s
work is perhaps more useful for our purposes. Lynch differentiated the Arabic
blogosphere in terms of the blogs’ political functions. He classified them as ac-
tivist, public sphere and bridge blogs. Activist blogs are associated with political
movements and use blogging to coordinate action, provide information and in
general propagate their cause – Lynch cites the Egyptian Kefaya movement and
its associated bloggers, who publicized protests when the mass media offered no
publicity and coordinated protest action (Lynch 2007: 13-14). Similarly, Bah-
raini and Kuwaiti activist bloggers publicized information on human rights
abuses and electoral corruption respectively. On the other hand, public sphere
blogs engage with political arguments and present informed political analysis but
do not get involved in organizing protests and other political activities. For
Lynch, public sphere blogs show the increasing sophistication and political en-
gagement of citizens in the region who are “determined to argue in public about
the things that matter to them” (Ibid.: 21). While both the activist and public
sphere blogs are oriented towards domestic politics, bridge blogs primarily ad-
dress Western audiences, typically writing in English, by providing information,
analysis and explanations regarding their culture.
While Lynch makes a distinction between these types of blogs, he insists that
these are not mutually exclusive, and many blogs move easily from one type to
other. But bridge blogging, which is the subject of this article, may in fact be
qualitatively different from the other types in that it works not only through the
substance and contents of its posts, but also through its structural position me-
diating between publics of different countries, regions, and cultures. But what
exactly are bridge blogs? According to Zuckerman, the term “bridge blogging”
was coined by Xiao Qiang, in 2004, and was made popular by Hossein Derak-
shan, the Iranian blogger currently serving 19.5 years in an Iranian prison, who
referred to Iranian blogs as “bridges, windows and cafés” (quoted in Zuckerman
2008: 48). These blogs are meant to build bridges to other cultures and to ad-
dress not only their friends and communities but to reach across to different in-
ternational audiences. For Zuckerman, the topics of bridge blogs are not impor-
tant – what is important is the bloggers’ intention to address a wider audience
and to explain parts of their culture to those who may be interested. Another
crucial feature of bridge blogs is language: bridge bloggers write typically in a
widespread language, such as English, so that they can be widely read by others.
Because they write in English, their posts are accessible not only to the world’s
media, but also to NGOs and foreign governments, thus providing an impor-
tant source of information.
Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger who was blogging in English during the 2003
phase of the Iraq war, was on the first or at least the most well-known among
bridge bloggers, as his blogs constituted an important source for Western jour-
nalists and publics who wanted to know what was actually happening in Bagh-
dad (Lynch 2007; Zuckerman 2008). The same orientation towards publics lo-
cated elsewhere is adopted by the Bahraini blogger Mahmood Al Yousif, who
explicitly seeks to dispel stereotypical ideas about the Muslim world, and to offer
an insight into the everyday life and culture of the region (Lynch 2007, see also
the analysis below). The work of bridge bloggers is therefore crucial as they con-
stitute an alternative and knowledgeable voice, and moreover, a more authentic
one as they come from and/or live in the region whose culture and politics they
are discussing. On the other hand, precisely because they write in English, they
receive a disproportionate degree of attention from Western sources, media and/
or governments. The issue here is that such bloggers may represent but a small
portion of their cultures, since they tend to be young, educated, middle class
men and there is no means by which we can discern that their writings represent
something wider than their idiosyncratic take on events in the region. Another
problem identified by Lynch concerns the ways in which such bloggers are ap-
propriated by Western media and bloggers. Lynch points out that bridge blog-
gers are linked to by like-minded bloggers and media, thereby reinforcing polar-
ized opinions. For example, conservative Western bloggers may cite and link to
conservative Middle Eastern bloggers, while more progressive ones link to lib-
eral, progressive bloggers. From this point of view, such blogs may be shifting
their function from bridging to mirroring, merely repeating rather than connect-
ing different voices. For Lynch, perhaps the most likely function of these bridge
bloggers is that they provide Western media with information about everyday
experiences as well as politics in the region. Indeed, given the widespread cuts in
sending correspondents to the region, more and more Western media depend
primarily on news agencies but increasingly also on bloggers from the region. Is
Lynch right to be sceptical of the actual bridging functions of such blogs? While
his arguments appear common sense, the idea of bridges as weak links in net-
works has been central in social network theory. Insights from this theory can
help specify the role played by this type of blogs, and also to generate ideas and
hypotheses to be tested empirically. Moreover, it may help us understand more
clearly the specific contribution of Middle Eastern bridge bloggers.
In 1973, Mark Granovetter wrote a paper in which he made an unexpected
claim: social networks benefit more from having weak rather than strong ties.
48 EUGENIA SIAPERA
This is because weak ties, connections to others that are not very close or closely
reciprocated, have the power to introduce us to new networks, which can prove
beneficial in many ways. While not all weak ties are bridges, all bridges are weak
ties. But to take things from the beginning, we know that social networks con-
sist of at least two people (nodes), who are connected together with some form
of link (tie) and exchange things, money, information and other kinds of com-
munication etc. (flows) (Barney 2004). Networks are characterized by homo-
phily, or the tendency to link to similar others. This is shown by the strength
and density of the ties connecting the various nodes within a network. Strong
ties are those which are multiple, dense, and reciprocal, thereby binding indi-
vidual nodes firmly to their network. If all networks comprised strong ties be-
tween their nodes, then the result would be that networks would be hermetically
sealed enclaves. How does information pass through these networks and how
might it reach other networks?
Here Granovetter’s work is instructive: he defines bridging ties between net-
work points or nodes as those ties that represent the shortest path connecting
these nodes. These bridges become more important if they represent the only
alternative for these nodes to be connected (Granovetter 1973: 1364-1366).
This implies, argues Granovetter, that the removal of weak bridging ties is more
damaging to the network than the removal of strong ties. In other words, an
important piece of information is likely to circulate via any or all the ties that
connect the nodes of a network. But if any two nodes are only connected by a
single, weak tie and this is lost, then the information will not be passed on. For
Granovetter, weak ties also serve important functions when it comes to social
cohesion: thus, strongly connected networks are likely to lead to overall frag-
mentation, as there will be nothing connecting them to other networks and so
they will operate autonomously, cut off from other networks. Conversely, net-
works connected through weak bridging ties are more likely to lead to social co-
hesion as they allow information and ideas to circulate more widely.
What does this theory tell us about the blogosphere and the role of bridge
blogs? Given the ways in which blogs function, i.e. through links, blogrolls, and
similar linking devices, it is clear that they could be considered as networks: that
is, blogs connected to each other form distinct networks within the broader
network of the blogosphere. The Etling et al. study did precisely this: it studied
the Arabic blogosphere as a network comprised of smaller, national networks,
including the so-called bridging networks, but did not actually present any in-
formation on the kinds of bridges they formed to other networks. Bridge blogs
in the Etling et al. study were understood as bridges because they wrote in Eng-
lish, thereby bridging through the linguistic and, potentially, the cultural divide.
Similar ideas are found in both Lynch (2008) and Zuckerman (2008). I would
like to suggest that the structural role of bridge blogs as ties between different
kinds of networks is crucial firstly for the dissemination of ideas and opinions as
well as information and for the creation of multiple channels for the diffusion of
ideas. Secondly, following this perspective, this diffusion of ideas and informa-
tion will eventually lead to a less fragmented and more coherent (potentially
global) social structure. If this is indeed the case, then we may consider these
blogs as very important in levelling out the differences and polarization between
Western and Muslim ideas on culture and politics, or at least in fostering an un-
derstanding between them.
Finally, this discussion seems to be questioning Lynch’s observations regard-
ing the bridging blogs in the Middle East. Lynch suggests that these blogs in fact
bridge like-minded people, while they may not be representative of the wider
culture and politics of their region or country. But Lynch’s criticisms stem pri-
marily from a consideration of the contents of these blogs and not of their struc-
tural position, mediating between different blogging networks. Thus neither Et-
ling et al. nor Lynch considered the structural position of these blogs, which, for
social network theory, is one of the most crucial parameters. Clearly we need to
understand both structural position and contents, as bridge bloggers’ work in
providing actual bridges depends both on the actual ideas they contain and on
their position to spread these ideas. The next section will conduct an exploratory
empirical study which attempts to study the role of bridge blogging and its im-
plications.
Exploring bridge blogs

How might we empirically study bridge blogs? Following the above discussion,
we have seen that they cannot be studied either on the basis of their contents or
on the basis of their structural position alone. Another issue here concerns the
extent to which bridge bloggers are aware of and consciously practice bridge
blogging. The problem is that in order to study bridge blogs we need to identify
them as such. A first step would be, following Etling et al., to look at those blogs
writing in English, and those explicitly defined as bridge blogs. At the same
time, bridge blogs are defined by their structural position. This leads to the em-
pirical question of the extent to which such blogs actually bridge between differ-
ent networks, and if so, which ones. A second kind of question concerns the
kinds of contents posted in these blogs, which would give us an idea of the kind
of ideas that get diffused across networks. This section will therefore begin with
an identification of some bridge blogs and the networks they are linked to, and
secondly with an identification of the main themes and categories that form part
of their contents. The first step is to identify a sample of bridge blogs for the
analysis. Since the task of this section is an exploratory analysis of the contents
and structural position of bridge blogs, the sample will be limited to three blogs.
This will allow a more detailed discussion of each, which in turn will be used to
reflect upon the theories and findings discussed earlier.
As previously mentioned, in their study Etling et al. do not actually refer to
specific bridge blogs, but in general consider all Arabic blogs written also or only
in English to be bridge blogs. Lynch and Zuckerman on the other hand, identify
some blogs as bridges, again based on their language and also, in some cases, on
their stated intentions. Starting from their work, we can identify specific blogs as
bridges based on the above understanding of bridging. These include Global
Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org), which operates as a hub for bloggers from
50 EUGENIA SIAPERA
around the world, including but not limited to the Middle East. The project was
launched by Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalist and former CNN Beijing and
Tokyo Bureau Chief, and Ethan Zuckerman. Global Voices explicitly under-
stands its function as providing bridges to blogs from around the world, and gets
its funding from the Harvard-based Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
Reuters, and the MacArthur Foundation. A second blog discussed by both
Zuckerman and Lynch is Mahmood Al Yousif’s blog, Mahmood’s Den (http://
mahmood.tv), described as “an Arab man’s attempt at bridging the cultural
gap”. Some of the other blogs referred to by Lynch and Zuckerman do not ap-
pear to be active, such as Salam Pax and Hossein Derakshan’s blogs. However,
looking at blogrolls and aggregators such as iToot, and through looking at the
‘about’ sections, it was possible to identify a further eight blogs that may be con-
sidered bridge blogs in that they write (also) in English, and consciously address
an international audience, with the goal either to dispel stereotypes or to increase
understanding.1 Technorati, a blog search engine and directory that developed its
own gauge of the authority or significance of a blog based on links from other
blogs, was subsequently used to enable a choice between these blogs. Using this
authority tool, Global Voices was first with 697 other blogs linking to it. Sabbah’s
report (http://sabbah.biz) ranked second (518 blogs), and Mahmood Al-Yousif’s
blog ranked third (429 blogs).2 The analysis will therefore focus on these three
blogs.
Global Voices
Global Voices is not a typical blog: it is an aggregator of themes, topics and posts
found in blogs from around the world. It understands itself as a ‘community of
bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world’. In oth-
er words, it collaborates with bloggers from various countries and regions across
the world, who then read and provide a daily digest for the readers of Global
Voices. Three editors-bloggers, Amira Al Hussaini, Hamid Tehrani, and Lova
Rakotomalala, read relevant Middle Eastern and North African blogs and pro-
vide short summaries of the main stories in English. The site provides an RSS
feed for readers to receive regular updates as they come in. In this manner, read-
ers from around the world, including journalists and other bloggers, can get
quick updates of the main topics of the Middle Eastern blogosphere. Stories are
primarily classified in terms of countries. At the time of the analysis, in early
December 2010, the main stories featured included the Wikileaks documents,
and their references to Iran and Lebanon. Reports from the Lebanese blo-
————
1 – These blogs include: http://beirutspring.com/blog/, http://saudijeans.org, http://afamilyin
baghdad.blogspot.com, http://saudiwoman.wordpress.com/, http://www.7iber.com, http://arab
womanblues.blogspot.com, http://madas.jordanplanet.org, http://sabbah.biz.
2 – This measure is dynamic: different days yield different results. The current results were
generated through a search on November 17, 2010.
gosphere discussed the revelations about Defense Minister Elias Murr who ac-
cording to the Wikileaks cables worked with the US and Israel against Hezbol-
lah in 2008. In general, Global Voices’ editors cite translated excerpts from blogs
written in Farsi and Arabic concerning topical stories, such as the Wikileaks sto-
ry, the planned student protests in Iran, Qatar hosting the 2022 world Cup, etc.
In addition, these posts are translated in various languages, such as French,
Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Bangla, and Malagasy. The site further includes a
scrolling page with updates about Middle East and North Africa, classified on
the basis of categories such as human rights, freedom of speech, war & conflict,
politics, cyber activism, children and so on. Finally, the site allows for comments
from readers.
Clearly the kind of work this blog is undertaking is very important, as it tries
to provide access to the various blogs of the region for a kind of audience who
would not know where to look. Its regular roundups of the Middle Eastern blo-
gosphere seek to capture the blogging opinion and agenda and deliver it to in-
ternational audiences as evidenced by the multitude of languages in which posts
are translated.3 The topics chosen include culture and politics, but also econom-
ics, technology, gender, development and a host of other themes. Posts can
therefore be classified both in terms of region or country as well as in terms of
topic or theme. There is no doubt that this kind of work is bridging work as it
makes connections between the world’s various blogospheres. On the other
hand, and notwithstanding the stated intention of Global Voices to strengthen
the voices of citizen journalists from around the world, it seems very likely that
Lynch was right in holding that this kind of work is primarily useful for journal-
ists covering these regions. This is because this kind of specialized and con-
densed information about these regional blogospheres is more likely to be of in-
terest to journalists and the media rather than to the general public. Indicative of
this is also the fact that the editors are not amateur bloggers or citizen journalists
but professional journalists, who then process and frame the regional blo-
gospheres from a journalistic point of view. The idea of RSS and regular updates
supports this mediating role of Global Voices. Thus, this blog may be a bridge,
in terms of its contents, but a very specific kind of bridge, from the blogospheres
to the media and from there eventually to the public.
It remains to examine its structural position and the extent to which it fits
with the overall theoretical scheme proposed by Granovetter (1973). In his fa-
mous article, Granovetter argued that bridge links should provide the shortest
path between two nodes and that they tend to be weak, that is, they tend to be
loose and singular rather than multiple. The empirical question here is, to what
kind of networks does Global Voices belong? What types of networks does it
bridge? To map the kinds of networks linked to Global Voices, we used a freely
————
3 – It should be noted that not all posts are translated in all languages, but they are translated
in at least one other language.
52 EUGENIA SIAPERA
available software, TouchGraph’s Google Browser,4 which allows the mapping

of blogs, sites or keywords on the basis of Google’s database, and which com-
putes the clusters that show the kinds of groupings that occur between these
blogs. This Java application works by feeding to it the URL of the website,5 after
which it provides a visualisation of the kinds of clusters associated with all the
sites linked to it. The graph below shows the networks or clusters associated with
Global Voices, each coded in a different colour. The methodological assumption
here is that Global Voices (like the other blogs under study) will be providing
bridges to these other networks to which it is weakly – i.e. with only a few links
– connected. An analysis of these networks will therefore give us a good idea of
the bridging work undertaken.
Graph 1: Global Voices Middle East and related networks6
The cluster in the centre is the basic network to which Global Voices be-
longs, and it is linked to sites such as Electronic Intifada, a well-known Palestin-
ian activist site, Norman Finkelstein’s site, as well as some media sites, such as
Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper site, CounterPunch, Al-Jazeera and a couple of
Palestinian news sites in English, such as the PNN site, and the Wafa site. It is
clear that this network is a pro-Palestinian one. But it is not the only network.
The network directly under the central one is comprised by Sudanese blogs and
media, such as Sudanese Thinker, Sudan Tribune and Sudan Watch. This is
————
4 – http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html.
5 – http://globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/middle-east-north-africa.
6 – To enable readers to follow the analysis I have uploaded coloured copies of the charts at:
http://www.slideshare.net/eugeniasiapera/from-bridge-bloggers.
probably the result of the fact that Global Voices Middle East is linked to Global
Voices Sudan. Under this network, however, there is another network, this time
comprising blogs such as Iraq the Model, Instapundit, Pajamas Media and others,
all of which are pro-American, or even conservative US blogs/sites. If this is the
case, then Global Voices provides a bridge between pro-Palestinian sites and con-
servative American media or blogs. Equally interesting is the last cluster, on the
far left of the diagram, which includes blogs such as Informed Comment by Juan
Cole, a US Professor and expert on Middle Eastern politics, TomDispatch, by
Tom Engelhardt, a Fellow of The Nation Institute, who blogs on America and
war from a progressive point of view, antiwar.com, ‘a source for antiwar news,
viewpoints and activities’, CounterPunch, a leftist political newsletter and so on.
Clearly, this cluster contains US-based progressive or left wing blogs and sites.
The cluster on the top left, contains a network of Jordanian blogs, such as
BlackIris, 7iber.com, 360degreeseast.com and Sabbah.biz, one of the blogs to be
examined here. It is worth noting that these blogs are also written in English,
and could therefore qualify as bridge blogs at least in terms of their contents.
The cluster on the top is linked to Global Voices Africa, with African blogs, such
as KenyanPundit, and MentalAcrobatics, two Kenyan blogs, BlogAfrica, a blog
aggregator by AllAfrica, ‘the largest electronic distributor of African news world-
wide’, Pambazuka.org, the site of Pambazuka News, a progressive African pub-
lisher. The cluster to the right links Global Voices Middle East to a network of
US sites, such as Twitter, CNN, Technorati, and Jeff Jarvis’ (the City University
of New York Professor of Journalism) Buzzmachine, as well as the Berkman
Center’s site, leading to the conclusion that this is a network of contacts for
Global Voices, relating to its ability to find funding and to promote its work. The
final cluster on the bottom right of the graph, is a cluster of Saudi blogs and
sites, such as Saudi Jeans, Saudi Woman, Arab News, American Bedu and others.
What kind of conclusions can we reach on the basis of this schematic repre-
sentation of the links and associations between Global Voices Middle East and
these clusters? To begin with, it is evident that there is a kind of bridging work
going on in structural terms, since Global Voices Middle East is linked to media
and blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, and also to other national re-
gional blogospheres, such as the Jordanian, the Sudanese, the more generally Af-
rican, and the Saudi blogospheres. There is little doubt that this work is much
needed, considering both issues of dissemination of information, openness, ex-
change of opinions and views as well as the issue of allowing marginalized voices
to represent themselves. On the other hand, however, the connections seem to
be between blogs already written in English, which, as Lynch has argued, already
have access to and are accessible by Western media and blogs. It is worth noting
that there were no links to any blogs written in Arabic, thus questioning the
bridging work performed by Global Voices towards the Arabic blogosphere. On
the other hand, this work shows the significance of the English language bridge
blogs and intensifies the question of representativeness posed by Lynch. A final
point here concerns the links to the political and journalistic websites: the links
to both sides of the political spectrum show that Lynch may not have been right
54 EUGENIA SIAPERA
in holding that the blogosphere is polarized with politically similar blogs linking
only to other politically similar blogs. This seems to be the most clear positive
finding of this analysis of Global Voices Middle East: that it is able to establish
connections between political blogs on both sides of the political spectrum and
bridge blogs from the Middle East.
Sabbah Report
The second blog to be analysed here is Sabbah Report, run by Haitham Sabbah,
a Jordanian of Palestinian origins, and one of the first Middle Eastern bloggers.
In common with other early bloggers, he comes from an engineering back-
ground and has been blogging about Palestine, war, human rights and cultural
and religious issues since 2000. In explaining the reasons behind his blog, Sab-
bah offers two main ones: firstly, the distorted image of the region in the West
and in their mainstream media, and secondly, the weakness of Arab media to
redress these distortions. For Sabbah, there are a lot of misconceptions concern-
ing the region and especially Palestine, and he blogs in order ‘to correct the
wrong perception’. Although the blog started as a personal commentary, it now
invites regular and ad hoc contributors to write stories that meet the blog’s re-
mit. For instance, in early December 2010, one of the contributors was Saeb
Erakat, Chief Negotiator for the PLO, with a post titled ‘The returning issue of
Palestine’s refugees’. The site runs a few low-key advertisements and has no oth-
er stated means of support, meaning that it is primarily sustained by voluntary
work. It is linked to all kinds of Web 2.0 applications, such as Facebook, Twit-
ter, Digg, and RSS, and it works on a Creative Commons License, which means
that its contents can be used and circulated freely, provided that the source is
cited.
In terms of the contents and their organization, Sabbah Report is not very
easy to navigate as it relies on a long continuous downward scroll with news arti-
cles and commentary. On the other hand, it has a searchable archive, where
readers can search by categories, keywords, authors or dates. The categories in-
cluded in Sabbah Report are multiple, ranging from action to Zionism, but in
general it seems to publish anything that is related to Palestine from a pro-
Palestinian point of view. Thus, while it refers extensively to the Wikileaks reve-
lations, its focus is on the implications of the US cables and the whole Wikileaks
saga on the Palestinian issue. Similarly, there is an article on the implications of
the restrictions on Gaza for the 20010 Christmas and New Year celebrations.
The category with the most posts is ‘regional’, and it includes posts on countries
of the region but also on the US and the UK. Within this category, Israel and
Palestine have amassed the majority of posts, with 1884 and 1806 respectively.
This is clearly a partisan blog, in support of Palestine, but is it involved in any
bridging work? Authors are both Arab and Western, implying that in terms of
contents this is more an international blog rather than a local one. On the other
hand, its regular posts on issues concerning Palestine may be an important alter-
native source of information for Western publics and media, assuming that they
have access to this blog. It is imperative therefore to examine the structural con-
nections of this blog before reaching any conclusions regarding its bridging
work. Graph 2 below shows the networks and blogs Sabbah Report is linked to.
Graph 2 — Sabbah Report and associated networks
As with the previous graph, the blog under study is at the centre of the
graph. The most direct links from Sabbah Report are to other pro-Palestinian
blogs and sites, such as the Electronic Intifada site, a blog by Dr. Mona El-Farra,
a physician living and writing from Gaza; Jewish Voice for Peace, a San Francisco-
based blog on peace in the region and run primarily by Jewish Americans; Pales-
tinian Solidarity, ‘a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli
apartheid in Palestine’; Free Gaza, the site of the movement linked to the Free-
dom Flotilla incident; Viva Palestina, a UK-based charity and others. These
sites, located at the centre and top of the graph, appear to form the main net-
work – with the sites at the top, representing the network linked to Free Gaza
(the largest pink circle). Directly under and slightly overlapping is another clus-
ter, with US-based pro-Palestinian blogs, such as Laurence of Cyberia (the slight-
ly overlapping circle), a blog by Diane Mason, a British-American former intel-
ligence specialist commenting on the Palestinian issue; Juan Cole’s site, also en-
countered above; Angry Arab, the well-known blog by As’ad Abu Khalil, a US-
based academic and blogger of Lebanese origin, and Muzzle Watch, a Jewish
American site in support of fairer US policies in the region. These sites are clear-
ly supporting Palestine, and exchange information, links and calls for action.
They are, in Lynch’s terminology, both activist and public sphere blogs, as they
both call for action over Palestine, and offer information, commentary and opin-
ion on the subject. But are they bridges? Looking at the cluster on the left, we
find the same Jordanian blogs encountered in the Global Voices Middle East
graph. Under this cluster, another cluster represents mainly progressive or left
wing media and blogs, such as Norman Finkelstein’s blog, Desert Peace, a blog
run by Steve Amsel, an American human rights worker living in Israel, Counter-
56 EUGENIA SIAPERA
Punch, and Haaretz. The cluster next to this is the network linked to Global
Voices, containing more or less the same blogs and sites encountered in the rele-
vant graph: Global Voices, Technorati, Buzzmachine, Twitter, CNN and the Berk-
man Internet Center at Harvard. Finally, the cluster on the right of the main
network contains a few local Middle Eastern blogs, such as Mahmood Al-You-
sif’s blog, to be examined next, Saudi Jeans, also encountered earlier, SillyBah-
rainiGirl and other English language Middle Eastern blogs.
The observations we can make here are multiple: firstly, although this blog is
doing some bridging work, it is mostly to like-minded sites, including activist
groups, (West-based) public intellectuals intervening in the debate, and inter-
ested individuals from the region, all supporting Palestine. Sabbah Report is also
linked to Global Voices and through this to some US media, such as CNN, but
there is little evidence for any other kind of bridging. Secondly, the local blogs
to which Sabbah Report is linked are in English, implying that there are few if
any connections to the actual local blogosphere. Thirdly, the similarity of this
network to the one of Global Voices Middle East shows a clear connection and
affinity between these sites (indeed Sabbah was one of the first contributors to
the Global Voices project), but it also shows an inner relationship between like-
minded blogs. From this point of view, the bridging work undertaken by this
site is not very substantial: it does not seem to connect disparate parts of the
blogosphere or to disseminate information more widely in the blogosphere. The
main kind of bridging work is between like-minded sites located in the US and
UK. Is this the case with Mahmood Al-Yousif’s site? This will be examined next.
Mahmood’s Den
This blog was created by Mahmood Al-Yousif, a Bahraini engineer, who is cur-
rently running his own film production company Gulf Broadcast. Mahmood’s
Den is operating with the stated purpose of trying “to dispel the image that
Muslims and Arabs suffer from” by seeking to “create a better understanding
that we’re not all nuts hell-bent on world destruction”. Mahmood’s Den does not
run any adverts, although it offers the possibility to advertise through banners
and side adverts for about $500 per month. However, at the time of this analysis
no ads were carried on this site. Secondly, unlike the other blogs examined here,
Mahmood’s Den does not have guess posts or other writers. It seems that Mah-
mood’s Den is a personal blog, run exclusively by Mahmood Al-Yousif. Finally,
the blog is making full use of Web 2.0 features, such as Facebook, RSS and
Twitter.
The blog is divided into five main categories: featured, miscellany, politics,
society, and blogs. On the top part of the blog, one can also find more targeted
information about the blog; there is also an archive, a category concerning Bah-
rain, its politics, personalities, but also touristic information, a category on blog-
ging, etc. On the right side of the blog, there are readers’ comments, but readers
can also see here the most popular and the most recent posts. More than the
other blogs examined here, Mahmood’s Den is concerned with cultural and so-
cietal issues rather than politics. While the Wikileaks revelations feature here as
well, there are posts on Christmas Carols, on Qatar hosting the 2022 World
Cup, and about Muharraq, Bahrain’s second city. The cultural and social posts
on the blog show a rich and interesting cultural and social life, not only in Bah-
rain, but also through comments on events and/or cultural exhibitions abroad:
for instance, in one of the blogs, there is a short video of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree
exhibition at the MOMA in New York, while another features an impromptu
dance at the Victoria harbour in Canada. At the same time, political posts tend
to feature Bahraini politics rather than the broader politics of the region. In ad-
dition, the blog has a lot of posts on freedom of speech, on the freedom to blog,
the silencing of the media in the region and in general about journalistic free-
dom. In addition, Mahmood’s Den campaigns for Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini
jailed blogger, held on general charges. It seems therefore that Mahmood’s Den
views its bridging work primarily in terms of disseminating cultural information
on Bahrain but also providing to Bahraini and other readers from the region cul-
tural information garnered from travelling abroad. In political terms, the blog
seems to be inner-directed, towards Bahrain, with occasional comments on other
political issues in the region, such as for example, Iran’s nuclear capabilities. On
the other hand, the campaigning for blogging freedom is an important part of
the blog, and in this, it may be looking to get some outside support for freedom
of speech in the region. How is Mahmood’s Den structurally linked to other
blogs? The graph below gives us an idea.
Graph 3 — Mahmood’s Den and associated networks
Mahmood’s Den is represented by the large circle in the middle, marked

with M. The cluster below and to the left is comprised by pro-Palestinian blogs,
such as Sabbah’s Report, PeacePalestine, FreeGaza, FromGaza, Lawrence of Cybe-
ria and so on. The cluster next to this contains other Bahraini blogs, such as
SillyBahrainiGirl, Emoodz, ButterflyBahrain, and others. The cluster on the top
right, contains a few Middle Eastern blogs, such as SandMonkey, and Egyptian
58 EUGENIA SIAPERA
blog, and Iraq the Model, but mostly it is comprised of US-based conservative
media and blogs, such as Pajamas Media, the Belmont Club (hosted by Pajamas
Media), Isntapundit and others. The few regional blogs that feature here are can
also be described as pro-American blogs. On top of the centre, the green cluster
contains a host of Saudi blogs, such as SaudiJeans, SaudiWoman, SaudiGazette,
AmericanBedu and so on. SaudiJeans, a blog that is also included in the networks
discussed above, is another typical bridge blog, as defined by Zuckerman: it is
written in English, by Ahmed Al-Omran, an MA student at the School of Jour-
nalism at Columbia University, who blogs on politics and freedom of speech,
human rights and women’s rights, but also with a view to ‘change many stereo-
types and misconceptions surrounding Saudi Arabia’. All the sites included in
this cluster are also written in English. Finally, the purple cluster is the network
associated with Global Voices, and includes CNN, Buzzmachine, Twitter, and
the Berkman Center.
As with the other blogs studied here, the actual structural bridging work un-
dertaken by this blog is disappointing. While it seems to provide some bridges to
political and journalistic sites primarily in the US, it does not really offer any
links to the deeper parts of the Arabic blogosphere. At the same time, we find
the same blogs and clusters encountered earlier, implying a kind of closely-knit
network of bridge blogs, linked to each other.
Conclusions
This paper focused on bridge blogs, or those Arabic and/or Muslim blogs writ-
ten in English, which are thought to provide bridges between otherwise discon-
nected parts of the blogosphere. There is little doubt that this kind of bridging
work is very useful, firstly in disseminating information about the region which
otherwise may not have reached other parts of the blogosphere and/or the West-
ern and international media. Secondly, because of the spread of information
coming directly from the horse’s mouth, as it were, it is likely that these blogs
may contribute to redressing widespread stereotypes and misconceptions regard-
ing the region’s culture, society and politics. Indeed, for many of these blogs,
this is an explicitly stated intention and one of the main reasons for writing in
English. Thirdly, these bridges may be politically important in generating sup-
port for political causes of great concern in the region, such as Palestine, human
rights and freedom of speech issues. On the other hand, there are a few prob-
lems, as identified by Mark Lynch (2007). He argued that these blogs can in fact
provide an inaccurate picture of the region given the inclinations of their authors
to adopt Western standards of communication, while they can also be used in
political terms by partisan Western blogs and media.
Yet these suppositions are based primarily on the observation that bridging
blogs are written in English, and not on the actual structural links they provide
to other networks. The importance of such structural links is based on Mark
Granovetter’s (1973) theory of weak ties and of my interpretation of bridges as
weak ties, connecting otherwise isolated networks, and thereby helping dissemi-
nate information, and through this contributing to maintaining or enhancing
social cohesion. Indeed, if these blogs are to actually operate as bridges, they
should be loosely connected to various networks both within the Arabic and the
international blogosphere. It is only through these links that information can
circulate and different networks can access information they wouldn’t otherwise
come across.
In the empirical part of this paper, however, in which I focused on three case
studies representing some of the most popular bridge blogs, two things became
evident: firstly, in terms of contents these blogs appeared to provide alternative
points of view, both politically and culturally, and this work was assessed as im-
portant. In structural terms, on the other hand, it was found that these blogs do
not in fact provide links to the ‘deep’ parts of the Arabic blogosphere, but rather
constitute a distinct network linked to other bridge blogs, such as those in Jor-
dan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. At the same time, they were linked to media
and political blogs and sites mainly in the US, sites that moreover covered both
sides of the political spectrum. It seems therefore that, in structural terms, their
bridging work is limited but not non-existent. While more should be done to
ensure that the methodological tools employed here provide the best means for
examining the links and networks generated by bridge blogs, and while more
bridge blogs should be studied to ensure the general validity of the current find-
ings, the results are suggestive of the kind of work necessary for bridge blogs to
meet their remit. More broadly, they indicate the need to move on from discuss-
ing the blogosphere in general terms and to focus on specific kinds of blogs and
their significance in the political and cultural contexts in which they operate.
For the Middle Eastern blogosphere, the current discussion showed that bridg-
ing blogs can play an important role, but they must fulfil certain structural crite-
ria.
60 EUGENIA SIAPERA
References
Alexanian, J.A. (2006) “Publicly Intimate Online: Iranian Web Logs in Southern
California”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 26, 1,
p. 134-145.
Anderson J.W. and D.F. Eickelman (eds.) (2003) New Media in the Muslim World:
The Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Bunt, G. (2000) Virtually Islamic, Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
––– (2003) Islam in the Digital Age, London, Pluto Press.
––– (2009) iMuslims: Rewiring the house of Islam, Chapel Hill, NC, University of
North Carolina Press.
Derahkshan, H. (2005) “Interview with N. Siamdoust, ‘Iranian Blogger Returns
from Exile for Vote’”, Los Angeles Times, 23 June.
Douai, A. (2009) “Offline Politics in the Arabic blogosphere: Trends and Prospects
in Morocco”, in International Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics,
Russell, A., and N. Echchaibi (eds.), New York, Peter Lang, p. 133-149.
Etling B., Kelly, J., Farris, R., Palfrey, J. (2009) Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Poli-
tics, Culture and Dissent, Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2009-06.
Granovetter, M. (1973) “The Strength of Weak Ties”, The American Journal of Soci-
ology, 78, 6, p. 1360-1380.
Hermida, A. (2002) “Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women”, BBC Online News
(available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2044802.stm).
Herring, S.C., Scheidt, L.A., Bonus, S., Wright, E. (2004), “Bridging the gap: a
Genre Analysis of Weblogs”, in Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii Interna-
tional Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, USA, p. 1-11.
Krishnamurthy, S. (2002) “The Multidimensionality of Blog Conversations: The
Virtual Enactment of September 11”, in Internet Research 3.0, Maastricht.
Lynch, M. (2007) “Blogging the New Arab Public”, in Arab Media and Society (http://
www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=10).
Mandaville, P. (2001) Transnational Muslim Publics: Reimagining the Ummah, Lon-
don, Routledge.
Rahimi, B. (2008) “The Politics of the Internet in Iran”, in Semati, M. (ed.), Media,
culture and Society in Iran, London and New York, Routledge, p. 37-56.
Said, E. (1979) Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books.
––– (1994) Culture and Imperialism, New York, Vintage Books.
Siapera, E. (2009) “Theorizing the Muslim Blogosphere: Blogs, Rationality, Public-
ness, and Individuality”, in Russell, A., and N. Echchaibi (eds.), International
Blogging: Identity, Politics, and Networked Publics, New York, Peter Lang, p. 29-
46.
Zuckerman, E. (2008) “Meet the Bridgebloggers”, Public Choice, 134, p. 47-65.
CHARLES HIRSCHKIND
FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE TO THE STREET:

SOCIAL MEDIA AND EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION
W hile the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off
guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mo-
bilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully
cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working
online via Facebook, Twitter, and within the Egyptian blogosphere. In this arti-
cle I want to address some of the ways the practice of blogging changed the con-
ditions of political discourse and action within Egypt over recent years, and set
the stage for the recent overthrow of the Mubarak regime.1 What is most strik-
ing about the Egyptian blogosphere, as I will argue, is the extent to which blogs
contributed to the elaboration of a political discourse that cut across the institu-
tional barriers that had until recently polarized Egypt’s political terrain, between
more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim
Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones. Since the rise of the Islamic Revival in the
1970s, Egypt’s political opposition had remained sharply divided around con-
trasting visions of the proper place of religious authority within the country’s
social and political future, with one side viewing secularization as the eminent
danger, and the other emphasizing the threat of politicized religion to personal
freedoms and democratic rights.2 This polarity had tended to result in a defen-
sive political rhetoric and a corresponding amplification of political antago-
nisms, a dynamic the Mubarak regime had repeatedly encouraged and exploited
over the last 30 years in order to ensure a weak opposition. What is striking
about the blogosphere I examine here is the extent to which it has engendered a
political language free from the problematic of secularization vs. fundamentalism
that until recently had governed so much of political discourse in the Middle
East and elsewhere. The practices of reporting, critique, argument, not to men-
tion satire and humor, that shaped the corner of the Egyptian blogosphere I am
concerned with resist categorization in terms of the binary of religion and secular
————
1 – In this paper, I address one small corner of the Egyptian blogosphere defined around a
shared emphasis on contemporary national political concerns. The majority of Egyptian blogs
are not explicitly political but focus on any number of themes, from movie and music stars, to
poetry, to fashion, to calls for greater piety.
2 – For useful discussions of Egyptian political life and the role of Islamic movements see
Abdo (2000), Beinin and Stork (1997), Baker (2003).

62 CHARLES HIRSCHKIND
– terms that have so forcefully shaped modern political life – but were (and con-
tinue to be) geared to creating an arena of discursive engagement which tran-
scends the institutional forms within which these categories are so thoroughly
rooted today in Egypt. Thus, while many of those who write and comment
within the blogosphere are involved in Islamist organizations, and identify them-
selves on their blogs as members of these organizations, the political language
they have developed online departs radically from that used within these organi-
zations.
The public arena of activist blogging I describe responded first and foremost
to the question, how can effective political agency be established today in the
face of the predations and repressive actions of the Egyptian state? And, con-
comitantly, what forms of political critique and interaction can mediate and en-
compass the heterogeneity of religious and social commitments that constitute
Egypt’s contemporary political terrain? While the political blogosphere has cer-
tainly been enabled by a politics of tactical alliance among participants of differ-
ing political orientation, the form of discursive interaction that emerged from
this tactical engagement produced unique practices of public reason and dia-
logue. As I argue, while these political practices – styles of reflection, argumenta-
tion, and social documentation – were not specifically Islamic, they were deeply
indebted to recent and ongoing transformations of Islamic forms of authority
and knowledge in Egypt.3 In my analysis I give particular attention to what I’ll
call the fuzzy realism through which exceptional and daily acts of violence have
been objectified within the Egyptian blogosphere, as the experience of a collec-
tive national subject.
Emergence of the blogosphere

The blogosphere that burst into existence in Egypt around 2004 and 2005 in
many ways provided a new context for a process that had begun in the late
1990s: namely, the development of practices of coordination and support be-
tween secular leftist organizations and associations, and Islamist ones (particu-
larly the Muslim Brotherhood – a phenomenon almost completely absent in the
prior decades. Toward the end of the 1990s, Islamist and leftist lawyers began to
agree to work together on cases regarding state torture, whereas in previous
years, lawyers of one affiliation would almost never publicly defend plaintiffs
from the other. This period also saw various attempts by Islamist thinkers to
found political parties (most famously, the Center Party, ðizb al-Wasa¥) on a
platform capable of attracting members well outside the Muslim Brotherhood
and other Islamist formations, including Christians.4 Overall, however, such at-
————
3 – On the reconfiguration of Islamic authority in Egypt, and in the Middle East more gener-
ally, see Agrama (2010), Hirschkind (2006), Mahmood (2005), Peterson (1997), Salvatore
(1997).
4 – On the emergence and career of ðizb al-Wasa¥ see Norton (2005), Stacher (2002), Wick-
ham (2004).
SOCIAL MEDIA AND EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION 63
tempts had little success, owning to the Egyptian state’s refusal to grant legal au-
thority to these parties.
The most successful experiment at reaching across Egypt’s political spectrum
came in 2004 with the emergence of what is called the Kif…yah movement, a po-
litical formation that brought together Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists,
liberals, and secular-leftists, joined on the basis of a common demand for an end
to the Mubarak regime and a rejection of Gamal Mubarak’s succession of his
father as president.5 Kif…yah was instrumental in organizing a series of demon-
strations between 2004 and 2007 that for the first time explicitly called for the
president of Egypt to step down, an unheard-of demand prior to that moment
insomuch as any direct criticism of the president or his family had until then
always been taboo, and met by harsh reprisals from the state. Kif…yah not only
succeeded in bringing considerable numbers of people of different political per-
suasions into the street to protest government policies and actions; they were
also the first political movement in Egypt to exploit the organizing potential of
the internet, founding a number of blog sites from which to coordinate and mo-
bilize demonstrations and strikes. When Kif…yah held its first demonstrations, at
the end of 2004, a handful of bloggers both participated and wrote about the
events on their blogs. Within a year the number of blogs had jumped to the
hundreds. Today there are 1000s of blogs, many tied to activism, street politics,
solidarity campaigns, and grassroots organizing.6
Two key events highlighted the political potential of blogging in Egypt and
helped secure the practice’s new and expanding role within Egyptian political
life. It had long been known that the Egyptian state routinely abused and tor-
tured prisoners or detainees (hence the US’s choice of Egypt in so called rendi-
tion cases). For its part, the state has always denied that abuse took place, and
lacking the sort of evidence needed to prosecute a legal case, human rights law-
yers and the opposition press had never been able to effectively challenge the
state’s official position. This changed when Wael Abbas, whose blog is titled al-
wa¼y al-ma¡r† (“Egyptian Awareness”), placed on his blog site a cell-phone re-
corded video he had been sent by another blogger that showed a man being
physically and sexually abused by police officers at a police station in Cairo.
(Apparently, the clip had been filmed by officers with the intention of intimidat-
ing the detainee’s fellow workers).
Once this video clip was placed on YouTube and spread around the Egyp-
tian blogosphere, opposition newspapers took up the story, citing the blogs as
their source. When the victim was identified and encouraged to come forth, a
human rights agency raised a case on his behalf against the officers involved that
eventually resulted in their conviction, an unprecedented event in Egypt’s mod-
————
5 – The co-evolution of the Kif…yah movement and Egypt’s political blogosphere has been ex-
amined by Radsch (2008).
6 – The by-far most useful analysis on the Egyptian blogosphere can be found in two articles
by Marc Lynch (2007a, 2007b). For a more general treatment of Internet use and the growth
of blogging in the Middle East, see Bunt (2009: 131-176).
ern history. Throughout the entire year that the case was being prosecuted, blog-
gers tracked every detail of the police and judiciary’s handling of the case, their
relentless scrutiny of state actions frequently finding its way into the opposition
newspapers. Satellite TV talk shows followed suit, inviting bloggers on screen to
debate state officials concerned with the case. Moreover, within a month of
posting the torture videos on his website, Abbas and other bloggers started re-
ceiving scores of similar cell-phone films of state violence and abuse taken in po-
lice stations or during demonstrations.
This new relation between bloggers and other media forms became a stan-
dard: not only did many of the opposition newspapers increasingly rely on blog-
gers for their stories; news stories that journalists couldn’t print themselves with-
out facing state persecution – for example, on issues relating to the question of
Mubarak’s successor – were first fed to bloggers by investigative reporters; once
they were reported online, journalists then proceeded to publish the stories in
newsprint, citing the blogs as source, this way avoiding the accusation that they
themselves invented the story. Moreover, many young people took up the prac-
tice of using cell-phone cameras in the street, and bloggers began to receive an
increasing number of cell-phone videos from anonymous sources that they then
put on their blogs.
A second event that brought bloggers to national attention also concerned
police abuse: during a Kif…yah demonstration in May 2005, 1000s of riot police
and paid thugs attacked a small group of about 100 protesters, including many
women who were beaten and harassed by the attackers. A number of bloggers
were present at the event, and immediately posted cell phone videos and exten-
sive descriptions of the attack on their sites. These accounts then made their way
first to Egypt’s opposition press, then to the international press, including al-
Jazeera, and finally to the courts. This and subsequent blog exposés on sexual
harassment in Egypt raised to national public attention an issue that until then
had rarely received acknowledgment in any of the popular media. Indeed, at the
end of 2008 a court judge sentenced two men to three years in prison on a sex-
ual harassment charge, an outcome that was unimaginable until the blogosphere
forced the issue into the realm of public debate.
These events played a key role in shaping the place that the blogosphere
would come to occupy within Egypt’s media sphere. Namely, bloggers under-
stand their role as that of providing a direct link to what they call “the street,”
conceived primarily as a space of state repression and political violence, but also
as one of political action and popular resistance. They render visible and pub-
licly speakable a political practice – the violent subjugation of the Egyptian peo-
ple by its authoritarian regime – that other media outlets have not been able to
easily disclose, due to censorship, practices of harassment, and arrest. This in-
cludes not only acts of police brutality and torture, but also the more mundane
and routine forms of violence that shape the texture of everyday life. For exam-
ple, blogs frequently include reporting on routine injustices experienced in pub-
lic transportation, the cruel indifference of corrupt state bureaucrats, sexual har-
assment encountered in the streets, as well as the many faces of pain produced
by conditions of intense poverty, environmental toxicity, infrastructural neglect,

and so on. Additionally, the focus on torture and police violence among bloggers
must be understood not only as a moral rejection of such practices. The images
of state violence circulated on blogs provided a visual anchor for a much broader
sense of discontent with the authoritarian, neo-liberal regime, with the poverty
and desperation that its policies imposed on Egyptian society.
The alliance online

I have described a couple of key moments in the emergence of political blogging
in Egypt and its important relation to opposition movements in the country. I
want to now sketch out some of the features that gave coherence and unity to
the heterogeneous currents that make up this arena of public dialogue and citi-
zen journalism. Activist bloggers from across a wide political spectrum were
brought together online through a shared sense of what were the most pressing
political challenges Egyptians faced. Four issues helped to define a common
moral stance: a forceful rejection of the Mubarak regime and a demand for its
end; a stand against tawr†Å, or “succession,” specifically Gamal Mubarak’s suc-
cession of his father as president of the country; a demand for the expansion of
political freedoms and the creation of fair and democratic institutions; and a
condemnation of routinized state violence. (Notably, these same demands pro-
vided the point of common ground for the demonstrators in Ta|r†r Square and
throughout the country in early 2011.) A fifth point of convergence lay in a
concern with the plight of the Palestinian people and an insistence that Arab
states have a responsibility to protect them. Stands on these issues were marked
on blogs with small banners, some linked to websites of associations and solidar-
ity groups. Although those who came to this common ground did so through
different institutional experiences, and brought with them different conceptions
of the place of religion within politics, they wrote and interacted within this
corner of the blogosphere as participants in a shared project. These issues, in
other words, provided common ground for the forms of social documentary and
commentary found across both leftist and Islamist websites.
For Islamist activists and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, this agenda
marked a radical shift. Until quite recently, Islamist political arguments focused
on the importance of adopting the šar†¼ah as a national legal framework, and on
the need to counter the impact of Western cultural forms and practices in order
to preserve the values of an Islamic society.7 Granted, an earlier generation of
intellectuals linked to Islamic political parties had since the mid-1980s empha-
sized the necessity of democratic political reforms. Leading Islamist writers such
as Fahmi Howeidi, ¼Abd al-Wahhab El-Messiri, and Tarek al-Bishri had at-
tempted to build a movement that would bring about an end to the rampant
corruption afflicting Egypt’s political institutions and establish a solid basis for
————
7 – Useful analyses of the Islamist movement in Egypt are found in Baker (2003), Mahmood
(2005), Salvatore (1997, 2001).
representative governance, but their viewpoints generally remained marginal

within Islamist political currents, and the organizations they tried to establish
were largely undermined by the state. For many of those making up the new
generation of Islamist activists, however, the goal of creating a flourishing Is-
lamic society must start with the reform of Egypt’s stultified authoritarian sys-
tem, and therefore, with the development of a political discourse capable of re-
sponding to the requirements of this task. This political reorientation can be
seen in a statement made by Ibrahim Hodeibi, an important voice among the
new generation of Brotherhood members, and a well-known blogger. Writing in
the context of a debate with fellow Brotherhood members about the future of
the organization, Hodeibi suggested that the Brotherhood slogan, “Islam is the
solution”, should be replaced by the religiously-neutral “Egypt for all Egyp-
tians”.8 I would caution, however, against a too hasty assumption that the aban-
donment of religious references – a constitutive feature of the political blo-
gosphere I am addressing here – can be taken as a symptom of the secularization
of political life in Egypt.9 Rather, and as many of the bloggers I spoke with in
Cairo insisted to me, what is marked by this shift is a recognition of the neces-
sity of creating a language of political agency capable of encompassing the het-
erogeneity of commitments, religious and otherwise, that characterize Egyptian
society. Blogs provided a unique space for the elaboration of such a form of po-
litical discourse, and enabled the creation of new models of political citizenship,
including by those who are concerned with preserving the Islamic character of
Egyptian society.
Sensory politics
In order to highlight the sensory politics undergirding this practice of activist
journalism, I want to trace its overlap and departure from a somewhat different
arena of ethical and political discourse. In my earlier work, I discussed the emer-
gence in Egypt of what I called an Islamic counterpublic (Hirschkind 2001,
2006). Articulated by the wide circulation of popular cassette-recorded sermons
among the lower and lower-middle classes in Cairo, this public arena connected
Islamic ethical traditions to practices of deliberation about the common good,
the duties of Muslims in their status as national citizens, and the future of the
greater Islamic community. Sermon tapes provided one of the means by which
Islamic traditions of ethical discipline were accommodated to a new social, po-
litical, and technological order, to its rhythms, noise, its forms of pleasure and
boredom, but also to its political incitements, its modes of citizenly participa-
tion. Within this context, public speech was geared less to the formation of po-
————
8 – Hodeibi’s viewpoints are discussed in discussed in Lynch 2007b.
9 – Nor can this shift of reference be understood as the triumph of a nationalist perspective
over an Islamic one. From its first inception early in the 20th century, the Muslim Brother-
hood in Egypt has always incorporated a strong nationalist orientation into their social and
political agendas. See Mitchell’s (1993) excellent account of this movement.
litical programs than it was to the cultivation of pious dispositions, the embod-
ied modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of
Islamic virtues, and therefore, of Islamic ethical comportment.
Notably, both the cassette sermon and the blog, in different ways, exploit a
kind of noise in order to articulate a domain of social-moral existence that defies
the normalizing discourses of the state. Recorded live at the mosque, on low
tech, low-priced equipment, sermon tapes reproduced, not simply the discursive
content of the sermon, but all of the surrounding noise – the horns and other
street sounds, the pious (and raucous) responses of the audience, as well as all of
the noise accumulated on the tape in the course of being passed along and cop-
ied from one listener to the next (Hirschkind 2006: 8-12). In their multiple lay-
erings of electronic and urban interference, tapes became a privileged technology
within a social world of pious listeners, what I called an Islamic counterpublic.
Egyptian political blogs, I want to suggest, also exploited the epistemic value of a
certain noise, two kinds in particular: the gritty abrasiveness of the vernacular
and the fuzziness and instability of the video sound-image produced by the cell-
phone.
Outside of modern literature, Colloquial Egyptian Arabic has rarely been
used as a written language. Attempts to assign it the status of the authentic voice
of the people have always been limited by classical Arabic’s proximity to the
Quran, and thus to what has remained for most Egyptian Muslims an exemplary
voice, one not only central to the variety of citational and recitational practices
through which one cultivates a closeness with God, but also pervasive within
daily speech, as a common stock of expressions through which the most mun-
dane actions find their ethical framing. Classical Arabic, in other words, has nev-
er become just a written form, but has always remained tied to its resonant
sound, a sound essential to and formative of parts of one’s most intimate
voice.10 Hence, within the cassette-sermon public I have written about, the ethi-
cal and rhetorical resources of classical Arabic are necessary to political action
and reflection.11
The use of colloquial within the blogosphere I am describing is more or oth-
er therefore than just an authentic voice of the people. On one hand, and most
obviously, its distance from the writing styles of other textual media signaled a
judgment on the illegitimacy of the Egypt’s political institutions, not simply
those of the state but also the organizations of political opposition which, from
the standpoint of many Egyptians, had long been overcome by corruption and
bureaucratic inertia. Such writing highlights its independence from the domi-
nant discourses of Egyptian political life that circulate via print and televisual
media. But recourse to written colloquial Arabic does more than simply mark a
distinction. Many of the most popular blogs, those most frequently visited both
by the secular-leftists and Islamists I spoke with in Cairo during 2008, push this
————
10 – See Haeri’s (1997) insightful discussion on the politics of language today in Egypt.
11 – On the ethical and devotional dimensions of classical Arabic see Graham (1985, 1987),
Padwick (1996), Sells (1999).
distinction further by deploying a particularly vulgar form of the vernacular.

The fact that people affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or generally sup-
portive of Islamist currents within society find such writing valuable, persuasive,
insightful is striking given the emphasis on pious modes of speech and com-
portment found within Islamist associations. As I mentioned, the media forms
developed by Islamic reform movements in modern Egypt have foregrounded
the rhetorical powers of Quranic speech to transform and improve the sensitive
listener. How do we understand such a radical departure from that tradition by
some members of the current generation of Islamist activists?
Take for example the comments of a blogger I spoke with named Fatima, a
woman who also wrote for the popular website Islamonline, and practiced a
more strict form of personal piety than many Egyptians (not shaking hands with
men, and so on). In one conversation, Fatima mentioned to me that one of the
blogs she visited most frequently was that carrying the name Malcolm X, one of
the popular Egyptian political blogs and well known for its author’s liberal if not
excessive recourse to Egyptian vernacular’s crudest expletives. Fatima said that
although she often found the language excessive and disturbing, the blogger’s
political insights, his ability to give expression to Egypt’s dire political predica-
ment were without parallel and well worth putting up with the verbal assault.
Even more surprising, she then told me that she frequently told him in person
that he should reform his language. They had come to know each other as
members of a group called Solidarity Committee against Violations of the State,
an association put together by online activists. It is the experience fashioned
within the blogosphere and the resultant practices of political engagement, I
want to argue, that made possible such exchanges and forms of cooperation.
This observation was not exceptional: many of the young people I spoke to who
were or had been affiliated with the Brotherhood emphasized, though not with-
out some ambivalence, their appreciation for bloggers who mined the rougher
edges of street language.
These comments, I want to propose, need be understood in light of the spe-
cific use to which text and image is put within the blogosphere. As a primarily
visual space, blogs leave behind the resonant word at the heart of Islamists pro-
jects of reform and instead assume the task of putting on display, objectifying
state violence, as a pervasive condition of contemporary Egyptian experience.
Despite its reliance on a colloquial form, the style of expression which has in
some ways come to define the Egyptian political blogosphere twists away from
the verbal utterance, becoming a scandal, unhinged from the languages that
shape and sustain ethical community. What it loses in utterability, however, it
gains as a material artifact, a disfigured social body visually registering a condi-
tion of generalized violence. It is written colloquial, in other words, that can
break with its own sound and all of the ethical attachments of aurality within
Islamic rhetorical traditions, and come to inhabit the visual frame of the blog as
an icon of disfigurement and subordination, of collective injury.12
This fracturing of language is also a fracturing of ethics from politics, what
might be described as a process of secularization, one founded on a split between
two sensory modalities, eye and ear. Notably, one of the primary points of ten-
sion and conflict between Brotherhood bloggers and the older directorate has
been around the issue of whether the activity of promoting adherence to pious
standards can be separated from politics without undermining the Islamic qual-
ity of society – a question that many of the younger Brothers have affirmed in
the positive (Lynch 2007a, 2007b). For those making up the new generation of
Islamist activists, the goal of creating a flourishing Islamic society must start
with the reform of Egypt’s stultified authoritarian system, and therefore, with
the development of a political discourse capable of responding to the require-
ments of this task. To be effective today, they argue, such a discourse must by dis-
encumbered from the pedagogical project of ethical reform that has been central
to Islamist political thought and practice. The blogosphere I have been describ-
ing contributed to this project, less in terms of the development of a political
discourse than as a site wherein political affects were solicited and honed, where
the experience of a violated national subject was objectified and cultivated.
The cell-phone videos that circulate widely within the Egyptian blogosphere
also accord with and enhance the perceptual habits I have been describing.
Many of the videos record encounters between state security forces and demon-
strators. The fleeting, unsteady, often unfocused images testify to a surreptitious
eye, threatened, evasive, bearing witness again and again to acts of state repres-
sion. The sounds heard are a blend of automobile noises, voices from the crowd,
stray expressions of fear, amazement, and outrage from those filming. Beyond
documenting specific acts of criminality by state security forces – an extremely
important function – these films in their endless variety and extensive prolifera-
tion have created a vast tableau of a society under siege – or what bloggers sim-
ply call the “street.”
Protocols of discourse
Interestingly, the protocols and practices of interaction in the blogosphere are
not always recognized outside it. For example, when I spoke to secularist blog-
gers, many tended at first to dismiss the idea that they would have anything to
do with Islamists; that on Islamist sites you would only find things like calls to
kill impious actors and writers. When I pointed out that their own sites included
many links to sites of people self-identified as Muslim Brothers, and that in their
own online writings they commented positively on the participation of Islamist
activists in organizing demonstrations and building public awareness of pressing
————
12 – This injury is also registered graphically in some instances, through the practice of stretch-
ing out single words across the entire screen through the repetition of one or more of the
word’s letters.
political concerns, then they would begin to note exceptions. In other words, the
kinds of statements and interactions within the blogosphere crosscut divisions,
divisions that still remain marked – in speech and associational life – outside it.
While they recognize the difference between their political commitments and
those of other bloggers, they engage with an orientation toward creating condi-
tions of political action and change, and therefore seek to develop arguments,
styles of writing and self-presentation that can bridge these differences and hold
the plurality together. As one secularist blogger put it in commenting on the
protocols of online engagement: “The atheists reign in their contempt for relig-
ion, while the religious bloggers – who would not even accept the existence of
non-believers in the first place – can now see some shared values.”
This also means that online participants frequently end up engaging with
topics, arguments, and people they would not tend to encounter offline. A
Christian blogger I spoke with and who contributes to this arena used the exam-
ple of gay Egyptian activists, noting that while many of the bloggers would be
uncomfortable associating with people who they knew to be gay in real life, be-
cause of the interactions of self-identified gay bloggers in the blogosphere, many
online participants – both Islamist and secularist – had come to recognize a
common ground with them, and to value their contributions to a shared critical
project. Once a topic acquires a momentum in the blogosphere, even those who
might otherwise avoid it are led to engage it openly as a condition of sustaining
the arena of discourse they have collectively forged and remain committed to.
Islamist contributors to this project now have to address topics like sexual har-
assment – an issue that would rarely be raised in Egypt, but even more rarely in
Islamist circles – and to think about them publicly in a style that acknowledges
the heterogeneity of viewpoints among their readers. Insomuch as bloggers, both
secular and Islamist, position themselves within this arena of activism and dis-
course, they necessarily address this question and others, including problems of
religious minorities (Copts, Bahais and š†¼ah), and issues of freedom of expres-
sion and freedom of religion.
The style of reasoning characteristic of this blogosphere foregrounds a lan-
guage of individual self-reflectivity and critical engagement while eschewing
what is understood to be its opposite, denunciation and dogmatism. In this, it
follows a trend long ago recognized by scholars of contemporary Islam (Eickel-
man 1992, Eickelman and Anderson 1999). As with the practice of blogging in
much of the world, this commitment to individual reasoning is marked rhetori-
cally by an insistence that one is speaking outside of all institutional affiliations
and strictly for oneself. Bloggers exploit the blog format, particularly the per-
sonal profile page, in order to fashion an online persona that transcends the
stereotypes that function to limit political argument. Thus, the blogspot proto-
col of providing a personal description, replete with favorite films, books, and
blogs is used to create and sustain, less a unique individuality, than a sense that
one is an “ordinary Egyptian”, not a Muslim Brother, not a Coptic Christian,
not a communist, but someone with the likes and dislikes of other Egyptians.
Thus, one’s self-declared identity as a member of I²w…n does not exhaustively
define one’s social, political, and religious identity, as other aspects of self are
highlighted, displayed. This has allowed for the possibility of linkages, the ar-
ticulation of shared interests and desires that otherwise would remain hidden, or
at least fail to find institutional expression within existing forms of affiliation
and political action. According to one prominent Brotherhood blogger, ¼Abd al-
Mun¼im Ma|m™d, this particular form of self-display has helped to “humanize”
Brotherhood Members, to show the extent to which they share tastes and desires
of other Egyptians, and in so doing, has opened up possibilities of mutual rec-
ognition and alliance foreclosed by reigning stereotypes. Ma|m™d’s own site is
called An… I²w…n, “I am the Brotherhood,” a title that calls to be read ironically
as “I am the Brotherhood, and yet I am much like you.”13
The rhetoric of individual self-expression and reasoning – I say rhetoric not
to suggest it is a false claim but to keep in mind that it is intimately a collective
political project that orients the discourse, not simply the desire for self-
expression – this rhetoric goes hand in hand with an openness to engage with a
global political culture. One sees this openness quite dramatically on websites
like Islamonline, a site that a number of Islamist bloggers wrote for until early
2010 when the site’s Qatari administrators decided to close down the Cairo of-
fice. While space does not permit me to go into the importance of such Islamic
websites in relation to shifting practices of dialogue and news reporting, I will
briefly draw a couple of examples, based on conversation I had with Islamonline
writers during 2008. First, I would note that Islamonline, a site dedicated to
promoting a correct understanding of Islam and which addresses issues under-
stood to be of relevance to Muslims, frequently hired non-Muslims to work for
them. As a journalist writing for the website explained to me, “we don’t see any
problem having non-Muslims write for us, as long as they are not addressing re-
ligious issues.” A second and striking example of the openness and lack of dog-
matism on this site can be seen in their decision to hold a live open forum with
and about Muslim gay activists in the US a couple years ago. No other media
agency in Egypt – secular or religious – would host such an event. Note as well
that Islamonline published a review of The Jewel of Medina, a book about the
prophet’s wife Aisha that many consider to be one more example of Islam-bash-
ing disguised as literature. The reviewer did indeed find great fault with the
book on both historical and aesthetic grounds, but, against many other voices,
argued that it was better to engage with such books openly and critically instead
of through censorship. This view, that one must remain open to what is taking
place in the world, marks a significant change from the defensive posture taken
by an earlier generation in regard to Western media and culture. This is not to
say that this generation of Islamist activists and bloggers are simply adopting
Western cultural models (many of the Islamonline writers I met insisted on strict
observance of a variety of religious duties). Rather, it points to the way seculari-
————
13 – http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/.
zation is no longer the primary enemy in the way it had been, a stance evident in
a far less defensive posture by young Islamist writers.
This attitude of critical engagement among bloggers from the Muslim
Brotherhood has met considerable resistance from the older generation that con-
tinues to dominate the organization. Many younger Brotherhood members
turned to the blogosphere to elaborate a serious and sustained critique of the old
guard and its policies – and were in return severely criticized by the old guard,
who forced some to shut down their sites.14 It is particularly the willingness of
the young bloggers to discuss openly and publicly questions regarding the gov-
ernance and direction of the organization that the older generation finds unac-
ceptable.
Conclusion
As I noted above, one aspect of my earlier work in Egypt concerned the emer-
gence of what I called an Islamic counterpublic, one for which the cassette re-
corded sermons and other religious oratory play an important constitutive role.
The political blogosphere I have been describing departs from this Islamic coun-
terpublic in some key aspects. Most notably, the web-based arena is predicated
on a separation of da¼wah – the activity of promoting adherence to pious stan-
dards – from politics.15 This separation is evident in the shift from a discourse
imbued with the performative and poetic resources of the Quran and other Is-
lamic ethical genres to one centered on the concepts of a modern democratic
political order (a shift further emphasized by the extensive use of vernacular on
blogs). Indeed, one of the points of tension and conflict between Brotherhood
bloggers and the older directorate has been around the issue of whether da¼wah
can be separated from politics without undermining the Islamic quality of soci-
ety (Lynch 2007a, Shahata and Stacher 2006).
There are also, however, ways in which the practice of blogging has built on
and extended certain trends developed in the public sermon I described. An ob-
vious overlap, of course, is found in the emphasis on deliberation and contesta-
tion as necessary to the reform of Egyptian social and political life. There is also
a similarity, however, in the way the conditions of production of the two media
forms – the cassette sermon and the blog – facilitate the articulation of a domain
of social-moral existence that defies the normalizing discourses of the state. As I
noted above, both give expression to a space of violence, a violence whose im-
pact is registered on both speech and vision (e.g. the trembling and surreptitious
eye of the cell phone video). They also both construct a new kind of agency
within this domain, in the case of the blogs, an agency conceived in explicitly
political terms.
————
15 – See Lynch (2007a) for an insightful discussion of these tensions within the Muslim
Brotherhood.
16 – On the history of da¼wah in the modern Middle East, see Canard (1999), Mahmood
(2005), Wardernburg (1995).
Lastly, both the counterpublic and the blogosphere share a concern for social
discipline – what in the da¼wah arena if often called ta|Å†b, the polishing of
one’s ethical capacities – and what a number of the bloggers I spoke with re-
ferred to as taÅq†f from the word Åaq…fah, meaning culture, but here deployed to
suggest a process of inculcating skills of political judgment, reasoning, and ar-
gument. As ¼Abd al-Mun¼im Ma|m™d told me: “our aim is not to build a po-
litical party or bring about a revolutionary overthrow of the government. Our
goal in blogging, rather, is to bring about political consciousness, to create a cul-
ture of informed engagement, a willingness to challenge and critique the state.”
This goal was to be brought about not by the embodied disciplines of da¼wah,
though it did involve the development of the attitudes and dispositions that
make dialogue and critique between Muslims and Christians, between Islamists
and secularists, within the blogosphere possible. The forms of sociability and
politics witnessed in Ta|r†r Square in the early months of 2011 suggest that the-
se efforts were not in vain.
References
Abdo, G. (2000) No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, New York, Ox-
ford University Press.
Agrama H. A. (2010) “Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an Anthropology of the
Fatwa”, American Ethnologist, 37, 1, p. 2-18.
Baker, R. (2003) Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists, Cambridge, Har-
vard University Press.
Beinin, J. and J. Stork (1997) “On the Modernity, Historical Specificity, and Inter-
national Context of Political Islam”, in J. Beinin and J. Stark (eds), Political Is-
lam, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, p. 3-28.
Bunt, G. (2003) iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam, Raleigh, University of North
Carolina Press.
Canard M. (1999) “Da¼wa”, in The Encyclopedia of Islam (CD-ROM, version 1.0),
Leiden, Brill.
Eickelman, D. (1992) “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in
Contemporary Arab Societies”, American Ethnologist 19, 4, p. 643-655.
Eickelman, D. and J. Anderson (eds.) (1999) New Media in the Muslim World: The
Emerging Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
th
Faris, D. (2009) “The End of the Beginning: The Failure of April 6 and the Future
of Electronic Activism in Egypt” in Arab Media & Society 9 (available online at
http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=723).
Graham, W. A. (1985) “Quran as Spoken Word: An Islamic Contribution to the
Understanding of Scripture”, in Martin, R.C. (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Reli-
gious Studies, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, p. 23-40.
Graham, W. A. (1987) Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the His-
tory of Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Haeri, N. (1997) “The Reproduction of Symbolic Capital: Language, State, and
Class in Egypt”, Current Anthropology 38, 5, p. 795-806.
Hirschkind, C. (2001) “Religious Reason and Civic Virtue: An Islamic Counter-
Public”, Cultural Anthropology, 16, 1, p. 3-34.
Hirschkind, C. (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counter-
publics, New York, Columbia University Press.
Lynch, M. (2007a) “Young Brothers in Cyberspace”, Middle East Report, 245 (Win-
ter), (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer245/lynch.html).
––– (2007b) “Blogging the New Arab Public”, Arab Media & Society, 1 (http://
www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=10).
Mahmood, S. (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject,
Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Mitchell, R. (1993) The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Norton, A. (2005) “Thwarted Politics: The Case of Egypt’s Hizb al-Wasat” in Hef-
ner, R. (ed.), Remaking Muslim Publics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. 133-160.
Padwick, C. (1996) Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use,
Oxford, Oneworld Publications.
Radsch, C. (2008) “Core to Commonplace: The Evolution of Egypt’s Blogosphere”,
Arab Media and Society, 6 (http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=692).
Salvatore, A. (1997) Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, Reading, UK,
Ithaca Press.
Sells, M. (1999) Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, Ashland, White Cloud
Press.
Shehata, S. and J. Stacher (2006) “The Brotherhood Goes to Parliament”, Middle East
Report, 240 (Fall) (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer240/shehata_stacher. html).
Skovgaard-Petersen, J. (1997) Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fat-
was of the Dar al-Ifta½, Leiden, Brill.
Stacher, J. (2002) “Post-Islamist Rumblings in Egypt: The Emergence of the Wasat
Party”, Middle East Journal, 56, 3, p. 415-432.
Wickham, C. R. (2004) “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the
Formation of Egypt's Wasat Party”, Comparative Politics, 36, 2, p. 205-228.
Waardenburg, J. (1995) “The Da¼wa of Islamic Movements”, in Actas, XVI Congreso
Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Salamanca, p. 539-549.
TERESA PEPE
FROM BLOGOSPHERE TO BOOKSHOPS:

PUBLISHING LITERARY BLOGS IN EGYPT
I n 2008, the best-seller lists of Cairo bookshops included three books written
by young Egyptian female bloggers. They were published by D…r al-Šur™q,
the biggest private Egyptian publishing house, in the series mudawwan@Šur™q
(blogsŠur™q), which is composed of books exclusively taken from online diaries.
At the Cairo Book Fair 2009 the three women, known within the Egyptian
blog-community as Bride, Ri|…b and Ý…dah, were introduced to the public with
their real names. Seated on a stage – not behind the screen this time – and sur-
rounded by literary critics, the three bloggers were invited to talk about blog lit-
erature and to sign books. Thus, blog-writers officially made their entrance into
the Egyptian literary field.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of turning blogs into books in
Egypt, started by D…r al-Šur™q, and carried on by other smaller independent
publishing houses. I will begin by presenting a brief history of the blogging phe-
nomenon in Egypt, focusing in particular on the so-called “flood age” (N…Þ†
2010), which witnessed a great appearance of blogs written as personal diaries
and memoirs. I will highlight the literary features of personal blogs, pointing out
their similarities with early forms of the novelistic genre in Europe and taking
into account the author/reader relation, the flexibility of the text, and the writ-
er’s anonymity. Next, I will analyze the reasons for publishers to publish blogs in
book form; how the printed books differ from the websites; and how these blogs
have been received by Egyptian literary critics, the reading public and the blog-
ging-community. I will discuss relevant theoretical questions and offer sugges-
tions of possible interpretation wherever appropriate.
The research relies mostly on my fieldwork in Egypt consisting mainly of in-
terviews with Egyptian editors, writers and bloggers, as well as on critical discus-
sions in Arabic and Western newspapers, online journals, and on blogs.
Contextualizing the Egyptian blogosphere

Earlier studies of the Egyptian blogosphere have analyzed the role of blogs in
political and social activism, or as a competitive alternative to traditional media
channels (Alterman 2007).1 Very little has been written about the literary fea-
————
1 – For a more detailed historical overview of the Egyptian blogosphere see Radsch 2008.

76 TERESA PEPE
tures of the Egyptian blogosphere.2

The first blogs appeared in Egypt in 2003 and they were mostly written by
liberal anti-establishment, leftist activists who blogged about their topics of in-
terest and wrote mostly in English. The blogosphere began to broaden only in
2005, both for national and international reasons: in this year Egypt witnessed a
flare-up of political activity, since multicandidate elections were allowed for the
first time, which facilitated the emergence of the grassroots movement Kif…yah
that focused on government reform and change. At the same time the govern-
ment, apparently unaware of the growing possibilities offered by new media, en-
couraged IT innovation, by lowering the price of internet connection and im-
proving the technological infrastructure. On an international level, western me-
dia and human rights organizations started looking at Egyptian bloggers as a
group that deserved their support. They referred to their websites to acquire in-
formation about Egyptian domestic and foreign policies. Blogs thus became an
alternative platform for discussion, information and creativity. They have been
used to denounce serious social and political incidents that had been ignored by
Egyptian mainstream media. Blogs were also used to start political campaigns,
organize street demonstrations and discuss issues generally considered taboo.
Apart from the most well-known cases mentioned in this volume (particularly
by Hirschkind), one should remember that N™rah Y™nus (who was awarded the
Human Rights First prize in 2008) published on her blog accounts and photos
of sexual violence against women who took part in political demonstrations
(Radsch 2008).
Because of its private nature and seemingly unlimited freedom, blogging al-
lowed social, religious and sexual minorities to express their views. By the end of
2006, a great number of Muslim Brotherhood blogs had appeared on the inter-
net.3 Some activists started using blogs to spread their ideas, explain their points
of view, create discussions and launch solidarity campaigns in support of the de-
tained members of the organization. Also Bah…½†s, whose faith is not recognized
in Egypt, took to blogging as a mean to claim their rights and defend their posi-
tion. The first of these was Bah…½† Mi¡r†,4 a blog started by a young Bah…½† in
September 2006. The blog served as a public space to write and publish his dia-
ries, and to respond to allegations and myths on the Bah…½† religion. Further-
more, many gay people started to write about themselves, either about their love
problems, social discriminations or accounts of daily life, while homosexual dis-
course had been and still is quite absent in ordinary media for social and reli-
gious reasons (N…Þ† 2010).
————
2 – For earlier studies of Egyptian literary blogs see: Hanafi 2006, Abdel-Messih 2009, and El-
Sadda 2010.
3 – A young journalist, ¼Abd al-Mun¼im Ma|m™d, was the first blogger who explicitly identi-
fied himself as a Muslim Brother on his blog An… I²w…n (Radsch 2008); see: http://ana-ikhwan.
blogspot.com/; see also Lynch 2007, M., “Young brothers in cyberspace”, MER 245, (Winter
2007) (http://www.merip.org/ mer/mer245/lynch.html.
4 – http://egyptianbahai.wordpress.com/.
PUBLISHING LITERARY BLOGS IN EGYPT 77
The anonymity of the medium allowed many Egyptian youth to express crit-
icism and frustration about daily life without losing social credibility. In an
email interview, the blogger who writes under the nickname Emraa methlya5
wrote me that blogging was the only way to express herself as a lesbian woman:
“Some of my stories are ordinary, and every woman on earth can identify with
it. Others tell about the anxiety of lesbians in Egypt. I take technical precautions
to hide my IP address and keep my anonymity”.6
The interactivity which allows readers to leave comments on blog entries
made it possible to connect people with similar interests and values and to re-
ceive feedbacks and advices: “Egyptian bloggers were able to constitute a com-
munity; being a blogger became a social identity of its own”.7
Diary-writing in the Egyptian blogosphere

In the following years Egyptian blogs ceased to be only tools for political and
human rights activists; they came to include a wider range of subjects. From
2006, the year which has been defined as the “flood age of Egyptian blogging”
by the blogger-journalist A. N…Þ† (2010), the Egyptian blogosphere has wit-
nessed the emergence of several blogs written in the form of memoirs and per-
sonal diaries. In a period of social and political turmoil and of state and self-
censorship in the traditional media and society at large, blogs emerged as the
best tool for self-expression and self-discovery (Weyman 2007: 5). Many young
people, and especially women, used blogs to talk about themselves in a way they
were not allowed to do both in traditional media (for religious and political rea-
sons but also because of the difficulty of entering the cultural field) and in public
(because of social pressures). In the words of Madeleine Sorapure, “the online
diary endorses a certain escape from the everyday, even as it takes the everyday as
its topic” (2003: 13).
In addition, many young people used blogs to pursue literary aspirations and
try their hand at writing. Even though many independent publishing houses are
now emerging in Egypt and are interested in publishing new young literary tal-
ents, publishing in print form still requires money (the publication is often at
the writer’s own expense) and finds very little distribution (Jacquemond 2008:
72). For example, the Egyptian blogger Narm†n Niz…r is inspired by Virginia
Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own,8 where the author affirms that “a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. In her blog
post “The flu defeated by Virginia Woolf”, she claims the need for a personal
space in which she can “settle down” and write about her life, from political
through social to ordinary daily life events:
————
5 – The nickname is a pun word because imr…h miÅ…liyyah literally means “exemplary woman”
while the word miÅl† stands for “homosexual”.
6 – Email interview, June 2010.
7 – Email interview with the blogger ‡m…n H…šim (http://3anes. blogspot.com/), June 2010.
8 – Woolf 1993: 3.
78 TERESA PEPE
When I started this blog I felt that finally I had “a room of my own”,
and Virginia Woolf says that this is one of the main conditions to
enhance women creativity. Of course I had no intention to create or
so, actually I just wanted to speak to my soul. In the last days I felt
the need to talk about what I have seen in the electoral office of Doc-
tor ¼Abd All…h Roza in ¼Ayn Ÿ…ber, sheer stupid acts taking place in
Alexandria, and that I will be back in Alex after two days, and about
what the Syrian wise man told me about militias and the assassina-
tions in Lebanon. Briefly, I just wanted to settle down in my private
room as said by Virginia Woolf. But I got flu and the result is that I
entered this room just to ask: is whiskey with lemon and honey bet-
ter than tea with lemon and honey? This is the most important exis-
tentialist question in my life in this terrible moment. And the
achievement of any other dream in Virginia Woolf’s room will be de-
layed until further notification (Niz…r 2009: 10, my translation).
Viviane Sefarty (2004: 469) maintains that in online diaries the computer screen
operates as a paradoxical twofold metaphor, that of a veil and of a looking glass.
The screen protects against the gaze of others, enabling each diary writer to re-
veal intimate thoughts and deeds, attempting to achieve transparency and break-
ing the taboo of social relationships. From behind the screen, diarists feel as they
can write about their innermost feelings without having to fear identification
and humiliation; meanwhile readers feel as they can observe others and satisfy
their curiosities. But the computer screen is also a symbolic space where the dia-
rist projects dreams and fantasies. Thus, the act of diary writing shifts from a
solitary venture in which one writes to and for oneself about one’s daily life, to a
means of moving away from the daily life, from the people with whom one has
daily contact, in order to discover and perform some different versions of oneself
(Sorapure 2003: 13). The blog-posts shed light on some areas of the diarists’
identities but at the same time conceal other aspects of their personalities. The
screen is transformed into a looking glass onto which diary writers project their
ideal other. The act of blogging thus becomes a way of life-constructing, a per-
forming act of self-identity. 9
Literary features of personal blogs

In the last years several international scholars have started to move beyond the
social and political effect of blogging and to define blogs in terms of literary
quality and as a new literary genre (See Fitzpatrick 2006; Himmer 2004; Van
Dijk 2004). It appears that there isn’t yet a clear definition of what a literary blog
is. Some scholars define literary blogs as blogs that offer a commentary about
literature, as they contain novel reviews, personal essays, information about au-
thors, and links to news about books (Nelson 2006: 6). Others define narrative
————
9 – Personal blogs can be studied in terms of autofiction, which is a form of fictionalized auto-
biography. This is analyzed more in depth in my doctoral dissertation.
blogs or literary blogs as blogs that have literary ambitions: that is, personal
blogs that have a certain literary quality (Abdel-Messih 2009).
I argue that personal blogs challenge traditional literary generic classification.
The question of whether there is a new literary genre born out of the new tech-
nology is not one that can be answered by a simple “yes” or “no.” Looking at the
Egyptian blogosphere we can observe that blogs are invariably a combination of
diary entries, memoirs, autobiographical stories, film reviews, shopping lists, po-
litical manifestos, reflections, short stories and novels. The personal content is
frequently intermingled with commentaries on politics or culture, thus making
the personal, the public, and the political inseparable (Himmer 2004).
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2006) has highlighted the literary features of personal
blogs and their connection with the early novel. She maintains that structurally,
blogs bear a relationship to early forms of the novel, such as the picaresque and
the epistolary novel, particularly because of their episodic format. As in the case
of the early novelistic genre in Europe, they create a tension with regard to their
truth value, letting the reader wonder if they are a reflection of ‘real’ life or
plainly fictional. Another similarity is that the character of the blogger is con-
structed through an ongoing, complex interaction of episodic narratives: inter-
ruption, deferral, and waiting produce the desire that makes the reader return to
either the blog or the novel. Fitzpatrick also points out that, in contrast to early
novels, blogs create a new form of subjectivity, a new understanding of the self
as it exists not as an individual, but rather as part of a network community. Be-
cause of the intense reliance on linking, whether within the blog, to other blogs
with whom the blogger is in contact, blogs usually have, in some sense at least, a
collective and inter-subjective authorship (Ibid.: 177). Steve Himmer adds that
blogs have certain epistemological features that make them a distinctive literary
genre. First of all blogs complicate the distinction between author and reader:
the reader participates and expands the text through direct comments. Then,
while the memoir presents a sense of conclusion, of past-tenseness, the blog re-
quires a focus on the present tense and a refusal of closure in order to go on
(2004).10
Very few Arab authors have discussed the literary features of blogs with re-
gard to the Arab context. In his article on the Emirati journal al-R…fid (v. 120,
August 2007) the literary critic al-Ÿa|r…w† writes that this lack of interest is due
to computer illiteracy, common in developing regions, as well as to the anti-
technological mentality that devalues anything written on cyberspace as a field
for amateurs and non-talented authors. He adds that other Arab literary critics
relate everything that has to do with cyberspace and internet, and technology in
general, to the issue of the “western invasion” of Arab “cultural identity" (al-
Ÿa|r…w† 2007: 82-83). In Egypt a real debate about literary blogs did not start
————
10 – Further details about the literary characteristics of blogs will be discussed in my PhD the-
sis. Online diaries published between 2006 and 20011 will be analyzed in order to examine
how bloggers shape their virtual\fictionalized identity and how they outline the Egyptian his-
torical context.
80 TERESA PEPE
until 2008, when the publishing house D…r al-Šur™q published three blogs in
paper form which became a success.
Egyptian publishers go online

The trend of turning blogs into books is not only an Egyptian literary trend. In
recent years publishers worldwide have been monitoring the internet in order to
find new materials.11
As for Egypt, the three books published by D…r al-Šur™q in 2008 are: ¼ƒyzah
atgawwiz (I want to get married) by Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl, Aruzz bi-l-laban li-
ša²¡ayn (Rice pudding for two) by Ri|…b Bass…m, and Amm… h…÷ihi fa-raq¡at†
an… (This is my own dance) by Ý…dah Mu|ammad Ma|m™d. In 2009, two ad-
ditional titles were distributed: Qahwat al-Mi¡riyy†n, (The Egyptians’ Coffee-
house) by Mu|ammad Kam…l ðasan and Mu¡¥afà al-ðusayn†, and Iskandariy-
yah-Bayr™t (Alexandria-Beirut) by Narm†n Niz…r. I Want to Get Married and
The Egyptians’ Coffeehouse are taken from blogs that deal with a single topic. In
the first one the blogger talks about the problem of marriage in Egypt and her
family’s desperate attempts to find her a groom, since she is turning 29. The se-
cond one is a collection of stories and anecdotes gathered by two authors mov-
ing around Cairo’s traditional cafés. The other three blog-books are taken from
personal blogs, in which the bloggers write about their daily life experiences.
D…r al-Šur™q was not the first Egyptian publishing house to look at the blo-
gosphere as a creative arena. It was preceded by D…r al-Mal…mi|, founded by the
activist blogger Mu|ammad Šarq…w† who in 2007 published the literary work of
three bloggers: R™Þirz by A|mad N…Þ†, al-Nab† al-ifr†q† (The African Prophet)
by Min… ßirÞ†s, and Asb…b waÞ†hah li-l-fara| (Good Reasons to be Happy) by
¼Umar Mu¡¥afà. In 2008 D…r al-Mal…mi| published The Poison Tree (in Eng-
lish) by Marwah Ra|…, þayl ðu¡…n (The Horse Tail) by Basmah ¼Abd al-Sal…m,
and ßardal wa-¡…b™n s…yil (Bucket and Liquid Soap) by Raÿwà ¼Us…mah. How-
ever, unlike D…r al-Šur™q’s publications, these books are not entirely taken from
blogs: the authors had been using the blog platform to experiment with writing,
and to publish excerpts of their novels in order to get the reader’s feedback.
Šarq…w† was the first one to recognize the literary talent of some bloggers and to
give them the possibility of entering the printed literary scene. Motivated by the
same intentions as Šarq…w†, in 2009 three Egyptian bloggers established the in-
dependent publishing house D…r Dawwin, which, as the name implies,12 looks
at the blogosphere as a source to discover new literary talents. Following D…r al-
Šur™q’s initiative, other Egyptian publishing houses turned blog postings into
books. In May 2008 a small publishing house called D…r Uktub started publish-
————
11 – In 2005 the journalist Jeff Jarvis coined the term blook to indicate books based on blogs
on his blog Buzzmachine. In October 2005 the self publishing company Lulu announced the
Blooker prize for the best blooks or print books based on blogs. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Blook).
12 – Dawwin is the imperative form of the verb dawwana, “to blog”.
ing a series called Mudawwan…t mi¡riyyah li-l-Þayb (Egyptian Pocket Blogs).13 In

2009 the independent publishing house D…r al-¼Ayn published ¼Indam… asma¼u
kalimat mudawwanah (When I hear the word blog), an anthology of 19 blog
posts written by different bloggers collected by Mu|ammad Kam…l ðasan and
Mu¡¥afà al-ðusayn†, the same authors of The Egyptian’s Coffeehouse. Also in 2009
D…r al-¼Ayn issued Yawmiyy…t S…|ir Mutaq…¼id (Memories of a Retired Magi-
cian), a collection of prose sketches taken from the journalist Y…sir Ä…bit’s blog
Qabla al-¥™f…n (Before the Flood). The texts which the author defines as “reflec-
tions about my life” deal with his encounters with people he met while traveling
in England, Qatar, America and the Emirates, his reflections about love, and his
reading of Darw†š, Marquez, M. L. King, Amal Dunqul and Ÿal…| ßah†n.
In June 2010, I conducted several interviews with Egyptian publishers to
identify the reasons which motivated them to turn blogs into books. In an ear-
lier email interview from May 2010, Sayf Salm…w†, chief editor of D…r al-Šur™q
at the time of these publications, declared that their decisions were motivated by
their wish to publish emerging young writers and by their consciousness that
blogs were the most original and exciting writing places where new writers can
be found:
The blogosphere is an interesting scene because it is an uncensored,
uncontrolled channel where young people are expressing themselves
freely as they like and when they like. The only criterion which we
used to select blogs was literary quality, as we felt that literary blogs
had a more lasting quality and suit better the catalogue.
He added that only minor editing has been done to the texts, as for example
changing the order of some posts, taking out some parts that were considered
‘weak’ and adding a few chapters. In contrast, A|mad al-Zay…d†, director of
publishing at the same house, told me that blogs had been selected also on the
basis of the number of visitors: the three female bloggers were already very fa-
mous in the blog community and their writing was attractive for its innovative
literary style. Thus, blog literature appears as a way to attract more readers to
printed literature, both from the blog-community and from outside.14
Mu|ammad Šarq…w†, owner of D…r al-Mal…mi| publishing house, was fasci-
nated by the blogosphere because of its literary language innovation. He stated:
“The blog writing style is immediate, emotional, less concerned with structure,
strongly influenced by oral discourse; its language opens new horizons in our
literary sceneˮ.15 The publisher H…šim, owner of D…r Uktub, maintained:
————
13 – The first book in the series appeared in 2008 and was titled Mašr™¼ wa¥an (Project of a
Nation). Another followed the same year, Mi¡r f† qi¥¼at g…t™ (Egypt in a Piece of Cake), and a
third in 2009, An… unÅ… (I Am Female).
14 – Interview, June 2010.
82 TERESA PEPE
Unlike the literary project of D…r al-Šur™q, we published these books

because we wanted to introduce the Egyptian blogosphere to the
people in the street and we sell it at a low price (EGP 4)16 to give
anyone the possibility to buy it. We want to destroy the image of
bloggers as a riot movement.17
As for Ašraf Y™suf, Egyptian poet and editor of D…r al-¼Ayn, turning blogs
into books is a marketing strategy, and an attempt made by traditional publish-
ing houses to react to the increasing success of electronic publishing. It is a way
to incorporate electronic publishing, to assimilate a phenomenon which could
easily survive and develop only on the net and for free.18
Eventually, Egyptian editors realized that the blogosphere is a fertile ground
for new ideas and fresh voices. Also, on a more practical level, editors are inter-
ested in blog books because bloggers usually have a built-in audience through a
connection with readers or ready-made fans (Nelson 2006: 10). The popularity
of a blog can be measured precisely, and D…r al-Šur™q selected blogs on the basis
of their literary quality but also of the numbers of their visitors: Ý…dah ¼Abd al-
¼ƒl’s blog counts more than 660,000 visitors since May 2006, while Ri|…b Bas-
s…m counts 280,000 and Ý…dah Mu|ammad Ma|m™d 209,000 since April
2005. Their posts attract a huge number of comments by the readers. These
numbers are reflected in the number of sold books: the blogging community
and their online fans went to the bookshops, book signing events and literary
discussions. Other readers were attracted by the immediacy of their language
and contents.19
The trend of turning blogs into books benefited not only publishers, but also
the writers. Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl declared that she was enthusiastic about the
print-publication because the book has a longer life than computer files and car-
ries a higher prestige “as you can handle it and show it to others”.20 This means
that even if she is experimenting on the blog platform, she is still committed to
the book format. The D…r al-Šur™q initiative gave such authors the possibility to
come out of the online community and to enter the literary scene as the main
representatives of Egyptian blog-literature. In February 2008, in the TV talk
show al-¼ƒširah Mas…½an the three women bloggers talked to the host Mun… al-
Š…÷il† about their excitement of being considered writers by their readers, sign-
ing books and being invited to book discussions at the Book Fair. Ý…dah ¼Abd
————
16 – Equivalent to EUR 0,50.
19 – As for I want to get married, the title looks very appealing to readers as it is quite unusual
in Egypt to hear a woman pronouncing this sentence without shame. In the talk show al-
¼…širah mas…½an, Dream TV 2, 11 February 2008, the host Mun… al-Š…÷il… asked Ý…dah:
“Don’t you feel shy of saying this sentence?” The video of the talk show can be watched at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= syLZOpGVn3o&feature=related.
20 – al-¼ƒširah mas…½an, Dream TV 2, 11 February 2008.
al-¼ƒl who is from a suburb outside Cairo and used to work as a pharmacist, has
now moved to Cairo: there, she regularly works as a columnist for al-Šur™q
newspaper and travels around Europe to talk about her book. I want to Get Mar-
ried has reached its ninth edition, has been translated into several Western lan-
guages and has now been turned into a television series which was released dur-
ing Ramadan 2010. Rice Pudding For Two has reached its fifth printing. This Is
My Dance and The Egyptians’ Coffeehouse are in their third edition now. Only
Alexandria/Beirut has been printed just once. A|mad al-Zay…d†, chief director of
D…r al-Šur™q, specifies that each print consists of 5,000 copies.
Even though D…r al-Mal…mi| books have not achieved the success of D…r al-
Šur™q’s printed blogs, the publication has granted the authors the possibility to
become influential in Egyptian cultural life. R™Þirz by A|mad N…Þ†, a novel
built on the album The Wall by Pink Floyd, has been translated into Italian and
turned into an audio-book; ¼Umar Mu¡¥afà is now working for al-Šur™q news-
paper and as an e-content development manager at the same publisher; Marwah
Ra|… has started an electronic publishing house.
The most relevant aspect of this phenomenon is how personal writing, not
intended for publication, written by common citizens who are outside the so-
called d…½irat al-muÅaqqaf†n (intellectual circle), managed to enter the biggest
publishing house in Egypt and to achieve such a big success. As explained by
Klinenberg and Benzecry (2005: 8), new communication technologies have re-
duced the price of entry into a cultural field, creating openings for people who
were previously unable to make their work public.
From screen to paper: differences between weblogs and book-form

A comparison of the blogs with their print counterparts reveals some features of
the former that show the impact the computer and the web have on how they
are written, what is written and how they are read. According to Sefarty (2004:
459), these features are: accumulation, the “about me” page, the interaction with
readers, and the presence of links. They are essential for the understanding of
the blogger’s self-representation, but they are not reproduced in the print-form
of blogs. Let us look into these in some detail.
Firstly, accumulation consists of the fact that even if personal blogs are most-
ly composed of text, they also include data provided by other media, such as
photos, videos, links, and audio-files. Sefarty points out that image, visual pres-
entation, and the navigation of the site also convey information about the author
and make the author a rounded character, as opposed to the flat bi-dimensionality
and rigid order imposed by print on a blank page (2004: 459). The reader or
viewer must perceive and make sense of disparate data provided through diverse
media (print, photographs, and videos) in an ongoing process of interpretation
and construction of meaning. Ri|…b’s blog, for example, welcomes the reader with
a picture of a young child (maybe the author herself) with black hair and a white
dress and a small description of the author: “born for stories and the smell of the
84 TERESA PEPE
flowers”. This contributes to the nostalgic and romantic atmosphere which per-
vades most of her writing.21 Ý…dah Ma|m™d’s blog includes the picture of a
bride staring at the sea, which preannounces her reflections on married life, the
intimate tone of her writing and the quotations of Arab and foreign poets.22
None of the published blogs reproduces any visual element.
Secondly, the “about me” page is used by writers to provide some autobio-
graphical information. It usually consists of quotations, images, etc. Ý…dah Ma|-
m™d’s bio section includes a quotation taken from a song of the Palestinian
singer K…m†liy… ßubr…n which says: “I love opening my wings and fly: where will
the waves of passion take me?” The bio sections have been replaced in the D…r
al-Šur™q and D…r al-¼Ayn publications by small paragraphs written by the au-
thors conveying information about their education, their hobbies and the blog
itself.
A third big difference between the online and printed blogs is the interaction
with readers. Diary writers construct themselves as the central characters in a
fictional theater populated by a large supporting cast of minor characters and
readers. The fiction thus created is essentially interactive and, as such, renews the
art of the diary by turning it into a collaborative effort (Sefarty 2004: 465).
Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl, for example, told me that her writing was not intended to
be humorous but it became more and more hilarious thanks to the feedback of
her readers.23 Likewise, Ma|m™d’s This Is My Chosen Dance perfectly acknowl-
edges the fact that online diary writing is always concerned about the readers’
feedback, thus it becomes a public construction of private life. When she de-
scribes her resistance to household responsibilities and her desire of a feminine
image, she addresses her husband as follows: “The problem is not you my dear
and it’s not your fault”. Thus she re-affirms her image of the loving wife in front
of her readers, never casting doubt on the widely accepted social value of mascu-
linity (8 January 2009; see also Abdel-Messih 2009: 516).
Finally, the function fulfilled by links in the structure of online diaries is im-
portant. The printed book is intended to be read in a linear manner, from the
first page to the last, while links allow the reader to move from one entry to an-
other. Books are read in a vertical way and they are generally the writing of an
individual artist; blogs are usually read horizontally, moving from one diary to
the next (Sorapure 2003: 15).
Reception of blog-books
The blogs published by the independent publishing houses were almost ignored
by the literary critics. In contrast, the best-selling blog-books of D…r al-Šur™q
rather alarmed the Egyptian literary critics. Mu|ammad ¼Abd al-Mu¥¥alib ar-
————
st
21 – Home page of blog ðaw…d†Å, see http://hadouta.blogspot.com/, accessed May 1 , 2010.
th,
22 – Home page of blog Ma¼a Nafs†, see http://ma3nafsi.blogspot.com/, accessed May 5
2010.
23 – Interview, February 2010.
gued that the success of the D…r al-Šur™q blogs derives from the popularity of
the medium because these authors can publish their writing and reach out to
their readers immediately, without undergoing any critical evaluation. If they
enter the print literature circle, they might ‘falsify’ the creative literary process
(quoted in ¼Ib…dah, 2008). The novelist M†r…l al-¦a|…w† declared that their
success derives from the fact that they write about topics that are familiar to the
reader; moreover, their writing engages the readers directly, through the use of
comments and simple literary language. She claims that these publications re-
spond to a need by the public for ‘easy writing’, and expresses her concern that
this type of writing might become a surrogate for literary production. “They
don’t add anything new to the Egyptian literary scene, as Ý…dah’s book follows
the trend of the satirical books written by An†s Man¡™r and Mu¡¥afà Ma|m™d”
(quoted in ¼Ib…dah 2008).
On 22 January 2009 a seminar entitled “Bloggers’ Literature… the screams of
youth or Kleenex paper?” was held at the annual Cairo International Book Fair.
The seminar was organized by the renowned writer Y™suf al-Qa¼†d and hosted
the bloggers Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl, Š…d† A¡l…n, and May…dah Mid|at. It was or-
ganized in response to an article written by ßam…l al-Ý†¥…n† in the journal A²b…r
al-adab 19 August 2008, in which he claimed:
In these days strange titles are published and they are sold very quick-
ly. They look like Kleenex paper because you use them once and then
you can put them in the rubbish. The problem is that in our literary
scene they are considered literary examples. Bestselling does not stand
for high literary quality.24
Thus he was labeling blog-literature as popular literature, as opposed to high lit-
erature. At the seminar Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl defined bloggers' literature as “the ex-
pression of a human being’s thoughts, feelings, and inhibitions.” Quoting Tawf†q
al-ðak†m, she describes the essence of real literature as follows:
It is the open air literature; the literary expression of freedom and
passion; words that reach out from one heart to another exposing the
depth of the human psyche in freedom, honesty, and sincerity”.
Then she moves on to defending the simplicity of blogging: “There is
no need to show off our lexicon, since our aim as writers is to deliver
our messages in the most comprehensible form. Hence, we are not
shallow, we are merely simple. Writing a light funny entertaining
book is not a crime.25
After this seminar, a big debate burst out also among bloggers themselves. A sig-
————
24 – The article can be found at http://maghress.com/ almassae/9911.
25 – The video of the conference is linked on A|mad al-Ÿabb…Ð’s blog http://ahmedelsabbagh.
blogspot.com/2009/01/blog-post_23.html (accessed on 15 November 2010) while a transla-
tion of Ý…dah’s words can be found on http://globalvoicesonline.org/ 2009/01/28/kleenex-lit-
erature-at-the-cairo-international-book fair/ (accessed on 13 November 2010).
86 TERESA PEPE
nificant example is a post published on Unbrainwasher blog on February 16th,

2009 titled þidda Šur™q wa-b…q† al-mu¥affaf†n (Against D…r al-Šur™q and the
Other Defrauders). Starting from an accusation against the newspaper al-Šur™q
(which the bloggers maintain has stolen some posts and published them without
authorization), the debate shifts to the turning of blogs into books. The main
accusation against Ý…dah is that she has betrayed the blogging movement by
selling the copyright of her blog; she is also accused of participating in literary
discussions in the name of bloggers. Gemmy Hood, one of the most active blog-
gers in Egypt, comments:
Printing a blog means going back to a traditional publishing system;
it is a fraud for the ones who buy the books because they pay for
something that thousands of people have read and still can read
online for free. Publishing houses are the only ones who benefit in
this process as they take advantage of the growing importance of the
blogging movement in order to make profits.26
A further aspect of turning blogs into books is that while D…r al-Šur™q included
these publications in the catalogue under the section mudawwanah, thus stress-
ing the unique features of this genre, Egyptian literary critics have tried to re-
connect them to traditional literary genres (short stories, personal diaries, and
satirical literature).27 On the one hand, this is a way to acknowledge that blogs
have a literary status. On the other hand, integration into traditional genres
means neglecting the specific features of the genre by refusing to acknowledge
blogs as a new literary genre. In addition, they did not take into consideration
that blog-language is usually influenced by the colloquial, by chat and social
network slang, street and café conversations and journalistic style: characterized
by shorter, emotional, provocative sentences, less concerned about stylistic accu-
racy but more keen to provoke the reader’s feeling and comments. This is, in my
opinion, an indication that the Egyptian literary critics still are not ready to ac-
knowledge that literary blogs need to be studied and judged according to a spe-
cific literary categorization that takes into account the peculiarities of the me-
dium.
Conclusions
In this study I have analyzed the phenomenon of printing literary blogs that was
started in Egypt by the biggest private publishing house D…r al-Šur™q, and con-
tinued by other small publishing houses. In the first part I have provided a brief
history of the Egyptian blogosphere, showing that blogs were firstly used as a
tool of political activism. Later, Egyptian young people started to use blogs to
————
26 – Gemmy Hood’s comment about Unbrainwasher’s blog post: http://unbrainwasher.blog
spirit.com/archive/2009/02/18/rejectionists-and-shorok.html. (my transl.).
27 – Sa|ar al-M™Þ† defines Ri|…b’s book as a collection of short stories (2 March 2008); M†r…l
al-¦a|…w† says that Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl follows the trend of satirical literature (¼Ib…dah 2008).
write personal diaries and memoirs as well. Because of its anonymity and inter-
activity, the blog offers an escape from everyday life, while taking the everyday as
its subject. I have discussed some theoretical issues regarding the literary features
of blogs and the possibility of considering blogs as a new literary genre.
Next, I have enlisted the blog-books published in Egypt from 2005 to 2010.
I have pointed out that this publishing trend benefited both publishers and writ-
ers. In fact, blogs have created a new entrance into the literary scene for outsiders
or for people who lack the necessary social connections. Once turned into books,
pieces of writing which were not intended for publication and which dealt with
daily life experiences yielded an immediate success.
I have explored the reasons that motivated Egyptian publishers to print
blogs: the Egyptian publishers interviewed by me said that they decided to pub-
lish blog-books because the Egyptian blogosphere appeared as an interesting
ground of literary innovation. In the case of the three blogs printed by D…r al-
Šur™q, the immediacy of their language, the popularity of their argument and
the presence of an online built-in audience guaranteed high sales numbers.
I then moved on to compare the blogs and the books: it turns out that the
print form does not reproduce the specific features of online writing (the use of
visual elements, the interactivity) that are essential to understanding the bloggers
self-representation.
Finally, I have analyzed the contemporary debate on blog-literature by crit-
ics, writers and bloggers. While the publishers are enthusiastic about literary blogs,
literary critics consider them ‘disposable’, or a surrogate of literature. Bloggers,
on the other hand, have accused the three female bloggers discussed in the in-
troduction of going commercial, selling the copyrights of their blogs to a big
publishing house.
Turning blogs into books risks stigmatizing blog-literature as a popular (as
opposed to high)28 literary phenomenon. Also, it might be seen as an attempt to
impose the still unquestionable prestige of printed books over electronic publica-
tions, while the electronic medium offers a great potential of artistic innovation
and literary experimentation.
References
¼Abd al-ðaqq, A. (2007) “Ri|…b Bass…m”, al-Š…ri¼, 15 Feb. 2007 (available online
at http://elshare3.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_15.html, retrieved 17 April
2009.
¼Abd al-¼ƒl, Ý. (2008) ¼ƒyzah atgawwiz (“I want to get married”), Cairo, D…r al-
Šur™q (http://wanna-b-a-bride.blogspot.com/).
¼Abd al-Sal…m, B. (2008) þayl ðu¡…n (“The horse tail”), Cairo, D…r al-Mal…mi|.
————
28 – For definitions of high and pulp literature I refer to Moretti’s article The Slaughterhouse of
Literature (2000: 210), in which he claims that high or canonical literature is made of the few
books which manage to survive in the literary history as they contain certain formal choices
which eradicate competitors.
88 TERESA PEPE
Abdel-Messih, M. (2009) “Hyper texts: avant-gardism in contemporary Egyptian

Narratives”, Neohelicon, 36, 2, p. 515-523.
Abdulla, R. (2009) The Internet in the Arab World: Egypt and Beyond, New York,
Peter Lang.
Alterman Jon B. (2000) “Counting down the nodes: understanding new media in
the Middle East”, Journal of Middle East Studies, 54, 3, p. 355-363.
Bass…m, R. (2008), ðaw…d†Å: Aruzz bi-l-laban li-ša²¡ayn (“Tales: Rice Pudding for
Two”), Cairo, D…r al-Šur™q (http://hadouta.blogspot.com).
al-B™h†, A. (2008) “Introduction”, “Mašr™¼ wa¥an”, in Mudawwan…t mi¡riyyah li-l-
Þayb, Cairo, D…r Uktub.
El-Sadda, H. (2010) “Arab Women Bloggers: The Emergence of Literary Counter
publics”, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 3, p. 312-332.
FarÐal†, I. (2008) “Kit…bah iftir…ÿiyyah |ass…sah tantaqil li-l-waraq”, al-Nah…r
(March).
Fitzpatrick, K. (2007) “The pleasure of the blog: the early novel, the serial and the
narrative”, in Burg T.N., and J. Shmidt (eds.), Blogtalks Reloaded, Wien (http://
machines.pomona.edu/dossier/files/2009/10/fitzpatrick-blogtalk.pdf, re-
trieved 16 March 2010).
ßirÞ†s, M. (2007) al-Nab† al-ifr†q† (“The African Prophet”), Cairo, D…r al-Mal…mi|.
al-Ý†¥…n†, G. (2009) “Adab al-Kl†n†ks”, A²b…r al-adab, 19 August (http://maghress.
com/almassae/9911).
Hanafi, H. (2006) “Post resistance cyberspace and women’s voices in the Arab
world”, MA thesis, Cairo, Department of English and Comparative studies, AUC.
Himmer, S. (2004) “The Labyrinth unbound: weblogs as literature”, in Gurak, L.,
S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, and J. Reyman, (eds.), Into the Blogosphere,
University of Minnesota.
¼Ib…dah, M. (2008) “Mudawwan…t: Kit…bah Þad†dah aw i|tiÞ…Þ iÞtim…¼ ?”, al-Ahr…m
al-¼Arab†, Cairene weekly 11, # 574 (22 March), p. 48-52.
Jacquemond R. (2008) Conscience of the Nation; Writers, State and Society in Modern
Egypt, Cairo, AUC Press.
Kam…l Ḥ. M. and al-ðusayn† M. (2009a), Qahwat al-Mi¡riyy†n, (“The Egyptians’
coffeehouse”), Cairo, D…r al-Šur™q (http://mkhassan.blogspot.com /2009/01/
blog-post.html; and http://www.m-hosyny.blogspot.com/).
––– and ––– (2009b) ¼Indam… asma¼u kalimat mudawwanah (“When I hear the
word Blog”), Cairo, D…r al-¼Ayn.
Klinenberg E. and Benzecry C. (2005) “Cultural Production in a Digital Age”, An-
nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597 (January), p. 6-
18.
Lynch, M. (2007) “Young brothers in cyberspace”, Middle East Report, 245, (Win-
ter) (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer245/lynch.html).
Ma|m™d, G. (2008) Amm… h…÷ih… fa-raq¡at† an… (“That’s my chosen dance”), Cai-
ro, D…r al-Šur™q (http://ma3nafsi.blogspot.com).
Moretti, F. (2000) “The Slaughterhouse of fiction”, Modern Language Quarterly, 61,
1, p. 207-227.
al-M™Þ†, S. (2008) “Ri|…b Bass…m”, al Mi¡r† al-Yawm, 2 March 2008 (http://www.
almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=95737, retrieved 15 April 2009).
Mu¡¥afà, ʿU. (2007) Asb…b waÞ†hah li-l-fara| (“Good reasons to marry”), Cairo, D…r
al-Mal…mi|.
N…Þ†, A. (2007) R™Þ†rz, Cairo, D…r al-Mal…mi|.
––– (2010) Min al-post ilà al-tweet (“From Posts to Tweet”), Cairo, ANHR Press.
Nelson, M. (2006) “The blog phenomenon and the book publishing industry”,
Publishing Research Quarterly, 22, 2, p. 3-26.
Niz…r, N. (2009) Iskandariyya-Bayr™t (“Alexandria-Beirut”), Cairo, D…r al-Šur™q
(http://alexandriabeirut.blogspot.com/).
Radsch C. (2008) “Core to commonplace: the evolution of Egypt’s’ blogosphere”, in
Arab Media and society, September (http://www.arabmediasociety.com/countries/
index.php?c_article=177).
Ra²…, M. (2008) The poison tree, Cairo, D…r al-Mal…mi|.
––– (2009) “Egypt: ‘Kleenex’ Literature at the Cairo International Bookfair”, in
(http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/01/28/kleenex-literature-at-the-cairo-interna
tional-bookfair/, accessed on 10 June 2010).
al-Ÿa|r…w†, A. (2007) “Al-adab al-taf…¼l† f† ÿ™¼ al-talq†”, al-R…fid, 120 (August), p.
80-84.
Sefarty V. (2004) “Online Diaries: Towards a Structural Approach”, Journal of
American Studies, 38, 3, p. 457-471.
Sorapure, M. (2003), “Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the
Web”, Biography, 26, 1, p. 1-23.
Ä…bit, Y. (2009) Yawmiyy…t S…|ir Mutaq…¼id (“Memories of a retired magician”),
Cairo, D…r al-¼Ayn (http://yasser-best.blogspot.com/).
Unbrainwasher (2009) þidda Šur™q wa-b…q† al-mu¥affif†n, 16 Feb 2009 (http://un
brainwasher.blogspirit.com/archive/2009/02/16/anti-shorok.html, retrieved 15
May 2010).
¼Us…mah, R. (2007) ßardal wa-¡…b™n s…yil (“Bucket and liquid soap”), Cairo, D…r
al-Mal…mi|.
Van Dijk, J. (2004) “Composing the self: of diaries and lifelogs”, Fibreculture, 3
(http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3_vandijk.html).
Weyman, G. (2007) “Speaking the unspeakable: personal blogs in Egypt”, Arab Me-
dia and Society, (October) (http://www.arabmediasociety.com/countries/index.
php?c_article=126).
Woolf, V. (1993) A room of One’s Own, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Interviews
Ašraf Y™suf, editor in ¼Ayn publishing house, personal interview, 3 June 2010.
Mu|ammad Šarq…w†, owner Mal…mi| publishing house, personal interview, 7 April
2010.
Sayf Salm…w†, editor in Shuruq publishing house, email, 10 May 2010.
Ý…dah ¼Abd al-¼ƒl, blogger, personal interview, 7 March 2010.
‡m…n H…šim, blogger, email, June 2010.
Imra½ah MiÅliyyah, blogger, email, June 2010.
Ya|yà H…šim, owner of Dawwin publishing house, phone interview, 19 June, 2010.
MAHA TAKI
WHY BLOGGERS BLOG IN LEBANON AND SYRIA?

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
H undreds of articles have appeared in both the Western and Arab press
about blogs in the Arab world press since 2005 (see for example Abu Zaid
2006, El Kazen 2006, Zaki 2008). In these articles blogs are often compared and
contrasted to the Arab mainstream media, which are, for the most part, either
state controlled, censored, or sponsored by politicians. In sharp contrast, blogs
are deemed to offer a space where users can escape the boundaries (and ideolo-
gies) of the dominant social, cultural and political milieus, resulting in voices not
often reported on being brought to the foreground, such as those of religious
minorities, homosexuals, and the ‘opposition’. Due to the activities of a select
number of bloggers, the media coverage of Arab blogs has been highly optimis-
tic, and, in some instances, has generated hurried and exaggerated statements
about their potential impact. Moreover, it has focused on a particular type of
blogging practice – challenging authoritarian states or using blogs in times of
war and unsettled periods – and on a type of blogger – young, active, secular,
and political (see also the article of Hofheinz in this volume).
These conceptions of blogs have focused on their use as ‘alternative’ media at
particular points in time and have thus ignored the other possibilities of using
blogging as a medium, the diverse and changing composition of bloggers and
the often shifting meanings that they hold for blogging. Indeed, the literature on
blogging and bloggers focuses on why bloggers should be blogging rather than
why they actually do blog. The aim of this paper is to portray the perspective of
the average Syrian and Lebanese bloggers on their motivations for blogging. The
findings are derived from a longitudinal comparative study I conducted between
2004 and 2010 on bloggers and the blogosphere in Lebanon and Syria.
There has been much research conducted on blogging that has focused on
motivations. The two methods frequently used to analyse bloggers’ motivations
consist of asking bloggers directly why they blog through surveys, or by deriving
their motivations through a content/textual analysis of the topics covered online.
Research focused on survey findings include Lenhart and Fox’s (2006) study on
bloggers in the U.S that received 223 responses through a questionnaire sent. It
revealed that the two primary motivations for blogging are creative self-expres-
sion and recording personal experiences. In other national contexts, similar find-
ings were found; Schmidt (2007: 11) researched motivation through an online
survey (N=5,246) and found that the dominant motives for maintaining a blog
are personal expression and, to a “somewhat lesser extent, supporting existing

92 MAHA TAKI
social relations”. Trammell et al. (2006) content-analysed front pages of 358

Polish-language blogs and concluded that self-expression and social interaction
have emerged as dominant motivations. Nardi et al. (2004) is a rare example of a
study that used ethnographic interview methods to find out about bloggers’ mo-
tivation. They concluded from interviewing 23 bloggers in the US that bloggers
blog for many reasons: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opin-
ion; expressing deeply felt emotions; articulating ideas through writing; and
forming and maintaining community forums (Ibid.). My methods for finding
motivations consisted of three stages. In March 2008, I conducted 13 explora-
tory open-ended, face-to-face interviews with Lebanese and Syrian bloggers.
Through template analysis, themes from the interviews were extracted and pro-
vided the foundation to a semi-structured questionnaire that was sent out in Oc-
tober 2008 and closed in December 2008 (some of the very same sentences and
wording that bloggers articulated were put into the questionnaire). The results
of the questionnaire were re-validated and re-questioned during the second ses-
sion of interviews with bloggers, which took place in January 2009, during
which time I conducted 10 more interviews with Syrian and Lebanese bloggers.
Some follow-up interviews were also conducted with Syrian and Lebanese blog-
gers in March 2008. The data collection fieldwork phases were scheduled with a
substantial gap between them, in order to enable a reassessment and reworking
of data that had been collected in the first phase. Informal online participant ob-
servation was conducted throughout the entire research period (September
2006–present).
The questionnaire sent out in 2008 asked bloggers to rank what motivated
them to blog from a list of options derived from the interviews of the first field-
work session. A ranking system was deployed for the different categories of mo-
tivations. Respondents could rank the themes from one being the most impor-
tant and five the least. There were eleven themes in total and plus an ‘other’ op-
tion which they could rank as well. The table below shows the total number of
respondents who picked each option and the average rank they gave that option.
The most frequently picked category, as a top five motivation to blog in
both Lebanon and Syria, was “to get others to read my thoughts and ideas”. The
respondents who picked this option gave it an average rank of 2.5 in Lebanon
and 2.8 in Syria with one being the most important and five the least. In Syria
the second most chosen option was “to make changes in society for social devel-
opment” followed by “to organize thoughts and record ideas”. They both had an
average rank of 2.6. In Lebanon, the second most popular motivation picked by
respondents reveals that blogs are being used for instrumental purposes, with 13
respondents stating they use it “to develop my skills (writing, art, design, pho-
tography, other)”. The skills they put in the comment box were “web design”,
“technical”, “photography” and “showcasing work”. Almost half of respondents
(N=14), in Lebanon also chose the option “to express myself about a specific
event” as a motivation for blogging. The 2006 war and the 2005 Cedar Revolu-
tion were the two events they specified in the comment box.
WHY BLOGGERS BLOG IN LEBANON AND SYRIA? 93
Table 1 — What motivated you to start a blog?
Average
Motivations for blogging Origin Frequency
Rank
Lebanon (N=29) 18 2.5
To get others to read my ideas
Syria (N=37) 22 2.81
and opinions
Total 40
Lebanon (N=29) 13 3.1
To interact with others
Syria (N=37) 16 2.68
Total 29
Lebanon (N=29) 6 3.1
To feel part of a community
Syria (N=37) 15 2.9
Total 21
Lebanon (N=29) 10 2.8
To make changes in society
Syria (N=37) 20 2.65
for social development
Total 30
Lebanon (N=29) 13 2.9
To develop my skills (writing /
Syria (N=37) 15 3
art / design / photography etc.)
Total 28
Lebanon (N=29) 11 2.27
To organize thoughts
Syria (N=37) 23 2.69
and record ideas
Total 34
Lebanon (N=29) 9 2.7

To offer a counter opinion
or an original view Syria (N=37) 15 3.5
Total 24
Lebanon (N=29) 13 2
To show own perspective
on some issues Syria (N=37) 13 2.4
Total 26
Lebanon (N=29) 6 3
To write about topics that are
Syria (N=37) 14 2.8
somewhat ignored
Total 20
To express myself about a spe- Lebanon (N=29) 14 3.21
cific social or political event
Syria (N=37) 10 3
(please rank and specify event
in text box) Total 24
Lebanon (N=29) 2 1
Other (please rank and specify
Syria (N=37) 1 1
in text box)
Total 3
94 MAHA TAKI
The questionnaire in Lebanon and Syria as well as the findings in other con-
texts show similar results in that the primary reason for blogging is to communi-
cate to an audience and be read. However, what do these articulations and box-
ticking of survey exercises really tell us? Is it not an obvious motivation that
bloggers write on a public platform to be read by others? Does it really say any-
thing worthwhile about why bloggers blog and the differences observed in blog-
ging practices across different contexts?
George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Why I Write (1946), in which he en-
capsulated much of the same reasoning behind bloggers’ motivations that blog-
gers expressed in the interviews. These categorizations, he says, are not mutually
exclusive but are intertwined and fluctuate from person to person and from time
to time. The first reason, “sheer egoism”, he defines as the desire to be read, to
be clever, to be remembered. He says that “writers share this characteristic with
scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short,
with the whole top crust of humanity”. The second reason is “aesthetic enthusi-
asm”, that is the “perception of beauty in the external world, or, the desire to
share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed”. His
third reason for why he writes is what he calls “historical impulse”, which is the
“desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and to store them up for
the use of posterity”. His fourth reason is “political purpose”, but here he in-
tends “political” in the widest sense possible, as “the desire to push the world in
a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should
strive after”. While Orwell believes that the first three motivations were the
strongest in his case, he realises, upon reflection, that his books were mostly
public-spirited and would have fit the last category. He says (1946: 6):
When I write? It is because there is some lie that I want to expose,
some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern
is to get a hearing … if I lived in a peaceful age I might have written
ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost
unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into be-
coming a sort of pamphleteer … in order to understand a writer, you
need to understand the factors that shaped him or her and the way
s/he reacted to those factors … his subject matter will be determined
by the age he lives in.
So while most bloggers in Lebanon and Syria articulated during interviews and
in the survey that they blog to be read as their primary reason for blogging, blog-
ging tools did not create the writers, artists or political activists in them. All of
those interviewed expressed a pre-existing propensity to express themselves. In
Lebanon, Samir (LB1), says that he was writing about social and political issues
before blogging was created and that blogging for him served as an outlet or
“anger management” as to what is going on. Ramzi (LB2) said in the interview
that he began his blog as a sort of archive for his writing on food and agriculture.
He teaches at the American University of Beirut and regularly writes for maga-
zines and journals. He said:
The idea of a blog came first and foremost as a form of repository of

all the things I found interesting. Its existence allowed me to file it in
a very simple format with a good search facility. That was my pri-
mary reason for it.
Yet upon digging a little deeper, Ramzi elaborates on what really motivates his
blogging activities. He says:
You may then ask why I choose to not just file my writing in a more
private domain on my computer, in my drawers in the office, it’s be-
cause no one can resist the lure of being read by many people. It is
good to believe [that people read your blog] if you feel you have a po-
litical mission, and in my case it is food, land, people, poverty.
Similarly, Bassem (LB3), a Lebanese PhD student, said he began to blog as a
way to organise all his ideas related to his PhD. He said the process of writing
ideas down helps him think and organise them. He continued:
And I also fool myself with the idea that there are people reading it … I
don’t just write for myself although I know that what I’m doing is purely
narcissistic. When people read it you feel like you have a mission and that
people are waiting for you to produce.
Hasan (SB1), a Syrian blogger, said that he began his blog in June 2007 when
he was researching a subject and eventually came across a well-versed blog based
around the same material of interest. While he had visited a few blogs during
earlier times, they were “banal pieces of writings about everyday life” which did
not interest him for the most part. However, upon discovering particular blogs
that had been created in Egypt and Syria, he was captivated by the content, and
inspired to start a blog himself. While Hasan studied telecommunications and
enjoys a stable work life in the field, his real passion is for philosophy and the
social sciences. Due to financial constraints, he opted to pursue his interests
through more practical means as he explained in an interview: “The vocations of
philosophers and teachers often lead to financial hardship due to the lack of op-
portunity and support for them in the Middle East”. As such, Hasan concluded
that this void has created a thought crisis in Syria. He said: “we have a problem
and we can change it, so what is the solution? My blog is to help me think about
these issues with other people here”.
Similarly Zeina (LB4), who writes about “feelings, problems with the family
and mental health”, says she writes on a blog because it serves as another diary
she once had but serves as a better archive. Yet she later elaborates:
The blog lets me speak to people. But this time it’s not my friends
and family. In fact I don’t give my blog URL to them. I speak to peo-
ple I don’t know and we share our experiences about mental health
issues.
Whilst bloggers will have valid reasons for why they blog in an interview process
and can tick boxes in a survey, it is nevertheless important to go a bit further an-
alytically than merely repeating the reasons that bloggers themselves give for
96 MAHA TAKI
blogging. Firstly, bloggers are not always aware of all the factors that have al-
lowed them to take action in specific ways or that have contributed to this ar-
ticulated motivation. Indeed, what people say is not necessarily an index of their
truths because intentionality cannot be fully understood through an interview, a
questionnaire, or from the text that the subject in question writes. Wanting to
be read is an obvious and valid motivation for blogging, yet without contextual-
ising their articulations within the cultural, social, economic and political envi-
ronments they inhabit and within the space they manoeuvre in, it is difficult to
understand why people pursue certain strategies of action (Swidler 1986) rather
than others. Swidler critiques the idea of asking people what they value in order
to explain their action. She gives the example of the culture of poverty, question-
ing why poor people do not take advantage of opportunities to assimilate into
the dominant culture. She argues that if researchers ask a poor person what they
want in life, it will most likely be the same kind of aspirations and values as the
middle class would give – better education, family, and stability. Yet class simi-
larities in aspirations in no way answer the question of whether there are class
differences in culture. She asserts that “people may share common aspirations,
while remaining profoundly different in the way their culture organises their
overall patterns of behaviour” (Ibid: 175). Indeed, motivation operates beneath
the level of consciousness and discourse – thus bloggers’ actions are often pre-
reflective and they are not always aware of the factors that have shaped why they
do what they do. What motivates someone to blog is a complex array of factors
that are very much contingent upon people’s context, and the various meanings
associated with blogging that operate in it.
Blogging during events

Blogs are not virtual environments separated from the concerns of local everyday
life. In this sense, it is quite common that bloggers will draw on the subject mat-
ter that their turbulent blogging environment imposes upon them. From my in-
terviews carried out with bloggers, it is apparent that the vast majority of blog-
gers are not writing about abstract issues, but rather about those that have a di-
rect effect on their lives. When personal, political or social circumstances change,
bloggers’ activities are also seen to change. If one looks at the content of blogs in
Lebanon between the events of 2005 and 2006, or interviews bloggers about
their activities during that period, one would be led to believe that they were all
political, civically engaged bloggers and that their primary focus is to blog about
these issues. While many bloggers started blogging because of the events in
2005-2006 specifically, others were blogging for different reasons but switched
their blogging activities to express themselves about the changes occurring in
their lives. Moreover, some bloggers who began to blog in order to speak out
about the war shifted their focus to other topics that interested them afterwards.
Mazen Kerbaj, a Lebanese artist who answered the questionnaire, began to blog
during the 2006 war providing up to 12 drawings a day about the situation.1
Since the war ended, he continued to blog but as a showcase of his artwork. As
one of the respondents to the survey, he wrote in the comment box: “I don’t
plan to stop blogging until I find a reason to stop, as I waited for a reason to
start in the first place which was the Israeli war in 2006”.
The survey data indicates that almost half (n=14) of the 29 respondents in
Lebanon had started their blog to express themselves about a specific event. The
events that they put down were either the 2005 Cedar Revolution or the 2006
war with Israel. Moreover, all 12 bloggers interviewed in Lebanon stated that
when a major political event occurs in Lebanon, they will discuss it on their blog
– despite the fact that it may be a purely artistic blog in essence, or even a photo
blog or personal one.
Lina (LB5), a Lebanese blogger and illustrator, began her blog as a showcase
for her work and to interact with people in similar fields. She said blogging was
a more engaging tool than the website she used to have. She differentiates herself
from other Lebanese bloggers by saying, “most Lebanese blogs are about politics,
mine is not. I have no interest”. Yet, she continues,
when something really big happens, like the war for example, I
change how I blog. [During the war] I was posting all the time about
that. I don’t do political analysis but I’m good at observing what’s
going on in my life and I got a lot of visitors during the war, some of
whom stayed.
Similarly, Zeina (LB4) also shifted to blogging about the war and campaigning.
Meanwhile Ghassan (LB6), just like Mazen Kerbaj, began his blog during the
war. In an interview he explained in detail how and why he began, stating that it
was exactly during the fifth week of the war, when, as happened to most citizens,
his career was put on hold for the entire war duration. He had also been going
through a divorce during the war. Having been put back into bachelorhood and
because of the crisis that was at hand, he had plenty of time to himself. The war
gave him impetus to speak out. He had always had issues he wanted to write
about concerning music, society and general day-to-day issues. Blogging proved
to be a great platform and outlet from which to voice these opinions. His blog
quickly began to gain momentum and created a following, encouraging him to
continue to blog. He opened a blog in English and Arabic. He said he opened
his blog “because Beirut was stigmatized”, explaining: “we were getting a lot of
rhetoric about Beirut being a shithole… so I wanted to show the world what
people from Beirut could come up with… ”. His Arabic blog mainly houses sa-
tirical voice recordings of social issues in Lebanon.
Other research conducted on blogs in times of crisis also found blogging ac-
tivities to increase in response to these events. Thelwall & Stuart (2007) in their
————
1 – Interview with Mazen Kerbaj on website: http://lebrecord.com/?p=19.
98 MAHA TAKI
research on blogging conclude that events might precipitate or hasten the adop-
tion of a new technology. A study (Saeed 2008) conducted by the Egyptian Cabi-
net Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) monitored the number
of blogs created over a 49-months period. It showed that at least eight of those
months had witnessed a significant rise in activity. These periods correspond to
significant political and social events that occurred in Egypt. This suggests that
public events in 2005 and 2006 in Egypt served as the real driving force behind
blogging activity.2
During the time of research in 2008, only 10 of the 37 respondents in Syria
included that they blogged about events. Syria at the time had a relatively stable
internal environment. With the continuous and unprecedented protests taking
place in 2011, the blogosphere is still to a large extent silent on the changes tak-
ing place. Syrian blogger, Hassan, said that during 2011 there have been real
schisms within the blogosphere between those with and those against the pro-
tests. Many choose to remain silent, avoiding the issue altogether. Some want to
support the rights of their people to demonstrate but are afraid of its repercus-
sions on Syria and the threat of interference from foreign forces. There is a wider
lack of civil society in Syria and this is reflected in the blogosphere. Bloggers
may express their aspirations for political and social reform but they face regula-
tory and other structural elements that may constrain their activities. Fadi (SB3)
for example complains about Syrians living abroad who overtly criticise the state,
explaining that it is not a practical stance for those living in Syria.
Akram (SB4), a Syrian activist and blogger in exile in Beirut3 explained in an
interview that in the past he had linked to Syrian bloggers who lived in Syria.
However, they asked him to remove the link to their blog, out of fear. He ex-
plains that instead of public links or comments, he communicates with bloggers
through private messages but would never publish the messages without their
permission. He continued to explain the constraints that bloggers in Syria face,
stating: “In Egypt people go on the streets and do stuff. In Syria people are more
wary of expressing themselves openly”. Privacy and discretion have always been
regarded highly in Syria and while there is not necessarily an absolute internali-
sation of ruling ideas, there is a more pragmatic or sceptical acceptance (Žižek
1989: 268). While many bloggers in Syria may want to explicitly criticise the
government’s policy, yet in general, unless they are already inclined to do so, such
as the ‘opposition’, they do not. They do not out of fear and repercussions of
their actions but also because ‘culture’ structures them not to resist.
————
2 – Over these two years, crucial events took place in Egypt such as constitutional amend-
ments, Mubarak’s re-election, a crisis among Sudanese refugees, a ferry sinking, and sectarian
conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Alexandria. Other regional incidents gained pub-
lic attention as well, including tension in Gaza and the bloody strife in Iraq. On the rise of
blogging in Egypt, see the contributions of Hirschkind and Pepe in this volume.
3 – His whole family has been in exile in Lebanon for their political activism against the Syrian
government for years.
Syrian blogger Hasan said the schisms and lack of a unified voice on the up-
rising taking place in 2011 have led many bloggers to settle for posting an “open
letter for Syria”, which does not make a substantial stance. The letter states:
We are a group of Syrian bloggers and online writers from various in-
tellectual and political trends who meet to call our brothers in our
homeland and nation to work together in order to avoid more blood-
shed, victims and tears, to stand together under the umbrella of the
nation and the nationalism which bring us all together, without ex-
ception or discrimination.4
Changing motivations
There is not often a grand or well-formulated idea for what compels bloggers to
begin their activity. Many of the early bloggers said in interviews that they began
out of mere curiosity with the tool rather than a clear-cut motivation. Menchin
Trevino (2005: 9) found that some begin a blog to “research blogs and partici-
pate in the community”. Similarly Brake (2009: 161) found that many initial
motivations were for merely the “pleasure of tinkering with a new tool”. Zeina
(LB4) began to blog when a journalist friend of hers encouraged her to do so.
She had already commenced writing a journal and soon came to the conclusion
that it would be a good idea to give it an online presence. Lina (LB5) said she
had begun after “stumbling across the world of blogging”. During an interview
she said: “I knew two people from LBF, the Lebanese blog aggregator, and they
encouraged me to blog”’. She has since stopped blogging. Another blogger, On
Boredom, said: “I don’t know why I began to blog, I was curious and it was fun”.
Indeed, a few of the interviewees said they started blogging “to see what the fuss
was all about” or to “be part of something new that felt important” rather than
wanting to express something intrinsic. While some bloggers and especially the
war bloggers in Lebanon had set out with a goal in mind that would dictate their
blogging activities, most of the bloggers’ interviewed had changed their activities
and had different motivations during the course of their blogging history.
Brady (2006) and Brake (2009) also found that motivations for blogging are
not static or clear-cut. Brady (2006) said that bloggers’ motivations change and
are often supplemented by additional motivations through time and as knowl-
edge is acquired. Brake (2009: 152) found that the bloggers he interviewed in
the UK appeared to change their blogging practice over time because of changes
in the way they perceived their audiences, changes in their personal motivations
for blogging, changes in their circumstances and potentially because of changes
in the underlying technologies. The two case studies below of a Lebanese and
Syrian blogger illustrate the shifts in why and how they blog through the course
————
4 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/whatwedo/where/middleeast/syria/2011/04/1104
27_syria_blogs.shtml.
100 MAHA TAKI
of their blogging activities.

Firas (LB7), a Lebanese blogger, began to blog when he moved to France to
study for his MA degree in autumn 2005. In an interview in 2008, he said he
had first begun to blog because he had arrived to university earlier than the other
students, didn’t know anyone in the new city and so “was bored to death”. By
“complete coincidence” he came across a television show on Al-Jazeera about
political blogging in Egypt and decided to try it out. He began to write in Eng-
lish about his everyday life, posting pictures of the new places he visited and
what he was experiencing in those places. However, he now describes his first
blogging venture as “very silly” and “trivial”. A few months later, Firas decided
to switch to blogging in Arabic, which he felt more comfortable writing in, and
began to write about a “wide range of Lebanese social and political issues that
took a story telling approach”. His parents were also writers and he found blog-
ging a good outlet to practice on. However, during the July 2006 war, he barely
wrote on his own blog but participated in a blog run by other Lebanese bloggers
and only concerning the war. After the war ended, he went back to writing on
his blog but changed its focus. He now writes short fiction stories. He felt a gen-
eral disgruntlement with blogging for wider political changes. He said:
I shifted to more literary posts because originally that’s what my blog
was about ... first it’s because I felt that we were not doing anything
special [by writing about current affairs/politics/society], what we
were writing was in the newspapers; al-Saf†r newspaper is the pure
opposition, al-Nah…r is with the government. We were just repeating
these ideas. We were not presenting anything new and we were just
the voices for the politicians and different ideological factions …
Firas also began to write for the cultural section of al-Saf†r, one of the main Leba-
nese daily newspapers, shortly after the war. Although his personal blog does not
deal directly with current affairs any more, he asserts that when a local event oc-
curs, he cannot help but comment on it. Since then, he has been writing on the
same blog and in 2008 described it as “the nucleus of a novel and a literary pro-
ject”. He said: “I’m not writing for fun [as I used to]. I have a sort of project”.
Similarly, Maya (SB2) a Syrian blogger began blogging when she was living
in Ashrafieh, a Christian neighbourhood in central Beirut. Her blog was centred
in her experience of living there when Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minis-
ter, was assassinated in 2005 and fingers were being pointed at the Syrian gov-
ernment as the main culprit behind the assassination. A massive demonstration
followed, soon to be named the Cedar Revolution, which was successful in eject-
ing Syrian troops and thereby ending Syria’s 15-year military presence in Leba-
non. Following Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, anti-Syrian rhetoric became
louder as anti-Syrian slogans dominated the airwaves. In the blogosphere, there
were also massive campaigns to end the Syrian presence in Lebanon. This bred
extreme activism by a sector of the Lebanese population against Syrians living in
Lebanon. Some Syrian expatriates were subject to harassment; causing wide-
spread fear amongst them and discouraging their otherwise steady influx into
their neighbouring country. Maya said: “As a Syrian in Lebanon I faced many
problems with my Syrian identity and so in order to free myself from this con-
flict, I found Syrians online”.
Although she had some shortcomings in the English language, she began to
write a blog in English. She explained in an interview that this was because most
Syrian bloggers at the time were writing in English. When she returned to Da-
mascus after her studies in Beirut, she wanted to make the blog relevant to her
new living circumstances. So she changed her blog name to Decentring Damascus
and began to write primarily on Syrian social issues. In 2007, she also opened
another blog called 3arabiyyat5 (meaning ‘Arabs’ in the feminine plural), this time
writing in Arabic. At that time, the number of Syrian bloggers had increased
from the small set of expatriate writers and they were almost all writing in Ara-
bic. Maya said in an interview that she switched to Arabic in order “to reach a
wider Syrian audience that lived in Syria”. Her focus also shifted from general
social issues to human rights causes and gay and lesbian rights in particular. In
the interview she described what she writes on her new blog as “anarchism and
queerness”. Her blog had always been anonymous, but in 2007 she decided to
write under her real name.
The cases of Firas and Maya illustrate that blogging is set in relation to a
number of factors that change over time. These include changes in personal cir-
cumstances (such as a new place where to live); dominant practices in the blo-
gosphere (such as the language used in Maya’s case); and external events. There
are certain ideas about blogging practices that are dominant amongst bloggers
who socialise with each other. New bloggers often discover that the activity of
blogging has pre-established and taken for granted structures of both meaning
and power. In this regard bloggers may shift or reassess their positions on how to
blog in accordance with these meanings. Therefore they may continue (or stop)
blogging for reasons that are different from those that led them to begin doing
so in the initial phase. For example, blogging in English was crucial for those
wanting to socialise with other Syrian bloggers online in 2005, as they were for
the most part all blogging in that language. With the proliferation of Arabic
bloggers over time, blogging in English was no longer required and those blog-
ging in that language were generally seen as liberal and living abroad. Thus there
are differing and changing meanings to the activity of blogging that bloggers will
also react to and that may change why the blog.
Conclusion
When people ask me why bloggers in Lebanon and Syria blog, I find it the most
problematic to answer because it requires a stable portrayal of the act of blog-
ging, while the evidence I had accumulated pointed to the bloggers’ changing
motivations and their dependence on many factors.
————
5 – http://3arabiyyat.blogspot.com/.
102 MAHA TAKI
In the interviews and survey, bloggers gave abstract reasons for why they blog
such as “I want to be read”. It is important to go beyond these articulations and
find out the factors that compel them to want to be read. Wanting to be read is a
valid motivation for blogging but without contextualising it within the social,
political and cultural worlds they live in and the spaces they manoeuvre in, we
cannot arrive at an accurate picture of why bloggers blog.
Why they blog, I found, is often a complex array of strategic positions they
choose at different points in time. Why they blog is changing and relational to
their personal circumstances, external circumstances and on how blogging as a
tool is perceived and used within the worlds they socialise in. What bloggers do
is to position themselves and their activities in relation to and in contrast to their
environments. These environments not only include the wider context, i.e. poli-
tics in the country one blogs in, but also the community of other bloggers he/she
belongs to online. Therefore researchers should look at trends, shifts and new
comers to the technologies being used.
Moreover, what they say about why they blog should not be taken as an in-
dex of their truths because people are not aware of all the factors that have influ-
enced why they do what they do. By situating their articulations within the vari-
ous social factors that influence it, and looking at the blogging activities through
long period of changes, research will be better equipped at understanding the
complexity of the varying factors that may influence why bloggers blog and how
they blog.
References
Abu Zaid, M. (2006) “Arab bloggers: the new voices of freedom”, al-Šarq al-Awsa¥,
28 October.
Brake, D. (2009) “As if nobody’s reading? The imagined audience and Socio-techni-
cal Biases in Personal blogging practice in the UK”, PhD thesis, London School
of Economics, University of London.
Brady, M. (2006) “Blogs: Motivations Behind the Phenomenon”, Chimera Working
Paper 17, Ipswich, University of Essex.
El Kazen, J. (2006) “The [Arab] blogosphere”, al-ðay…t, 09 January (available online
at http://www.daralhayat.com, accessed 9 January 2006).
Lenhart A. and S. Fox (2006) “Bloggers: a portrait of the internet’s new storytellers”,
in Pew Internet & American Life Project, Washington, 25 p.
Menchen Trevino, E. (2005) “Blogger motivations: power, pull, and positive”, paper
presented at Association of Internet Researchers 6.0. Chicago, Ill Conference.
Nardi, B. A., D.J. Schiano, M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz (2004) “Why We Blog”,
Communications of the ACM, 47, Issue 12, p. 41-46.
Orwell, G. (1946) Why I Write, London, Penguin Books, p. 1-10.
Schmidt, J. (2007) “Blogging Practices in the German-speaking blogosphere”, New
Communication Media Research Centre, University of Bamberg (http://www.
ssoar.info/ssoar/files/2008/239/fonkpaper0702.pdf, accessed 1 February 2010).
Swidler, A. (1986) “Culture in action: symbols and strategies”, American Sociological

Review, 51, 2, p. 273-286.
Trammell, K. D., A. Tarkowski, J. Hofmokl, and A.M., Sapp (2006), “Rzeczpo-
spolita blogów [Republic of blog]: Examining Polish Bloggers through Content
Analysis”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 3, art. 2.
Zaki, A. (2008) How the internet is challenging Egypt’s government, The Daily Star
Network, 14 May 2008.
Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso.
Bloggers referenced:
Lebanese bloggers
LB1 – Name: Samir; date of interview: 13 March 2008; location: Rootspace, Beirut,
Lebanon.
LB2 – Name: Ramzi; date of interview: 20 March 2008; location: Café Younis, Bei-
rut, Lebanon.
LB3 – Name: Bassem; date of interview: 5 March 2008; location: Home in Sursock,
Beirut, Lebanon.
LB4 – Name: Zeina; date of interview: 28 March 2008; location: Costa Café, Beirut,
Lebanon.
LB5 – Name: Lina; date of interview: 12 March 2008; location: Rootspace offices,
Beirut, Lebanon.
LB6 – Name: Ghassan; date of interview: 28 March 2008; location: Rootspace of-
fices, Beirut, Lebanon.
LB7 – Name: Firas; date of interview: 24 March 2008; location: Rootspace, Beirut,
Lebanon.
Syrian bloggers
SB1 – Name: Hasan; date of first interview: 24 March 2008; date of second inter-
view: 19 January 2009; date of third interview: 17 April 2011; location: Bab
Touma café, Damascus, Syria.
SB2 – Name: Maya; date of first interview: 20 March 2008; date of second inter-
view: 4 January 2009; location: Bab Touma café, Damascus, Syria / Café Younis,
Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon.
SB3 – Name: Fadi; date of interview: 4 January 2008; location: Bab Touma café,
Damascus, Syria.
SB4 – Name: Akram; date of interview: 5 January 2009; location: Costa café, Ham-
ra, Beirut, Lebanon.
ENRICO DE ANGELIS
SYRIAN NEWS WEBSITES: A NEGOTIATED IDENTITY
O n the 16th of March the wave of Arab revolts reached Syria, after 150
protesters gathered in Marjeh Square in Damascus. The turning point
took place the on the 18th of March in the southern city of Deraa, with the ar-
rest of 15 schoolchildren. They had written anti-government graffiti on walls,
inspired by the Egyptian and the Tunisian revolutions. It seems that they took
the slogans from some al-Jazeera reports about Egypt. The arrest provoked mass
protests in Deraa, and then the disorders spread to Baniyas, Nawa, Homs,
Latakia, Douma and other cities. The ‘Syrian unrest’, as the media soon named
it, expanded to a considerable size, conquering a firm place in the international
news agenda.
Though the influence of al-Jazeera and the transnational televisions appeared
to have played a more relevant role at the beginning, it soon became clear that
internet was the main space where Syrians were negotiating the meaning of the
protests and trying to find a way out. Groups, comments, and articles started to
thrive on Facebook and on the local online newspapers, becoming a unique
space for the discussion about the latest events. Facebook groups had never
worked effectively as mobilization tools in Syria, but they were useful to gather
people around some precise requests, in order to clarify at least some of the aims
of the disorders. At the same time, journalistic networks such as SNN (Sham
News Network) took a leading role, spreading on the web daily news, images and
videos about the protests.
Even after it became clear that in Egypt and Tunisia internet had played a
crucial role as a mobilization tool, on the 8th of February the ban of Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube was unexpectedly lifted, putting an end to the restrictions
decided as long ago as 2007. Just before the lifting of the ban, many groups
supporting the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions had appeared on Facebook.1
The majority of them were closed after a few days, but re-opened later. On the
eve of Mubarak’s resignation, Facebook was also the theatre of a harsh struggle
between opposing groups, in favor of and against the Syrian regime. Some of
them invited people to take to the streets on the 5th of February.2 In reaction,
————
1 – Two examples are An… s™r†, an… t™nis† (“I’m Syrian, I’m Tunisian”), and S™riyy†n mutaÿ…-
min™n ma¼a al-intif…ÿah al-t™nisiyyah” (“Syrians supporting the Tunisian revolt”).
2 – This is the case for “The Syrian revolution 2011”.

106 ENRICO DE ANGELIS
other groups were immediately created, in support of president Bashar al-Asad

and in order to delegitimize the protests. An example is the group “Against the
gathering of 5th February and the day of Syrian rage, and God protect Syria”,
created by R…m† Man¡™r, the editor-in-chief of Shaku Maku, one of the most
important local news websites. In those same days the Syrian news websites de-
voted a great amount of space to the events in Tunisia and Egypt and their pages
were rapidly filled with readers’ comments against the corruption of Arab re-
gimes and debating the possibility of a ‘chain reaction’ reaching Syria. An article
about the Tunisian demonstrations, published on the Facebook page of the web-
site Syria News, after 19 hours had already reached 135 comments.3
All these examples can provide an idea of the vitality characterizing internet
in Syria at this particular historical juncture. Yet they also proof that this already
before the wave of protests that swept the Arab world. According to Internet
World Stats, Syrian access to internet in 2010 reached almost 4 million people,
namely 17.7% of the population.4 It should be remembered that internet in
Syria opened to the public only in 2000, quite late even compared with the oth-
er Arab countries, but its growth rate is one of the highest in the world.5 Apart
from the usual actors such as Google, YouTube or Facebook, it is the Syrian
news websites that appear to play the most relevant role as regards online con-
sumption. If, for example, we examine the Alexa rankings, we find as many as
three local news websites in the first ten positions (Syria News, Aks Alser, SANA),
and 10 among the first 60 positions (Dpress, Muassasat al-wahda, Damas Post, Sha-
ku Maku, Tishreen, Syria Steps, Cham Press).6 Although it is true that the Alexa
statistics must be taken always quite cautiously, nevertheless they offer an indica-
tor of the relevance of local news institutions within the online environment.
In a weak media system like the Syrian one, online journalism appears to
have met a demand for different forms of political communication, so becoming
a phenomenon with a distinct identity and, although contested, recognition.
This impression seems to be reinforced by the image that online journalism en-
joys in opposition to the traditional press. If we look, for example, at the cover-
age that pan-Arab newspapers dedicated to the upcoming law entrusted with the
regulation of internet in Syria, a sharp distinction tends to emerge. In these arti-
cles online journalism is presented as a field that cannot be assimilated into the
rest of the political communication system. The Lebanese al-A²b…r defines the
Syrian internet sphere as the “realm of anarchy and randomness”, and as the “il-
————
3 – T™nis: al-i|tiÞaÿ…t al-ša¼biyyah tu¥†| bi-zayn al-¼…bid†n wa-tuÞbiru| ¼alà muÐ…dar…t al-
balad, Syria News, 15 January 2011.
4 – Internet World Stats. For Syrian statistics, see http://www.internetworldstats.com/me/
sy.htm.
5 – See for example the OpenNet initiative report at http://www.internetworldstats.com/me/
sy.htm.
6 – The statistics were gathered on the 25 February 2011.
SYRIAN NEWS WEBSITES 107
legitimate son” of the Syrian media family (Kan¼…n, 8 June 2010). Al-Quds al-
¼arab† describes the effects of the law in terms of a “sharp deterioration” of on-
line journalism, since it “enjoyed greater freedom than the printed press”.7 Al-
ðay…t says that online journalism brought up “interactivity”, “the point of view
of the people”, and even “citizen journalism” (Ibr…h†m 2010).
Against this background, this article analyzes some aspects of Syrian news
websites. In particular it intends to analyse how the virtual newspapers have
been positioning themselves within the Syrian media environment, and how
they are defining their identities in opposition to one another and, of course, in
opposition to the traditional media. The following questions are raised with re-
spect to online journalism: how is internet changing political communication in
Syria? Do they see themselves in the same way as journalists of traditional media
or are they building up their professional identities essentially on a wider, global
and technological-driven basis? Which kind of forms of political communication
do they express? How does the negotiation between journalists and political
sources work regarding online journalism?
The choice to focus the analysis uniquely on these media outlets rather than
on blogs and social networks is due to various reasons. Blogs still lack enough
credibility to play a significant role within Syrian society. Moreover, the regime
seems to be much less tolerant towards these realities, suffocating them with
much more determination. For these reasons their prominence in relation to the
general media environment seems to be still quite modest in comparison with
their western counterparts, but also in comparison with those in other Arab
countries like Egypt. The decision not to focus directly on social networks de-
pends on the difficulty in analyzing them from a journalistic point of view.
Moreover, Facebook as a political tool was not yet largely exploited until the
wave of revolutions in other countries at the beginning of 2011, being used
mainly for entertainment and social aims only.
As Gonzalez-Quijano (2006) points out, the nature of internet is volatile: it
is difficult to identify the boundaries between different sources and to distin-
guish between various content typologies. For these reasons, news websites can
be a better entry point to tackle online realities in Syria, since they have the ad-
vantage to be media outlets with many similarities with the traditional ones.
Journalists working for the new media should be considered as an integral part
of the Syrian communication system and of the journalistic field, even if the re-
lationship with old media is sometimes difficult and the mutual recognition al-
ways has to be negotiated. But at the same time, news websites are also actors
who fully belong to the new forms of political communication introduced by
internet. In this sense, in this article it is argued that the editorial strategy of Syr-
ian news websites is primarily based on the characteristics differentiating internet
from traditional media. Online journalism is also the arena of delicate negotia-
————
7 – “Q…n™n murtaqib |awla al-internet yu|addid al-|urriyyah al-haššah li-i¼l…m f† s™riyah”, al
Quds al-¼arab†, 4 November 2010.
tions between different needs and pressures within the national system of politi-
cal communication. The outcome of this negotiation is the construction of a
discourse around online journalism that gives it an ambiguous status. As a con-
sequence, the expectations, the rules and the perceptions of roles regulating
online journalism are distinct from those characterizing traditional media.
The theoretical framework

The structure of this study relies on a model that conceptualizes political com-
munication as a system of dynamic interactions among political actors, the me-
dia and members of the audience, receiving and interpreting political messages
(Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). To put it in the words of Voltmer:
All these actors – but particularly politicians and the media – are con-
stantly involved in a complex web of interactions and negotiations
over aims, procedures and, ultimately, control of the public agenda
(2006: 6).
As a consequence of this continuous interaction, journalists and political sources
establish a “mutual interdependence” (Voltmer 2006) and a “competitive sym-
biosis” (Wolfsfeld 1999).
Since all the actors are connected, any change in one element of the system
implies modifications in the behavior and the orientations of the other actors
who have to adapt to the new conditions by redefining their roles and their
strategies. In addition, the system responds to variations occurring in the broad-
er environment: new technologies, the rise of new actors, political and economic
developments, repercussions of international events.
Two main benefits ensue from trying to place Arab political communication
phenomena in a system framework. First, it is an antidote against the tendency
to underestimate or overemphasize any single element of the political communi-
cation system. In the last few years some changes have made the relations be-
tween politics and media much more complex than before. The advent of trans-
national broadcasting stations has introduced new models and standards of
journalism in the region. And the capacity of these media outlets to cross na-
tional boundaries makes it more difficult for Arab governments to control them.
In addition, the process of economic liberalization has led to the birth of private
national media in almost all Arab countries, Syria included. Finally, the advent
of internet takes the globalization of the media a step further, creating, for the
first time, a bridge connecting the national public spheres.
In order to deal effectively with these changes, we cannot rely on political
economy approaches only, since the political elites cannot control the news
agenda as before. The media field cannot be considered just as a dependent vari-
able of political communication processes. In this regard, Brian McNair (2006)
points out that today the control paradigm should be replaced by a chaos para-
digm in order to understand the mechanisms of the relations between media and
politics. While we should always acknowledge the desire for control on the part
of the elites, the exercise of control “is increasingly interrupted and disrupted by
unpredictable eruptions and bifurcations arising from the impact of economic,
political, ideological and technological factors on communication processes”
(McNair 2006: 3).
On the other hand, it is important not to overestimate technological or
transnational factors. This will occur, for example, if we treat them as a panacea
in relation to the promotion of democratization processes. A systemic approach
has the advantage of allowing us to take into account both the international and
the local dimensions as well as technological and professional factors. Moreover,
approaching political communication as a system means also to attempt to link
the dimensions of structure and culture of political communication processes
(Pfetsch 2001). This implies considering as relevant both the macro-level condi-
tions and the micro-level variables (Gunther and Mughan 2000).
The structural dimension refers to the nature of the political regime, the me-
dia ownership structure, the dimension of the market, the parallelism between
media and political forces, and the formal regulations concerning political com-
munication (Hallin and Mancini 2004). The cultural dimension refers to what
Blumler and Gurevitch have called the culture of political communication:
In any continuing relationship based on mutual dependence and
need, a culture, structuring all the areas of behavior in which both
sides regularly interact, tends to emerge. The norms of that culture
then (1) regulate the relationship, (2) get embedded in behavioral
routines which often assume the status of precedents to be followed
in the future, (3) are points of reference when disputes arise over al-
leged failures to respect existing ground rules or demands to change
them, and (4) revert to and become absorbed into the internal role
definitions of the respective actors (1995: 36-37).
To include the cultural dimension means to acknowledge that, especially in the
era of globalization, we have to take into account how the daily practices of
journalists and politicians are influenced by the presence of new actors, new
technologies, and the changes in the broader environment.
The empirical analysis

Within this theoretical framework, the analysis takes into account both the
structural and the cultural dimensions relating to news websites in Syria. With
regard to structural dimension, the ownership structure and the formal legisla-
tion concerning internet will have to be reconstructed. On the cultural side, as
the study is exploratory in nature, a qualitative method of focused interviews has
been chosen.
The interviews took place between November 2010 and January 2011 in
Damascus, and they were conducted with the editors-in-chief of some of the
most important Syrian news websites: Niÿ…l Ma½l™f of Syria News,¼Al† ßam…l™
of Cham Press, Mu|ammad ¼Abd al-Ra|†m of Sham News, Fir…s ¼Adrah of Dpress,
M…zen Bil…l of Suria al-Ghad, R…m† Man¡™r of Shaku Maku and Nab†l Ÿ…li| of
al-Jamal. The respondents were asked about their views of online journalism;
their working routines; the perception of the role of the different media typolo-
gies within the Syrian environment; their expectations regarding political elites
in relation to the media and internet in particular; the nature of their interac-
tions with political sources; the conditions that shape their working context. The
recordings of a workshop organized the 26th of January at IFPO Damascus which
had journalism and internet as its object are also used.8
The interviews were later analyzed and compared in order to reconstruct the
most widespread elements of the cultures of political communication character-
izing online journalism. We also conducted a number of interviews with jour-
nalists working for other news websites or for other media. For example, Mu-
|ammad D†b™ and ³…lid ¼Al†, the former editors-in-chief of Shaku Maku, and
³…lid al-I²tiy…r, who writes for the banned website All4Syria. In addition, I ob-
served the home pages of the websites on a daily basis from the 28th of October
to the 17th of December. Finally, some articles directly concerning the status of
online journalism in Syria, such as those discussing the possible effects of the
upcoming internet law, were analyzed in greater detail.
The choice of the seven websites mentioned above does not only rely on the
official relevance of the media outlets. Some news websites such as SANA or the
Muassasa al-wahda, for example, occupy higher positions in Alexa rankings than
websites such as Suria al-Ghad or Sham News. But the relevance of websites such
as SANA and other governmental media appear to depend strictly on the fact
that they reflect directly the voice of the Syrian regime, and they are probably
visited precisely for this purpose.
Instead, the choice has been made to put together various considerations.
First, all the websites chosen are relevant to the Syrian internet sphere, playing
distinct roles in it. Syria News, Cham Press, Shaku Maku, Dpress and Sham News
are the most important private websites aimed at a general public. As such, they
cover all the spectrum of journalistic topics: global and local news, sport, econ-
omy and soft news such as television drama series, accidents and so on. Suria al-
Ghad is a website which focuses on geopolitics, and it is close to being a branch
of the ðizb al-Qawm†, the National Party. It offers in-depth analysis of interna-
tional issues, trying to read them from a Syrian perspective. Al-Jamal is some-
thing between a blog and a website of political analysis. It does not have a
proper staff of journalists, but tends to be identified with its editor-in-chief,
Nab†l Ÿ…li|, a well-known intellectual and journalist who was behind the short
but lively experience of al-Domari.9 The website offers analysis and opinions
mostly obtained through the translation of material from foreign media such as
CNN, BBC World, and of course by copying from other Arab news websites.
————
8 – For details see http://www.ifporient.org/node/844.
9 – Al-Domari (“The Lamplighter”) was a satirical weekly founded by political cartoonist ¼Al†
Ferz…t in 2001. It was closed by Syrian authorities in 2003.
Moreover, all these websites are private and exist only in internet version,
that is to say, they are not the extension of television channels or printed news-
papers. This is particularly important because online journalism in Syria is not
identified, as often happens in Europe, with online versions of traditional media.
On the contrary, these outlets were born on internet and they only exist on
internet. As we will see, this aspect creates a stronger identification between the
online outlets and the medium they use. The journalists appear to be well aware
of the differences that being online means in terms of forms of political com-
munication, presentation of the news, and margins of freedom. In other words,
these websites represent internet and in particular online journalism in Syria,
delineating an opposition with traditional media that in Europe is less neat. By
contrast, it is evident that traditional media, with the exception, perhaps, of the
daily newspaper al-Wa¥an, are not investing in their internet extensions. These
appear to be only a necessary and generally not very well executed digitization of
their original content. When you ask a Syrian about news websites, they do not
think of any of the traditional institutions.
Finally, all the websites that I have chosen are authorized, that is to say they
are not officially forbidden in Syria. Their offices are all situated in Damascus.
In this sense, they can be considered as an integral part of the Syrian political
communication system.
The structural dimension

Formal legislation
At the time of writing this piece, there is no law regulating internet in Syria. As
such, Syrian online journalism is not governed in the same way as television or
the printed press. It seems possible, in any case, that this condition will change
soon, as a law intending to organize the use of internet was enacted by the gov-
ernment and passed to the Council of the People at the end of October for final
approval.
The absence of a law governing the use of internet has affected the nature of
online journalism in multiple ways. First, Syrian news websites do not exist from
an administrative point of view. They do not have to obtain a license from the
Prime Minister as the other media do: usually they just send a memo to inform
the Ministry of Communications of their presence. By the same token, journal-
ists working for these organizations are not able to register themselves in the Un-
ion of the Journalists, and so they cannot enjoy the same benefits enjoyed by
journalists working for the other media, for example a pension at the end of
their careers.
The lack of recognition is also evident in the locations where the offices are
situated. The great majority of them are situated in residential apartments, re-
adapted for this function. There is no tag placed outside the apartment or the
building signaling their presence to the public. Even the most important and the
richest of them, Syria News, is not an exception. Outside on the interphone
there is just the name of the editor-in-chief, Engineer Niÿ…l Ma½l™f. Their of-
fices are very difficult to find and, in my experience, it is even useless to ask any-
one in the neighborhood.
Of course, the small size of the offices and their modest nature are not lim-
ited to online outlets only. There are many small magazines that found them-
selves in the same situation. And even an important newspaper like al-Wa¥an
does not possess offices that are much bigger. The scarce resources of Syrian pri-
vate media do not allow them to acquire more than that. But in general the oth-
er media at least have a sign on the door signaling their presence, even if we do
not consider the sharp contrast with the big media state institutions as SANA,
Muassasa al-wahda or Syrian Television.
The absence of a law, however, also has some advantages. Since they are not
registered, the news websites have to pay taxes on ads only if the advertisers are
state-owned companies. Otherwise, they do not have the obligation to pass
through the Arab Advertisement Organization, which takes a large percentage of
ad revenues. According to the journalists, the possibility to avoid tax payment
encourages the investments of advertisers in online journalism more than in tel-
evision or the printed press. And many editors-in-chief claim to be economically
independent thanks to the ads. Out of the seven websites on which this article is
focused, five have advertisements on their pages.
Though this can appear surprising if compared to western standards, the pe-
culiarities of the Syrian advertisement market should be considered, in which
the printed press is estimated to cover between 45 and 60 per cent of the entire
advertising market and television only 5 per cent (Birke 2009). In any case, since
it is not possible to have access to transparent data, it is also impossible to recon-
struct the weight of advertisement in online journalism in the exact way.
Table 1
Website Editor-in Owner Investor Advertising
name chief
Syria News Niÿ…l Ma½l™f Syrian Economic Syrian Economic Society, Yes
Society (Niÿ…l Fir…s ¦l…s (M.A.S.)
Ma½l™f)
Shaku Maku R…m† Man¡™r Onyxar Onyxar (Sulaym…n Yes
Ma¼r™f, financer of al-
Dunia)
Sham News Mu|ammad Ninar (Rami Ninar (Rami Makhlouf, Yes
¼Abd al- Makhlouf) financer of al-Wa¥an,
Ra|†m owner of Syriatel)
Al-Jamal Nabīl Ÿal…| Nab†l Ÿal…| ? No
Dpress Fir…s ¼Adrah Fir…s ¼Adrah ? Yes
Cham Press ¼Al† ßam…l™ Independent ? Yes
Media Group
(of ¼Al† ßam…l™)
Suria al- M…zin Bil…l M…zin Bil…l Syriana (Bil…l Turkm…n†, No
Ghad financer of Abyaÿ wa-
Aswad)
The ownership structure

Reconstructing the ownership structure of private media in Syria is particularly
difficult. The ways of funding are not clear, and most of the time the websites
are not registered with the names of the real owners. As one journalist told me:
“There is no such a thing in Syria as ‘website owners’, or at least not with this
exact meaning. We should talk about investors instead”.10 What is more impor-
tant, the borders between the state and the new entrepreneurs of the private me-
dia are quite blurred and difficult to keep distinct (Perthes 1995, 2004, 2004a).
Given this premise, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct some of the
more visible aspects constituting the business map behind the news websites. As
Table 1 shows, the ownership structure reflects more or less the same structure
that characterizes private media in general. Syria News is financed by Fir…s ¦l…s,
owner of MAS Economic Group11 and son of former Minister of Defense Mu¡-
¥afà ¦l…s. MAS is a group of enterprises with interests in food production and
merchandising and Real Estate.
Shaku Maku is owned by Onyxar Group, a company linked to Sulaym…n
Ma¼r™f, the agent for Honda in Syria. Ma¼r™f is, together with Mu|ammad
ðamš™, one of the most important shareholders of Al-Dunia television, a private
satellite channel operating in Syria. Onyxar is a company that owns a number of
media, such as websites, radio and magazines. Sham News is part of the group
Ninar, owned, among others, by R…m† Ma²l™f, cousin of President Bashar al-
Asad and the main shareholder of Syriatel and of al-Wa¥an. Ninar owns Radio
Ninar and Sham FM, two of the main private radio stations in Syria, and a satel-
lite channel, Ninar TV will also soon be opened. Suria al-Ghad is financed by
Syriana Group, headed by Bil…l Turkm…n†, son of the former Minister of De-
fense ðasan Turkm…n† and owner of the magazine Abyaÿ wa-Aswad. The rest of
the websites claim to be “independent”: Dpress is officially property of its editor-
in-chief, Fir…s ¼Adrah, a former journalist from al-Wa¥an; Cham Press is prop-
erty of the Independent Media Group, created by ¼Al† ßam…l™, a Baathist
member party and former journalist for governmental media; al-Jamal is owned
by Nab†l Ÿ…li|. Except for al-Jamal and Suria al-Ghad, the others claim to sur-
vive only with the revenues earned through advertising.
The cultural dimension

As we have seen, the ownership structure of online journalism is very similar to
that of the private media in general. The investors are mainly constituted by a
group of businessmen very close to the regime who have exploited the possibili-
ties opened by the process of economic liberalization that began in the early
————
10 – Interview, November 2010.
11 – Acronym for min aÞl S™riyah (“For the sake of Syria”): http://www.masgroup.net/english/
index.htm.
1990s (Perthes 2004, Leverett 2005). As mentioned above, in order to investi-

gate the differences between these new media and traditional media we have to
make recourse to a cultural dimension as well, and to an analysis of the micro-
dimension of political communication. Only in this way is it possible to take
into account the impact of media globalization on local communication proc-
esses. Moreover, the cultural dimension is necessary in order to understand how
a new technology such as internet influences the negotiation between journalists
and political sources.
Internet: a controversial technology
The first step we must take in order to introduce the main elements of this ne-
gotiation concerns the controversial image surrounding internet in Syria. On the
one hand, internet is synonymous with progress and technological development.
It is an innovation that needs to be promoted and dealt with. In this sense, there
is no alternative to it, if Syria is not to be excluded from modernity. It was the
Bashar al-Asad himself who emphasized the importance of internet in relation to
Syrian interests. In an interview with al-ðay…t in October 1997 he pointed out
the need to integrate the Arab world in the web in order to make the Arab point
of view more visible (Zisser 2007). In a similar vein he told the editor of the
Egyptian magazine al-Usb™¼:
There is a need to ensure the existence of an open Arab medium that
makes use of advanced technology to convey our positions. Only this
type of medium, which respects the mentality of the Arab viewer, can
influence public opinion and lead it to support our views (Zisser
2007).
These statements are evidence of a vision of internet as a fundamental ‘media
diplomacy’ tool from which Syria cannot allow itself to be excluded. In this
sense, al-Asad was also one of the founders of the Syrian Computer Society, an
organization designated to promote internet and to regulate the ICT market in
Syria. On the other hand, internet is a medium that is hard to control, where
social networking, connectivity, user-generated content and interactivity play a
primary role.
This lack of controllability of course is a major danger in the eyes of the Syr-
ian regime. According to Ayubi (1995), the Arab state is characterized by a lack
of institutional legitimacy and ideological hegemony. This weakness makes the
control over communication processes one of the first priorities of Arab regimes.
Syria is not an exception. To the weakness of the state we have to add the ethnic
fragmentation of the society, the problematic diplomatic relations with western
countries and other Arab countries, and a history characterized, before the rising
to power of Hafez al-Asad, by instability and frequent coup d’états (Hinnebusch
2001).
A second cause of concern is the dependence on sources from abroad, and in
particular from the United States, for online services. As Khater says:
Middle Eastern countries that do not prepare suitable alternatives to

the most popular Internet services, such as mail, blog platforms,
search engines and cloud computing software, run the risk of eco-
nomic and social disruption. Furthermore, and of equal importance,
the data collected by websites and companies through the Internet
services they provide can give them unique, in depth, and real-time
insight into countries around the globe. The possession of this knowl-
edge by foreign entities, whether private or government-owned, is a
challenge to the sovereignty of other nation states (Khater 2010).
To resolve this problem, Khater recommends to Arab governments to create
suitable domestic services in order to compete with the foreign ones: “the best
way to move people to government-approved services (private- or state-owned)
would be through silent degradation of traffic to foreign websites” (Ibid.). Fi-
nally, online journalism seems to share the same flaws that the private media sec-
tor has in general in the eyes of public opinion. That is to say, there is the per-
ception of a certain lack of professionalism and patriotism on the one hand, and
on the other hand they are seen as having strong connections with the wealthy
businessmen near to the regime (Caldwell 2010).
Prime Minister Mu|ammad N…Þ† al-¼U¥r†, on the occasion of a speech to
the center of the Baath party (D…r al-ba¼Å) on the 24th August 2009, divided
Syrian media into three categories:
Journalists engaged and loyal to the country and its interests, and
journalists not engaged except with their personal interests. And
these ones pass from the public to private sector and write in a con-
tradictory way. And they have to decide which sector they belong to
in order to end this schizophrenic condition they live in. In addition,
there is a hostile journalism, for which there is not any hope (¼ƒ½išah
2010).
The editorial identity

These contrasting perceptions about the internet and the private media make
the management of online journalism in Syria very difficult, as its development
appears to be the result of multiple, ongoing negotiations.
First, the necessity on the part of the authorities to let news websites develop
in a way that makes them capable of competing with other, foreign actors is
counterbalanced by the necessity to exercise a certain level of control. Second,
online journalism has to struggle to gain recognition and legitimacy within Syr-
ian society and the professional community. To deal with these different pres-
sures and needs, online journalism has developed an ambivalent identity. The
journalists working for these websites see and present themselves as the expres-
sion of a ‘new journalism’, clearly distinguishable from the traditional one. They
are connected with the vast universe of the web, have a daily interaction with
their readers, and enjoy more freedom than any other media. But on the other
hand, they are also in search for a public recognition of their status as profes-
sional and responsible journalists.
The editorial stance taken by online journalism can be summarized in four
main elements: interactivity, local news content, connectivity, and social responsibil-
ity. The first three indicate the shaping of a ‘technology-oriented’ identity. This
indicates the inclination of news websites to give meaning to their presence in
the broader media system on the basis of the forms of political communication
made possible by internet technology. This does not mean that the content does
not present differences to a certain degree from that of traditional media. As the
technology and other conditions change, the content also inevitably changes at
the same time. But the intention is, instead, to emphasize that the strategies to
attract readers are rooted in the different forms of political communication that
internet makes available: interactivity, connectivity, immediacy and the possibil-
ity to use different types of messages such as videos, images, and articles at the
same time.
This choice presents many advantages. First of all, it offers an easy way to at-
tract readers and to build up a recognizable identity. As the respondents gener-
ally acknowledged in the interviews, it is very difficult for an editor-in-chief in
Syria to develop an original and specific editorial policy. It is almost impossible
to offer independent positions in foreign or domestic politics. The ‘red lines’ are
valid for everyone, and all the journalists know it. So making recourse to inter-
net to differentiate their offer from the other traditional media appears to be a
natural choice.
The second reason is that using internet offers a justification to renegotiate
some ‘rules of the game’ with the authorities. To operate on internet with the
same restraints and controls applied to old media simply does not work. And
journalists try to use this point to gain more freedoms. The third element, social
responsibility, refers to the effort by the journalists to present themselves as
“professional” journalists working for Syrian interests. In this sense, they see
their role as promoters of Syrian points of view abroad. In addition, they have
the task of introducing internet to the Syrian people in a gradual and responsible
way.
Interactivity
Syrian websites make use of all the tools that internet offers in this direction.
Almost all the articles include comments by the readers. They make an extensive
use of votes that later are discussed in articles. They have sections such as “most
commented”, “most read”, “most posted”. They set up discussion forums. They
have sections dedicated to readers’ contributions and others reporting their com-
plaints. Syria News for example has a parallel site linked to the main one, whose
aim is to receive complaints, redirect them to the ministries, and then to publish
the answers.12
————
12 – http://syria-news.com/wilive/.
This aspect was indicated by all the editors-in-chief as the most important
element differentiating online journalism from traditional journalism. To de-
scribe this phenomenon, they frequently use expressions such as “school of de-
mocracy”, “interactivity”, “citizen journalism”, or even “culture of the people”.
Nab†l Ÿ…li| in an interview with al-ðay…t states that
online journalism in a short time has demonstrated that it offers the
best exercise of democracy thanks to the windows allowing readers to
vote and the system of comments on the published articles … And it
gave the possibility to the Syrian citizen to be present in the virtual
space of internet (Ibr…h†m 2010).
Another editor-in-chief went even further in this direction:
the most important thing written on Syrian websites is not written by
journalists; it is the readers’ reactions to the articles. There you find
the real news, that is where people can say ‘what is this discourse
without meaning? What is this nonsense?’ You find that the readers
are more intelligent than the journalists, and this is quite a disaster. I
mean, it is supposed that it is the duty of journalism to teach the peo-
ple, to give them information. And what happens to the information,
if the street knows more than me? What is my utility? And you find
it’s the readers who penetrate more into the issues, they write more
courageous words, more important than the article itself. And you
find that the readers have a good level of consciousness, they know
that this is nonsense, or that you as a journalist can’t write this way.
And for this reason they write better than you. I mean they say
‘What’s this? This employee is the corrupt one in this country? We
know that there is one more corrupt than him’. As a journalist, you
can’t write this. But you find those who comment on your articles
writing it.13
Interactivity means also to claim that one practices a kind of journalism that is
nearer to the public taste, and in particular that of young people. An example is
one journalist quoted by al-ðay…t as saying that online journalism offers news
“in a different way from the speech construction of printed journalism, which
continues to be governed by a discourse construction used by our fathers and
ancestors” (Ibr…h†m 2010).
Local news content
One of the first things you notice when you start reading Syrian news websites is
that they focus much more on local issues than the traditional press does. The
difference can be found not only in the number of the articles, but also in the
hierarchy given to the topics. In the traditional press the priority is given to in-
ternational affairs or to diplomatic meetings between Syrian officials and their
————
foreign counterparts. On the contrary, online journalism shows the tendency to

put these topics on the same level as the local ones.
Local news is better adapted to the interactive tendency of these websites,
since they are more suitable to create community spaces where people can chat,
exchange opinions and knowledge, in a similar way to what happens on Face-
book and other social networks. Moreover, it also allows these journalists to fill
the gap left by the scarcity of local news in the panorama of Arab media, with
transnational televisions focusing mostly on pan-Arab issues (Sakr 2007, Harou-
tunian 2010). Finally, according to the journalists, a great percentage of visitors
to the websites are from abroad, and in particular are Syrians in search of local
news.
The local dimension is considered by journalists as one of the main aspects
differentiating online journalism from traditional journalism. An editor-in-chief
criticized al-Jazeera and the other pan-Arab channels, saying that their news
agenda has the negative effect of distracting the Arab audiences from their real,
domestic problems:
During the time you listen to a speech about the Americans, and the
bad role of Americans, and Israel, and the global Zionists, there is no
Syria there. The difference is that now the new generation doesn’t
want to listen to this empty speech. They don’t want this debate, and
they don’t want to know what happens in Iraq. They are not inter-
ested. If you go down to the streets and ask who al-M…lik† is, you
won’t find five people who know. And this is good, because the
treatment of real problems starts from the treatment of your own
problems. I don’t deny that those are problems. But the real prob-
lems are those that you face when you wake up in the morning:
which work you can find, what chances you have, what the system of
your country is. For this reason, when you discover that the people
have more consciousness about real problems, it is better so.14
Connectivity
News websites see themselves as filters between the World Wide Web and the
Syrian political communication system, playing this role in both directions,
from abroad to Syria and from Syria to abroad. They select journalistic material
from external links and they propose it in their pages. And most of the time they
do it without using links, but simply through a copy-and-paste procedure. In
the same way, almost all the websites were already present both on Facebook
and Twitter even when the social networks were officially forbidden. This prac-
tice is deeply rooted in work routines, and for that reason online journalism is
frequently attacked as a non-professional and a parasitic kind of journalism. For
sure, piracy is a central part of the editorial strategy of news websites for several
————
reasons, and without it online journalism would lose its raison d’être within the
political communication system.
First of all, Syrian news websites rely on it to compensate for the limited
funding. Except for Syria News, which has over 50 employees, the other outlets
do not have enough journalists available to cover all the stories. A website like
al-Jamal is the extreme case, having only translators assigned to picking up news
or analysis from internet and presenting it in Arabic on the website pages. They
often take from Lebanese newspapers, all the international news agencies and the
most relevant international media, such as BBC, CNN and the likes. Sometimes
piracy is also practiced among websites, generally, but not always, through citing
the original source at the end.
Secondly, in this way the journalists present an editorial identity that belongs
not only to the Syrian political communication system but also to the web and
thus a new kind of news management, where there are fewer restraints and a dif-
ferent conception of copyrights. In this sense, they use this possibility as a pre-
cise editorial strategy to include some opinions that in other ways they could not
publish. One editor-in-chief, for example, tried to give interviews to al-Jazeera
criticizing internet law, in order to publish the same article afterwards on his
site.15 An article published by Agence France Press against the law was also given
much visibility for the same reason.16
Social responsibility
The last component refers to a group of journalistic values that generally in me-
dia studies literature goes under the name of “social responsibility”. This indi-
cates the inclination of journalists to evaluate carefully their work in relation to
the negative consequences that it could provoke on stability, the cohesion of so-
ciety, and the development of the country. As Mellor points out, this profes-
sional culture is quite widespread within the Arab world. The charter of the Un-
ion of Journalists states in 1964 that Arab journalists “should be honest in ex-
pressing their own editorial opinions, bearing in mind the general consequences
of those opinions on the general public” (Mellor 2005: 85). It is a culture of po-
litical communication rooted in the perception of the chronic instability of the
region, in the awareness of the complex balances within these societies, and in
the feeling of always being threatened by external forces.
In the interviews this aspect also emerged strongly as a guideline for the be-
havior of journalists. This translates first of all into a self-restraint that is only
partially due to censorship and political control. But in this specific case, it
means especially to promote a good image of Syria abroad and to promote the
points of views of the Syrian establishment and Syrian audience on the web.
————
15 – Interview, October 2010.
16 – Q…n™n murtaqib |awla al-internet yu|addid al-|urriyyah li-i¼l…m f† s™riyah, Syrian Steps, 6
November 2010: http://www.syriasteps.com/?d=127&id=58872.
One editor-in-chief claims this role in one editorial against the upcoming
law, saying:
For this reason we say to our leaders have a better opinion about us.
We are citizens as you are too, and we can make errors and we can
cause damage just like you. And we are a sector that is born to sup-
port you and not to create obstacles … And we are connected with
the world and we are absorbed in it with a certain amount of trust
and freedom to represent our country and our nation amongst the
nations (Ÿ…li| 2010).
This duty is also made clear by many of the names of these websites, that recall
explicitly their belonging to Syria: Syria News, Cham Press, Sham News, Damas
Post, Syrian Steps, Syrian Days, and so on. These websites present themselves as
the voice of Syria on the web.
Finally, with the term “social responsibility” we are also referring to the ef-
fort by the journalists themselves to be recognized as professional workers like
those working for the other media. In this sense, they use conventional strategies
to address the public and the authorities: they emphasize the reactions of politi-
cians to their articles; they give visibility to exclusive interviews and to original
reportages; they try to offer the entire spectrum of topics, including interna-
tional politics, just like the other media; they publish articles to celebrate their
popularity with the Syrian public.17
Conclusion: an ambiguous negotiation

The editorial identity of news websites in Syria appears to be the result of an on-
going negotiation between different actors and different needs. The construction
of an ambivalent identity, combining new media forms of political communica-
tion on the one hand, and, on the other, “social responsibility aspects, enables
online journalism to play different roles on different chessboards. In particular,
journalists working for news websites appear to play a role of mediation between
the larger sphere of internet and the local political communication system. In
this sense, one of their main tasks is to try to mitigate the possible dangers that
the advent of internet can create for the regime. We can say that news websites
are built up on the one hand to “represent Syria on internet”, and, on the other,
“to represent internet in Syria”.
Today social networks, blogs and international news websites are for Syrian
citizens a tempting alternative to traditional media and the regime cannot exercise
any kind of control over them. To deal with these new powerful actors, the local
political communication system has to develop media outlets that are more com-
petitive in the international arena and at the same time nearer to traditional pro-
————
17 – See, for example, AkÅar min mily™n q…ri½ yut…bi¼™n syrianews f† ¼†d m†l…dih… al-s…dis, Syr-
ia News, 22 February 2001: http://www.syria-news.com/readnews.php?sy_seq=129079.
fessional values. For this purpose, journalism is of course subjected, as the other
local media are, to some forms of control of a structural and cultural nature.
An emergency law has often been used, as happened against many bloggers
in the last few years.18 Other times, the control can be practiced through the in-
vestors who are behind online journalism, as happened, for example, with the
removal of Mu|ammad D†b™ as editor-in-chief of Shaku Maku. He had pub-
lished an article about a scandal concerning the falsification of titles in Univer-
sity competition with the compliance of the Minister of Education. Just after the
publication of the article, the owners of the website fired him.19
The restraints are also applied through direct and daily warnings by security
services. Two cases occurred which I observed during the field research period.
The first was when a journalist from the communist semi-tolerated newspaper
Q…siy™n opened a group of solidarity with the Tunisian revolution, An… s™r†, an…
t™nis† (“I’m Syrian, I’m Tunisian”). The security services called her just a few
hours after the group was established, ordering her to close it. The second case
occurred when the website Dpress published in the early morning of the 4th De-
cember 2010, an article about the Facebook profile of Mo|sen Bil…l, the Minis-
ter of Information.20 The problem, of course, was that at the time Facebook was
still forbidden in Syria. I was at the Ministry of Information that morning and
the security services called immediately to urge the employees to deal with the
article, which they actually did by informing directly Fir…s ¼Adrah, the editor-
in-chief of Dpress. In both cases the pressures did not produce any result, since
the group and the article were not removed in the end. But these cases can give
an idea of the continuous and pervasive controls exercised by the security ser-
vices on the publication of internet content.
Finally, as we have seen, the pressures also take the form of a cultural nego-
tiation with other journalists and in general with the local political communica-
tion system: journalists working for the websites have to struggle to be recog-
nized as a legitimate media field in relation to professionalism, patriotism and
social responsibility. At the same time, the need to face the reality of media global-
ization and the rules of the internet sphere compel Syrian authorities to limit
state intervention and to let online journalism compete to a certain degree with
other actors of the same sphere. Only in this way will it be possible for online
journalism to be able to represent a distinctly Syrian voice effectively within the
international arena.
————
18 – For example the trial and arrest of the blogger Kar†m al-¼ArbaÞ† in 2008. See http://
www.menassat.com/?q=en/alerts/3897-syria-trial-blogger-karim-arbaji-adjourned.
19 – Interview, January 2011. See http://all4syria.info/content/view/35666/96/ for the history
of Mu|ammad D†b™’s expulsion from Shaku Maku. The original article by D†b™ can be read
at http://www.chamtimes.com/37541.html.
20 – Waz†r al-i¼l…m ya¥lub ¡ad…qat muw…¥inihi ¼alà Facebook, Dpress, 4 December 2010, http://
www.dp-news.com/pages/detail.aspx?l=1&articleid=65334.
Whether they can really play this role successfully remains to be seen in the
future. But it is evident that until now the policy of the political establishment
towards online journalism in Syria is characterized by an unusual laissez-faire,
allowing these websites to live in a sort of ‘no man’s land’. Online journalism is
managed as a sort of ‘private enclave of publicity’, a space that appears not to be
considered as being on the same level regarding its public nature as the other
media. The absence of a law, the lack of visibility of news website offices, and
the lack of recognition of online journalism as a credible, professional source of
news, are all elements that contribute building up around these media institu-
tions a status of ambiguity that allows Syrian authorities to close an eye on their
activities.21
In this sense, Syrian authorities act ‘as if’ what is written and shown on in-
ternet in the local sphere does not deserve the same attention and the same level
of control reserved to other media. That was evident in relation to Facebook
management before the recent lifting of the ban. The social network was offi-
cially forbidden, but actually it was freely used by everyone through proxies in
every internet café or even at the Ministry of Information’s offices. In the same
way, news websites before the ban’s lifting could show on their homepages the
links to their Twitter or Facebook pages, without any cause for concern. In this
context, journalists of online media wield the distinct status of internet to ac-
quire certain advantages in the negotiation with the authorities.
In an article against the upcoming law Niÿ…l Ma½l™f, editor-in-chief of Syria
News, even compares the success of Syrian websites to that of Syrian drama stat-
ing that “this developing sector doesn’t have any less opportunity for success and
supremacy on the Arab level than that of Syrian drama” (Ma½l™f 2010). In the
same way, Nab†l Ÿ…li| says:
we have to add to the positive aspects of electronic journalism the
merit of giving circulation to Syria and distributing it abroad after a
half century of failure of the printed press in crossing the boundaries
toward the Arab reade (Ibr…h†m 2010).
This view is reinforced by the awareness of the uncontrollable nature of internet.
In this sense, the journalists do not seem very concerned with the upcoming
internet law. In their opinion, it is not possible to restrain internet freedoms and
the “tsunami”, as they call it, of the new media. As one editor-in-chief said:
internet works like quantum physics. If you try to put pressure on
some particles, blocking their movements in one area, then you have
unpredictable results and explosions of energy in other areas, where
maybe you can’t control the reactions any more.22
The upcoming law, a journalist pointed out, “binds the hands of domestic jour-
————
21 – For the concept of “private enclaves of publicity” see Wedeen (1999).
22 – Interview, December 2010.
nalism and doesn’t affect journalism outside of Syria” (Ÿ…li| 2010). This strategy
of management of online journalism, however, has been at least partially inter-
rupted by the escalation of the Syrian crisis a few months after the beginning of
the revolt. When the regime decided to react more decisively to the protests also
on the propaganda level, the news websites were forced to align with the re-
gime’s positions similarly to the other national media, and consequently social
networks such as Facebook acquired a more relevant role.
References
¼ƒ½išah, Ÿ. (2010) “Itti|…d al-sa|…fiyy†n al-s™riyy†n, dawr al-Ðayb… ad…½ qa¡†r! ”,
Damas Post, 31 March.
¼Akka, N. (2010) “Wiz…rat al-i¼l…m li-syria news: mašr™¼ qan™n al-taw…¡ul ma¼a al-
¼um™m” lan yu|adda min |urriyyat al-ta¼b†r… wa-i¼tim…d al-maw…qi¼ f† al-wi-
z…rah Ðayr ilz…m†, Syria News, 30 October.
Ayubi, N.N. (1995) Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle
East, London, Tauris I.B.
Birke, S. (2009) “Bucking the Trend”, Syria Today, April.
Blumler, J.G. and M. Gurevitch (1995) The Crisis of Public Communication, New
York, Routledge.
Caldwell, L. (2010) “Privileging the Private: Media and Development in Syria”, Ar-
ab Media and Society, 12.
Al-ßirmk…n†, R. (2010) “21% min zuw…r Sham News yar™na anna ¡ud™r q…n™n li-
tan©†m ¼amal al-mawqi¼ al-iliktr™n† sayu|add min |urriyyatih… wa 63% yu¥…lib™-
na bi-waqf al-|aÞb!”, Sham News, 16 November.
Gonzalez-Quijano, Y. (2006) “Les sites d’information en ligne dans l’espace public
syrien”, in Gonzalez-Quijano, Y., and C. Valin, (eds.), La société de l’information
au Proche-Orient. Internet au Liban et en Syrie, Presses de l’Université Saint-
Joseph, Beirut.
Gunther, R., and A. Mughan (2000) “The Media in Democratic and Nondemoc-
ratic Regimes: a Multilevel Perspective”, in Gunther, R., and A. Mughan (eds.),
Democracy and the Media: a Comparative Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Hallin, D.C., and P. Mancini (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three models of Me-
dia and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Haroutunian, M. (2010) “Soft Content to Prevail: News Give in to ‘Sports’ and
‘Movies’. Local Channels Flourishing, Pan-Arab Stations Waning”, Arab Media
and Society, 10.
Hinnebusch, R. A. (1998) “Calculated Decompression as a Substitute for Democra-
tization: Syria”, in Korany, B., R. Brynen, P. Noble, (eds.), Political Liberaliza-
tion and Democratization in the Arab World, London, Lynne Rienner.
––– (2001) Syria: Revolution from the Above, New York, Routledge.
Ibr…h†m, R. (2010) “Dimašq: al-i¼l…m al-iliktr™n† f† S™riyah yatawaÞÞas min q…n™n
¡…rim”, al-ðay…t, 18 June.
Kan¼…n, W. (2010) “S™riyah: tan©†m al-i¼l…m al-iliktr™n† am takm†muh?”, al-A²b…r,
8 June.
Leverett, F. (2005) Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial of Fire, Washington, Brookings.
Khater, R. (2010) “Digital protectionism: preparing for the coming internet em-
bargo”, Arab Media and Society, 12.
Ma¼l™f, N. (2010) “Qaw…n†n tu|…fi© ¼alà al-tur…Å al-¼uÅm…n† … wa-l-¡a|…fah al-
iliktr™niyyah ta²š† min ¼™dat al-makt™biÞ†”, Syria News, 28 October.
McNair, B. (2006) Cultural Chaos: Journalism and Power in a Globalised World, New
York, Routledge.
Leverett, F. (2005) Inheriting Syria. Bashar’s Trial by Fire, Washington, The Brook-
ing Institution.
Mellor, N. (2005) The Making of Arab News, Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield.
Perthes, V. (1995) The Political Economy of Syria under Asad, London, I.B Tauris.
––– (2004) “Syria: Difficult Inheritance”, in Perthes, V. (ed.), Arab Elites: Negotiat-
ing the Politics of Change, London, Lynne Rienner.
––– (2004a) Syria under Bashar al-Asad: Modernisation and the Limits of Change,
New York, Routledge.
Pfetsch, B. (2001) “Political Communication Culture in United States and Ger-
many”, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 6, 1, p. 46-67.
Sakr, N. (2007) Arab Television Today, London, I.B. Tauris.
Ÿ…li|, N. (2010) “Kalbaš…t iliktr™niyyah”, al-Jamal, 29 June.
––– (2010a) “Ilà maÞlis al-ša¼b al-s™r†: na|nu l… nulawwi|… innam… naÐraq”, al-ßa-
mal, 7 November.
––– (2010b) “al-ðuk™mah taqarr q…n™n yuqayyid al-i¼l…m al-iliktr™n†”, al-ßamal,
27 October.
Voltmer, K. (2006) “The mass media and the dynamics of political communication
in processes of democratization: an introduction”, in Voltmer, K. (ed.), Mass
Media and Political Communication in New Democracies, London, Routledge.
Wedeen, L. (1999) Ambiguities of Domination. Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Con-
temporary Syria, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Wolfsfeld, G. (1997) Media and Political Conflict. News from the Middle East, Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press.
Worth, R.F. (2010) “Web tastes freedom inside Syria, and it’s bitter”, New York
Times, 29 September.
Zisser, E. (2007) Commanding Syria: Bashar al-Asad and the First Years in Power,
London, I.B. Tauris.
ELISABETTA COSTA
ONLINE JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL

ACTIVISM IN LEBANON
S ince we live in a multicentered media world and new circuits of media flows
have been entering the media ecologies (Appadurai 1996; Hobart 2007;
Marcus 2006; Peterson, 2003), digital technologies that transcend state bounda-
ries are creating transnational flows in which the cultures of news production are
embedded.
In Lebanon, within the spread of digital technology, online journalism has
entered the local media landscape. The diffusion of several kinds of newspapers
online in English and French has contributed to the creation of a new kind of
journalism addressing both an international audience and the Lebanese diaspora.
While ‘traditional’ newspapers in Arabic address mainly Lebanese and Arab
readers, online newspapers direct their attention not only to the metropolitan
upper middle class, but to the diaspora and to a foreign audience. The online
Lebanese press is not simply the web version of traditional newspapers. The de-
velopment of digital technologies gave rise to new forms and styles of communi-
cation and led to radical transformations in the idea of information itself. As
pointed out by Gonzales-Quijano (2003: 67):
the idea of what is ‘information’ on internet has been totally over-
taken by the rapid technical, legal, and economic changes introduced
by the use of new media. To assess the current situation, one must
look beyond the conventional print media and focus instead on the
new information forms made possible by the technologies.
In this article I present a case study concerning NowLebanon.com, one of the
most read Lebanese journalistic websites in English whose popularity goes be-
yond Lebanon’s border. The first purpose is to investigate online news aimed at
foreigner readers. In particular I analyze news texts, seen as symbolic sites of po-
litical struggle, and produced during the pre- and post-election period in the
spring and summer of 2009. I explore how themes and stories in circulation are
used by Lebanese journalists in order to discredit their political rivals within a
global digital environment. The second goal is to explore extra-textual aspects of
online news meaning. “The medium through which symbols are expressed is
thus always and inevitably a defining characteristic of the text” (Peterson 2003).
I focus on the beliefs that journalists encounter in the use of internet for com-
municative practices. Indeed internet has expanded the potentiality of political
activism thanks both to the presence of new international and transnational im-
Oriente Moderno, XC, 2010, 2, p. 125-138

126 ELISABETTA COSTA
agined audiences and the ideological assumptions associated with this technol-
ogy. Digital media have been shaping news making and people’s understanding
of political activism.
This article aims to contribute to the debate on how contemporary techno-
logical trends are affecting political communication, journalism and the process
of political identity construction. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Bird (2010)
I stress the importance of media content analysis in addition to research on pro-
duction and reception processes. Although anthropology has long omitted the
importance of the text-based approach, the news media have a strong role in re-
vealing the dominant stories that shape everyday reality and journalistic practices
(Bird 2010). Thus, the inclusion of media content analysis becomes pivotal in
understanding the news narratives both from and about Lebanon. It is worth-
while addressing the issue of the relationship between different media worlds
(Ibid.; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002; Peterson 2003) such as inter-
national and local journalism. In order to achieve this goal I focus on the follow-
ing questions: which stories are written by Lebanese journalists in order to le-
gitimize their own political coalition in front of an international audience? What
are the consequences of such journalistic practices on the processes of political
identity construction? Does western journalism affect national and local politics
in Lebanon? What meaning does internet technology convey?1
Media worlds and Lebanese political election:

struggling for international hegemony
In the political elections of June 2009 two different blocks, March 14 and March
8, were competing for the majority in parliament, using all the communication
tools available to them. After four years of political agitation that nearly involved
the country in another civil war, Lebanon was divided into two political blocks:
March 14, comprising as its main parties Saad Hariri’s Future Movement, the
Lebanese Forces and the Kataeb Party, supported by Saudia Arabia, Europe and
USA; and March 8, formed by Hezbollah, Amal, and Aoun’s Free Patriotic Move-
ment, supported by Iran and Syria. Although the elections were expected by the
international public opinion and by Lebanese citizens to be an occasion for the
beginning of another civil war, it was instead conducted mainly peacefully and
fairly. The formation of coalitions competing for the majority in parliament was
the result of a period of internal political transformations, following a renewed
UN interest in the region carried out through Resolutions 1559 and 1701, the
assassination of the Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on 14th February 2005, the dem-
onstration known as the “Cedar Revolution”, and the Israeli invasion of Leba-
non in July 2006 (Corm 2006).
————
1 – This article is based on my fieldwork in Beirut between February and October 2009,
where I had many conversations and interviews with Lebanese journalists from the online press
and with foreign correspondents. Moreover I did online ethnography, following news texts,
forum and social media practices such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Twitter.
ONLINE JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN LEBANON 127
The several political parties united in the two political blocks competing in
the parliamentary elections have been using a wide set of communication tools
beyond the ‘traditional’ media. Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, YouTube,
blogs and several online newspapers became the new means through which ac-
tivists, journalists and politicians struggled to support their political coalition.
The Lebanese mediasphere has always consisted of an ample number of newspa-
pers, magazines, TV and radio stations that mirrored the pluralistic and frag-
mented Lebanese political landscape. Moreover, as pointed out by the media
scholar Nabil Dajani (1992, 2005), after the political changes in 2005 a “re-feu-
dalization of the public sphere” occurred, meaning that the Lebanese media were
reinforcing the characteristics and contradictions of Lebanon’s confessional soci-
ety. In this sense, the proliferation of websites, user generated contents and so-
cial media did not bring large transformations to the sectarian divisions that
characterise the Lebanese media landscape. Contrary to techno-deterministic theo-
ries, new media develop in continuity with the former media practices. New
ideas, codes and technologies enter a local field whose historical dynamics de-
termine the new uses. Indeed, among other reasons, internet in Lebanon has
been appropriated by political parties, politicians and activists because of the op-
portunity for them to spread their point of view to a global audience, beyond
the Lebanese public sphere. As they felt misrepresented in the international jour-
nalistic narratives, many political parties used English language sites in order to
struggle for representation and recognition within an international arena. A
widespread consciousness of foreign political interference in Lebanese affairs and
an understanding of the power of external recognition have become widespread
among Lebanese people and journalists. As pointed out by Bishara (2010), activ-
ists are concerned with how they are represented by US and European media
and they are cognizant of the deep influence that US and European policies have
on their own societies. During the electoral campaign period, both March 8 and
March 14 supporters were paying attention to the influence of western media in
Lebanese political life. Thus, themes and representations were chosen by local
journalists working in the online English press in reaction to the images pro-
vided by western media. Media processes framed and reframed each other and
different media worlds emerged as interrelated within a broad social context.
Within this variegated and rich media ecology I shall focus on the case of
NowLebanon, an online newspaper backed and supported by March 14 and
funded by international donors.2 I will first introduce the discursive strategies
used in fighting for international recognition during the pre and post-election
period. I also show how particular topics are turned into stories and framed in
culturally and historically specific ways. An important point to highlight is that
boundaries between analytical categories normally used in media studies are use-
————
2 – Several reliable and informal sources confirmed to me that NowLebanon was founded by
USAID, but I could not obtain any official reference for this. Since USAID in Lebanon was
massively backing and supporting many Lebanese NGOs, associations and new-media projects
with an anti-Hezbollah agenda, I would consider this information as true.
less here: professional journalism, citizenship journalism, political activism and

propaganda often overlap. In Lebanon it is commonly accepted that news is bi-
ased depending on each media’s ownership, and news making is commonly seen
as a kind of political activism.
NowLebanon: claims to the world

NowLebanon was created on June 2007 by Lebanese activists living in the US
and involved in the “Lebanon Spring” demonstrations in 2005. The website in-
cludes two parts, Arabic and English. These have each their own organizations
and offices, and their contents are largely independent of each another. They
address different audiences, Lebanese and foreign, respectively.
NowLebanon, which includes an acronym for New Opinion Workshop in
Lebanon (NOW), was created “to convey the principles of the Cedar Revolu-
tion, freedom and independence, in an internet web-site” as pointed out by the
chief editor Hanin Ghaddar. During the political campaign in 2009, it was one
of several media that mobilized support for March 14. Through the NowLeba-
non news production, local journalists were involved in a process of creating and
recreating their own representation of Lebanon and March 14 political identi-
ties. A multiplicity of hegemonic articulations, involving a variety of political
and social discourses, was embedded in the news produced and diffused in the
global arena. I present below an opinion piece published on the 28th July 2009
during the long delay in the formation of the government, one month and half
after the parliamentary election.
Working on our image

July 28, 2009
This is the view most people outside the Middle East have of Lebanon. (AFP)
While Messrs Aoun, Nasrallah, Franjieh and the fabulously-named

Zahle in the Heart bloc are hunkering down for the final showdown
over who gets what portfolios, something called the National Brand
Perception Index or NBPI has published its findings. Lebanon ranked
174th among 200 countries around the world and – and this part is
really disgraceful – 15th among the 19 countries that make up the
MENA region. The ranking is supposed to indicate the strength of a
country’s brand by monitoring how often it appears in the media,
but warns that frequency does not necessarily reflect quality. Ouch!
It is probably a dream too far to suppose that one of the priorities of
the next government will be to improve on this mediocre placing; a
feat made even more mediocre when one considers that much of
Lebanon’s brand awareness is negative. A random survey taken in any
major capital would probably indicate that people associate Lebanon
more with instability, kidnapping, war, Hezbollah and terrorism than
its undisputed assets. Wars have a habit of making it onto the front
pages with greater ease than the Temple of Jupiter or a bottle of Cha-
teau Musar.
Other, less-smug countries spend hundreds of millions every year in
advertising themselves. They sell a dream to encourage investment, to
promote key products or simply just to tell people to come and visit.
You might argue, especially today when finding a decent table at a
restaurant or a place to park is a herculean struggle, that Lebanon has
enough visitors, but if the country is to move beyond its role as a
playground for Gulf visitors and the diaspora, it needs to evolve.
The country benefitted from 9/11. When smoke cleared from Ground
Zero and the US saddled up its horses, downtown Beirut opened for
business, conveniently offering Arabs wary of vacationing in Europe
and the US an alternative destination, one that spoke their language,
didn’t judge their habits and wouldn’t humiliate them at passport
control. They came and they spent, and we loved them for it.
But Lebanon has been sitting on its laurels and the world has moved
on. This week in London, a 5-star hotel hosted an exhibition of lux-
ury goods – watches, cars, and jewellery and the like – aimed at an
Arab market perceived as being unaffected by the recent recession.
Unabashed in its ostentation, it was an equally brazen attempt to
woo Gulf high-rollers, perceived as the world’s biggest consumers of
high-end items. The message was clear. London, at least, was scream-
ing “we want you back.” If the rest of Europe behaves in a similar
way, Lebanon will lose some of its luster. And then what?
Lebanon is not geared up for the non-Arab tourist: security percep-
tions, environmental realities and the lack of an infrastructure for an-
ything more adventurous than a nargelieh will ensure they choose
Croatia, Slovenia or any of the obscure Balkan or Baltic nations that
have recognized and are selling their potential in the global market-
place.
It’s been said so often it’s become a cliché, but with the right focus
Lebanon could be a truly international destination offering a glitter-
ing bouquet of attractions in such a small area. So far, all attempts to

burnish Lebanon’s reputation have come from the private sector with
almost zero government help.
No wonder no one wants the Tourism Ministry.
There are several interesting points in this article. It exemplifies many aspects of
the NowLebanon strategy: discrediting the political adversary – Hezbollah and its
allies – through the reiteration of images widely used by western journalism to
describe “Third World” countries. The disorder motif and the motif of violence
and subversion are among the most pervasive in the western journalistic repre-
sentation of the “Third world” (Dahlgren and Chakrapani 1982; Fiske 1987).
Third world countries are, for example, conventionally represented in
western news as places of famines and natural disasters, of social revo-
lution, and of political corruption. These events are not seen as dis-
rupting their social norms, but as confirming ours, confirming our
dominant sense that western democracies provide the basics of life for
everyone, are stable, and fairly and honestly governed (Fiske 1987:
284-285, in Hobart 2007: 193).
These stereotypes are reiterated by March 14 supporters in order to condemn
March 8 and Hezbollah policies in the country and in the region. At the begin-
ning of the article, the picture shows the clashes that erupted in Lebanon during
the fights between Hezbollah and Future Movement militiamen in May 2008.
This image aims to evoke the violence of the Shi‘a Lebanese political parties.
Hezbollah is associated with war, terrorism and disorder. The elements of vio-
lence, disaster and war are used to describe the “internal Other”, namely Hez-
bollah.
This bipolarity is very familiar both to western readers and to Lebanese jour-
nalists. It has very long historical roots related to the dichotomy of “we” and the
“other”, where the identity of the “we” is contested by that of the “other”. By
doing this, the article invites the readers to identify with the point of view of the
writers, who emerge as the ones who stand for order, democracy and develop-
ment. Hezbollah is constructed as the irrational force that threatens not only the
stability and the image of Lebanon, but also the European and the American
projects. Another important point emerging from the text concerns the repre-
sentation of the ideal Lebanon: the alternative to political violence is not merely
peace, but a country whose main desire is to make western tourists happy.3 If
Hezbollah did not exist, Lebanon would become the kind of country the west-
ern world is dreaming of. Thus, Lebanon is described as an object of western
projections and heavy Eurocentric discourses and representations are used by
journalists. In NowLebanon’s articles and editorials, binary oppositions are con-
————
3 – See Hobart’s (2007) analysis on news coverage of political violence. He highlighted the po-
larity of political violence vs. touristic paradise used by British journalists to frame the bombs
explosion in Bali.
stantly used for the struggle within the global mediascape. What emerged from
the content analysis of the editorial news written during the election period was
that the repetition of the following opposing terms was continuous:
Democracy / Arms
Democratic system / Ideologically totalitarian organisation
Strong state constitution / Paralysis of all institutions
Autonomy / Syria’s interfering
Independence / Foreign occupation
Nationalism / Shi‘a confessionalism
Sovereign entity / Private military arsenals
Development / Backwardness
By using such bipolarities, March 14 supporters created an image of the internal

enemy as an entity that threatens not only Lebanese society, but the values con-
sidered “universal”. The internal rival is not contesting particular internal Leba-
nese values, but democracy, freedom, independence, peace and justice. Not only
are Hezbollah and its allies associated with violence, war and fighting, but they
are described as a local agent of foreign powers, Iran and Syria. Such discourses
reiterate common representations made by western media, where March 14 forc-
es and their network with western governments are presented as contributing to
a free and democratic Lebanon, while the transnational networks that Shiite
forces maintain have been portrayed as conflicting with nationalism and com-
mitment to Lebanese interests (Shaery-Eisenlohr 2008: 203).
In a nutshell, the battle between March 14 and March 8 evokes the clash of
civilizations diatribe, whereby the latter are portrayed as a danger for the most
progressive, westernized and democratic components of Lebanese society. The
clash of civilizations does not refer here specifically to a religious element. In-
stead, in recent decades many images delivered by western media to western
consumers about Islam (Said 1997) are here used to discredit Hezbollah policy.
Moreover the binary oppositions reiterate the interpretation of Lebanese history
widespread among international and Arab literature and historiography, as is
well reported by Samir Kassir (2003) in Histoire de Beyrouth: the image of Bei-
rut and Lebanon collapsing and then rising again. The legendary Arab phoenix4
became a popular metaphor for Lebanon: war, violence and destruction alternat-
ing with prosperity, richness, and health. Such images influenced most of the
historical knowledge about the country and they now constitute a pre-written
frame for local and international journalists willing to narrate the events happen-
ing in Lebanon. The two opposite representations that historically have charac-
terized the image of Lebanon in the world are used here to justify the political
position of March 14 and to condemn Hezbollah. March 14 is represented as the
————
4 – The Arab phoenix is a phantasy bird that can be found in several mythologies. It is said
that the phoenix has the ability to be reborn from its own ashes. For this reason it has long
been presented as a symbol of rebirth, immortality and renewal.
coalition that can bring wealth and success, while March 8 would bring war and
disaster. If activists and newsmakers want to achieve visibility, they must fit
themselves into western media frames in order to be read as politically meaning-
ful in western terms. They must self-consciously struggle to be perceived as sig-
nificant for the western frameworks and models. In this way, March 14 emerges
as the result of an appropriation of the western world project.
At the same time, dominant discourses are always pregnant with ambiguities.
NowLebanon journalists do not merely reproduce dominant discourses. They are
involved in a complex variegated process of accommodation, appropriation, and
‘mimicry’ to dominant culture, thus producing a hybrid discourse. From the
viewpoint of the hybridity theories expressed by Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994),
such news transforms and deforms dominant discourses, since these are not the
voice of the dominating social position, nor the voice of the other (Peterson
2003). I argue that within these processes of news interpretations and news mak-
ing, hybrid discourses and new political subjectivities have been created.
In addition, a media project such as NowLebanon has contributed to the
construction of the political identity of March 14 in terms of a mass-mediated
performance of cultural differences expressed in Western terms, and distin-
guished from the internal backward Other. In Lebanon, the construction of po-
litical identities in the election period was fluid, resulting as a multiple project of
creation in relation to different local and global cultural resources. Thanks to the
development of the online Press in English, political identities have come to be
increasingly articulated in term of western discourse.
Interpretive practices
Hanin Ghaddar is the editor-in-chief of NowLebanon English. She describes her-
self as an interpreter capable of explaining the Lebanese culture and identity to
foreigners, thus engaging in a process of cross-cultural translation. She writes
articles and editorial pieces that are intended to be understood by western audi-
ence that are interested in Lebanese issues but are seen as full of prejudices about
the Middle East. Creating and disseminating a different image of the country is
her political goal. She aims to present the cultural and political features of Leba-
non to people who do not know much about it. By doing so she chooses those
aspects of Lebanon that fit better with her ideas of the Lebanese nation and that
can be understood by an imagined western audience: “People are interested in
Lebanon. They want to know about it. And we are doing that basically. We speak
to people who do not know about Lebanon and we are the only ones to do that”.
During the political elections, Hanin’s purpose was to oppose foreign jour-
nalistic narratives which overvalued Lebanese support of Hezbollah. Although it
is widely-known that the western media support the March 14 coalition, she
thought that Hezbollah was overrepresented in the international media. Foreign
journalists were described by her as merely followers of sensationalist news. She
told me in an interview:
Foreign correspondents like to speak about Hezbollah more than

others political parties. They overvalued Hezbollah's importance (…)
During the elections, foreign newspapers were very bad: they con-
veyed an untrue message. They totally fell into the trap that Hezbol-
lah was trying to set for them. They wrote that March 8 was going to
win. All the international media were saying that March 8 was going
to win, which didn’t happen.5
Hanin Ghaddar describes herself as part of a world where political powers lo-
cated beyond the nations have a big influence in national affairs. It is a common
notion that Lebanon is a playground for other international powers. A prevailing
idea during the Civil War, and still resonating in Lebanon today, was that of
“the war of others on our land” (see Tueni 1985). In the political situation fol-
lowing the UN resolutions and the Prime Minister’s assassination, the internal
political alliances were widely portrayed as reflecting international divisions. Due
to the fact that foreign powers (the US France, Italy, UN, UNIFIL, the Special
Tribunal for Lebanon) have a strong influence in determining causes and pur-
poses, gaining international recognition became an important political goal.
Hanin was born in South Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, where the ma-
jority of inhabitants are Shiite. She portrays herself as an expert on Hezbollah’s
work in the south: “I know what happened to Shi‘a people in the South and I
don’t like it. I always go to the South to visit my family. Hezbollah is playing
with my people, my family. They are developing a foreign agenda. Hezbollah
people are Lebanese but Hezbollah is led by Iran. They are a one man show.”
Hanin Ghaddar describes her job in NowLebanon as coherent with her personal
trajectory. After moving from South Lebanon to Beirut at the age of 18, and af-
terwards obtaining a university degree in English literature and then having sev-
eral jobs as a journalist, she became editor-in-chief of NowLebanon. She de-
scribes her job as a way to give voice to her political beliefs and ideas. She inter-
prets the Lebanese social world and explains it to foreigners who are viewed as
blinded by stereotypes and the sensationalist news that overvalues the impor-
tance and impact of Hezbollah in the country.
NowLebanon journalists are consumers of both international and local news,
and producers of their own news, within a complex network of media worlds.
They are active agents working in a constellation of fields. In this sense, online
journalism addressing a foreign audience emerges as a product of different inter-
related media processes, involving the coverage given by international and local
media, its interpretation by Lebanese journalists, the production of new articles
addressed abroad, and the development of new media technology and ideologies.
In the offices of NowLebanon English, the work setting is quite cosmopoli-
tan. In 2009 it was composed of 15 employees, most of them international. On-
ly the chief editor and the four news writers were Lebanese; the editor, the copy
editors and the reporters were foreigners, European, American and Korean. This
————
5 – Interview with Hanin Ghaddar conducted at NowLebanon office on August 2009.
choice was mainly due to a certain shortage of Lebanese professionals able to

write good journalism in English. Moreover, the professional team was very
young. The oldest was 35 and the youngest 22. This composition facilitated
‘cosmopolitanism practices’ that took place as part of a face-to-face daily interac-
tion routine. NowLebanon journalists were positioning themselves strategically at
the nexus of local, national, and global flows, as part of what Featherstone (1990),
referring to the world of transnational professionals, called the “third culture”.
This form of journalism has emerged as profoundly embedded in global dis-
courses of democracy, human rights and global liberalism, but grounded in a
complex local political logic characterized by religious identification and kinship
loyalties within a transnational network of power.
Web 2.0 tools

I now turn my attention to extra-textual aspects of media production and I refer
to internet technologies as communication modalities with specific significance.
NowLebanon uses a wide set of web 2.0 tools: each article is followed by a forum
where every reader can add comments and opinions. Furthermore, there are
bookmarking and sharing services through Facebook, Google, Dig, OKNO,
Twitter, Delicious, etc. I argue that participative platforms, forums and web 2.0
tools have been adopted in NowLebanon because of their external rewards. In-
deed the use of web 2.0 platforms gives an extra legitimacy to NowLebanon and
the March 14 coalition within the international arena. These participative media
have a specific meaning for NowLebanon creators, journalists and readers, which
are not naturally inscribed in the technology itself; rather they are embedded in
the medium as a result of historical and social processes. I refer here to “socio-
technical constraints” (Pfaffenberger 1992), i.e. ideological assumptions about
what a technology is and does within a particular milieu (Peterson 2003: 74).
These tools are seen as capable of promoting social and political participa-
tion and thus supporting the democratic process (Chakravartty and Sarikakis
2006; Sarikakis and Thussu 2006). This is a consequence of one of the main
ideological assumptions within the new media discourses widespread in Europe
and North America, and in Lebanon as well: the belief that digital media can
lead to social and political transformations thanks to the decentralised architec-
ture of the technology. Such assumptions contain a strong technological deter-
minism, articulated within a participatory discourse (see also Hofheinz in this
volume): internet is seen as an autonomous and powerful agent that shapes hu-
man, social and cultural life; participation is uncoupled from wider political and
social context, and represented as something apart from historical and social re-
lations and instead resulting from the work of an autonomous technology.
Internet technologies are portrayed as tools that can bring social change and em-
powerment, regardless of the social, historical and political context where they
are used.
As expressed in the following NowLebanon presentation, internet is described
as a democratic structure that can be used to solve the problems faced by Leba-
nese society:
Now provides comprehensive coverage and analysis of key issues and

news, making social and political participation a much more realistic
option for many citizens … Our website is not simply an online
magazine or information portal. It is a tool for making sense of the
issues that are most relevant to Lebanon’s future, and it is an intelli-
gent platform for constructive discussions and debate … It is unac-
ceptable for the Lebanese to remain voiceless, a nation of ‘refugees’
within their own borders, victims of larger domestic and external
forces. The tools for addressing many of the problems facing con-
temporary Lebanese society already exist. We have a democratic
structure at our disposal. (NowLebanon 2011)
In this sense one can say that internet is the message. As a result of historical
transnational processes, the democracy of internet and social platforms has been
naturalized in the technology itself. By the use of these digital tools, March 14
supporters affirm what they understand as their superiority in terms of media
freedom, technological development and democratic rights in relation to other
Lebanese political groups. By doing so they propose an image of NowLebanon as
a democratic political project, gaining even more international recognition.
Through the use of these participative tools, NowLebanon editors and journalists
create and recreate their own identity and that of the March 14 political coali-
tion in terms of a modernized, democratic and progressive project. Indeed, as
emerged from several interviews I carried out, internet in Lebanon is viewed as
an icon of status, modernity and democracy. As pointed out by Daniel Miller
(2000, 2010), the use of technological tools contributes to creating new identi-
ties as a result of processes of reciprocal creation between internet and the peo-
ple. Within this process of mutual creation, extra-textual aspects of the journalis-
tic platform, such as new language styles, videos, photos, forums, and com-
ments, convey specific messages to the international audiences: they produce an
image of Lebanon and the March 14 alliance as a modernized, advanced, inno-
vative and forward-looking country.
Conclusion
In Lebanon internet provides a powerful new means of political communication
for political parties, activists and journalists. This article discussed some aspects
of these new communicative processes, and specifically how internet has been
appropriated in order to gain international attention and recognition. Indeed,
during the election of 2009, digital technology gave rise to a political struggle
within the global arena. I focused on the case of NowLebanon English, in order
to bring out important issues related to the politics of representation and con-
struction of political identity. In Lebanon, political identities are fluid and con-
tinuously changing and the Lebanese people’s views of themselves are strongly
related to regional and global flows of power and systems of meaning. These
processes of identity construction are caught up in journalistic production. They
emerge at the nexus of different media worlds, within forms of appropriation of
western media representations and images by journalists working in the online

Lebanese press.
Moreover, through the use of web 2.0 and participative tools, NowLebanon
creates its own identity in terms of a democratic, modern and developed media
project. Through a dialectic of mutual creation (Miller 2000, 2010), internet
contributes to producing new ways of being Lebanese, as much as the Lebanese
create new internet projects. Hegemonic narrations about the democratic effects
of social media technologies have been appropriated in local Lebanese political
practices. As result, the proliferation of websites, user-generated content and so-
cial media has not affected the sectarianism that characterizes the Lebanese me-
dia landscape. Contrary to techno-deterministic theories, new media have devel-
oped in continuity with the former media practices, and new ideas, codes and
technologies are entering a local field whose historical dynamics have deter-
mined the new uses. Consequently, the diffusion of online journalism address-
ing foreign audiences has had a local impact in shifting the local production of
political identities.
References
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalisation, Min-
neapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press.
Bhabha, H. (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration, London-New York, Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London-New York, Routledge.
Bird, E. (ed.) (2010) The Anthropology of News and Journalism, Bloomington, Indi-
ana University Press.
Bishara, A. (2010) “Covering the Barrier in Bethlehem: The production of Sympa-
thy and the reproduction of difference”, in Bird, E. (ed.), The Anthropology of
News and Journalism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 54-70.
Chakravartty, P., and K. Sarikakis (2006) Media Policy and Globalization, Edin-
burgh, Edinburgh University Press.
Corm, G. (2006) Le Liban Contemporain. Histoire et Société, Paris, La Découverte.
Dahlgren P. and S. Chakrapani (1982) “The third world on TV news: western ways
of seeing the ‘other’ ”, in W.C. Adams (ed.), Television Coverage of International
Affairs, New York, Ablex.
Dajani, N. (1992) Disoriented Media in a Fragmented Society: the Lebanese Experi-
ence, Beirut, The American University of Beirut.
Dajani, N. (2005) “Re-feudalization of the public sphere: Lebanese television news
coverage and the Lebanese political process”, TBS Journal (available online at
www.tbsjournal.com/Dajani.html, accessed 28 November 2010).
Featherstone, M. (1990) Global culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity,
London, Sage.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television culture, London, Methuen.
Ginsburg, F., L. Abu-Lughod, and B. Larkin (eds.) (2002) Media Worlds: Anthropol-
ogy on New Terrain, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Gonzales-Quijano, Y. (2003) “The Birth of a media ecosystem: Lebanon in internet

age”, in Eickleman D. and J. Anderson (eds.), New Media in the Muslim World,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 61-79.
Gonzales-Quijano, Y. and C. Varin (2007) La Société de l’Information au Proche-
Orient: Internet au Liban et en Syrie, Beyrouth, Université Saint-Joseph.
Haugbolle, S. (2007) “From A-list to Webtifada: Development in the Lebanese Blo-
gosphere 2005-2006”, in Arab Media & Society Journal, (www.arabmediasociety.
com/?article=40, accessed July 2010).
Hobart M. (2007) “Round up the Usual suspects: some radical implications of In-
donesian and Euro-American media coverage of ‘Terrorist’ attacks”, in Nossek
H., A. Sreberny, and P. Sonwalkar (eds.), Media and the Political Violence, Broad-
way, Hampton Press.
Kassir, S. (2003) Histoire de Beyrouth, Paris, Fayard.
Marcus, G. (ed.) (2006) Connected: Engagements with Media at the Century’s End,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Mermier, F. and Picard, E. (2007) Liban: une Guerre de 33 Jours, Paris, La Decou-
verte.
Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) Internet: an Ethnographic Approach, Oxford-New
York, Berg.
Miller D. (2010) Stuff, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Nossek H., A. Sreberny, and P. Sonwalkar (eds.) (2007) Media and the political vio-
lence, Broadway, Hampton Press.
Peterson, M. A. (2003) Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in
the New Millenium, New York-Oxford, Berghahn Books.
Pfaffenberger, B. (1988), “Fetished Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an
Anthropology of Technology”, Man, New Series, 23, 2, p. 236-252.
Pfaffenberger, B. (1992) “Social Anthropology of Technology”, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 21, p. 491-516.
Said, E. (1997) Covering Islam (edition revisited), New York, Vintage Book Edition.
Sakr, N. (2006) “Foreign Support for Media Freedom Advocacy in the Arab Medi-
terranean: Globalization from Above or Below?”, Mediterranean Politics, 11, 1, p.
1-20.
Sarikakis, K. and D.K. Thussu (eds.) (2006) Ideologies of Internet, Broadway, Hamp-
ton Press.
Shaery-Eisenlohr R. (2008) Shi‘ite Lebanon. Transnational religion and the making of
national identities, New York, Columbia University Press.
Tueni, G. (1985) Une guerre pour les autres, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattes.
Web Sources
NOWLebanon. 2011. AboutNOW (available online at: http://www.nowlebanon.com/
Sub.aspxID=26463&MID=1, accessed 27 April 2011).
NOWLebanon. 2009. Working on our image (http://www.nowlebanon.com/News
Archive Details.aspx?ID=106036, accessed 27 Apr 2011).
SARAH JURKIEWICZ
OF ISLANDS AND WINDOWS:

PUBLICNESS IN THE LEBANESE BLOGOSPHERE
Blogs can be both public and intensely personal

in possibly contradictory ways.
Miller and Sheperd 2004
T he Lebanese blogosphere is known for being especially active in political

crisis, as in the Independence Intifada of 2005 or in the July War in 2006.
Ever since then, a wide range of Lebanese bloggers have been continuously com-
menting on social issues, mocking political discussions, and posting about cul-
tural events, especially in Beirut. Their blogs are often both personal and politi-
cal, journal-like and journalistic, and they are making it difficult to maintain the
classical distinction between the blogging genres.1
Within Middle Eastern Studies there is an ever-growing interest in, but also
hype, about blogging. The main questions are those concerning its political im-
pact or its capacity “to construct a democratic public sphere” (Armbrust 2007:
532) – even if this capacity might be hard to determine (see also Hofheinz in
this volume). How a blogosphere is to be understood conceptually, especially
what kind of public it can constitute, is being widely discussed, whether as “net-
worked public” (Anderson 2009), counterpublic, or something else. The Haber-
masian notion of the public sphere, or the search for its implementation, is
thereby a lasting superstructure for understanding recent developments. How-
ever, a closer look at specific blogospheres shows that the notion of a single pub-
lic sphere2 vis-à-vis a counterpublic is not an easy fit. The blogosphere is not a
homogenous public, as I will show in this article. At most, as I discussed else-
where, it can constitute a fluid and momentary counterpublic.3 Moreover, it is
hard to distinguish a single public sphere against which it is opposed. Instead of
testing the applicability of the idealistic public sphere concept, this article takes
the actors and their practices as a starting point. It emanates from the question
how blogging is to be understood in terms of public culture and as a media prac-
————
1 – Nevertheless there are also strictly political and personal blogs to be found.
2 – “(T)he notion of a singular public sphere is often invoked as an either hopeful or menacing
reality or possibility”: Panel description, Rereading the ‘Public Sphere’ in the Middle East,
WOCMES, Barcelona, July 2010, organized by Sune Haugbolle and Armando Salvatore.
3 – I discuss the applicability of the counterpublic notion in more detail in Jurkiewicz 2011.
Oriente Moderno, XCI 1, 2011, p. 139-155

140 SARAH JURKIEWICZ
tice. Inspired by Sune Haugbolle and Armando Salvatore’s suggested term “pub-
licness” as a better translation than “public sphere” for Habermas’ Öffentlichkeit,
I intend to look at bloggers’ “concrete ways of going and being public”.4 This
approach to the field allows for a shift of focus from the search for the direct po-
litical impact of blogging to the dynamics and fragmentation of contemporary
publics. In the first part of the study, I will give an overview of the internal
fragmentation of the Lebanese blogosphere. In the second part, I will present the
cases of two bloggers. Starting from their accounts, I will reflect upon the pub-
licness of blogging in the Lebanese context.5
The Lebanese blogosphere: a fragmented public

The Lebanese blogosphere has increased enormously after former Lebanese Prime
Minister Hariri’s assassination in 2005 and the following demonstrations for the
independence from Syria, the so-called Cedar Revolution or Independence Inti-
fada. Between February and June 2005 alone, several hundred blogs were cre-
ated (see Haugbolle 2007) in which a wide range of issues, mainly related to the
current political situation, were discussed.
The blogosphere then experienced a second peak in the July War of 2006,
during which another hundred new blogs were launched. During the war blogs
“offered an alternative to traditional press and TV coverage” (Haugbolle 2007:
9). Bloggers wrote pieces of war journalism and “personal descriptions of life
under siege” (ibid.: 15). After the end of the war, several blogs stopped, others
were continued only in times of conflict.6 The activity of the blogosphere as a
whole can therefore be described as irregular, and it is strongly linked to political
circumstances. Nevertheless, new blogs covering a wide range of thematic fields
were launched since 2007. Overall there might be up to 2,000 registered blogs
from and about Lebanon.7 To give an exact number of the current active blogs
is difficult.8 Regarding gender, according to the Berkman study of 2009, 30.2
percent of the Lebanese cluster are female bloggers (Etling et al. 2009: 36).
————
4 – Panel description WOCMES, see footnote 1. This article reflects my paper presentation at
this conference panel.
5 – The article is based on my online observations of the Lebanese blogosphere since March
2009 and my fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon from November 2009 to March 2010. During the
fieldwork I participated in several bloggers’ and social media meetings in Beirut, took part in
blogging trainings, and had extended guided interviews with 15 ‘intensive’ bloggers as well as
some social media figures.
6 – For example Funky Zarathustra (http://funkyzarathustra.blogspot.com/), who notes that
she is “blogging mostly during conflicts, i.e. every four months or so”.
7 – Lebanese blogger Tony Saghbini estimates 350-400 blogs, see his post on http://saghbini.
wordpress.com, 2 August 2010. See also blogger Liliane Asaf cited in Sara 2010, who mentions
the same number. This number includes mainly blogs from the platforms wordpress.com and
blogger.com that are assembled in the Lebanese blog aggregator, but more than 1,300 registered
blogs from Lebanon are to be found on the maktoob.com platform alone (see footnote 27).
8 – On the difficulty of measuring, see Chalhoub 2008.
PUBLICNESS IN THE LEBANESE BLOGOSPHERE 141
Quantitative studies, such as the study on the Arabic blogosphere by the Inter-
net & Democracy project (Etling et al. 2009), show that blogging is organized
mainly around countries, since most of the links are within the respective coun-
tries. This is an argument for speaking of “national” blogospheres. Some of the
Lebanese bloggers themselves also promote the idea of a vital Lebanese blo-
gosphere. The idea is realized and visualized on the site of the Lebanese blog ag-
gregator.9 The aggregator presents itself as the portal to the Lebanese blogosphere
and gathers around 400 blogs from or about Lebanon. Nevertheless, as seductive
as the term of a national blogosphere is, it is also problematic. As Enrique Klaus
argues, it implies the existence of a connected community “linked and defined
by the use of weblogs on a national scale that transcends religious and political
boundaries” (Klaus 2009: 253). This implication somehow contradicts the na-
ture of a blogging public that, as Anderson points out, is primarily based on so-
cial networking and very similar to other social media tools (Anderson 2009).
In the following I will provide an overview of the networked blogging public
and its internal fragmentation. This is not to counter the notion of a Lebanese
blogosphere as such, but to make the reader aware that the blogosphere is not
only a space of connection – as is often celebrated in social media research – but
also of differentiation. I will shed light on several lines that crosscut the blo-
gosphere, some actively drawn, others unnoticed. The first line is between po-
litical currents, the second between different uses of language, and the third be-
tween different publishing platforms. Those lines partly overlap and are not al-
ways exclusive. The overview is based on my observations online and during my
fieldwork in Lebanon, so it cannot claim to be representative of all groups and
divides, but aims to highlight the main tendencies. I focus on the politically and
socially engaged blogs and do not include blogs that deal mainly with technol-
ogy, cooking, or commerce.
Political currents
Interlinking with the likeminded is one of the key features of networked publics
like blogospheres. So political orientations necessarily come into play. At least in
the beginning, the blogs represented in the main aggregator and among the A-
list blogs, i.e., widely read and quoted blogs, March 1410 was the strongest po-
litical orientation in the blogosphere. Supporters of March 8,11 the alliance of
the opposition, were less well-represented.12 This is partly explained by the close
————
9 – http://lebanonaggregator.blogspot.com/.
10 – March 14 describes the coalition of political parties (Future Movement, Lebanese Forces, et
al.) that refers to the date of the so-called Independence Intifada of 2005 and is led by Leba-
nese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
11 – The March 8 coalition refers to the date of the ‘pro-Syrian’ mass demonstration in Beirut.
The main parties in the coalition are currently Hezbollah, Amal, and Free Patriotic Movement.
12 – See also the blog post by Tony Saghbini on the Lebanese blogosphere, in which a similar
assessment is made (see footnote 8). Saghbini explains the current absence of March 8 bloggers
relationship between the first blogging boom in Lebanon with the Independence
Intifada of 2005 (see Haugbolle 2007). But this picture has constantly changed
as new actors entered the Lebanese blogosphere in recent years. A group of leftist
activist bloggers,13 affiliated as well as non-affiliated with leftist groups and par-
ties, and a wide range of other activist bloggers,14 be they feminists,15 environ-
mentalists,16 etc. that link up to each other, are actively engaged in the current
blogosphere. On the other side of the political spectrum one finds the blog The
Ouwet Front17 that reflects “personal views and opinions of Lebanese Forces
supporters”18 and links only to Lebanese Forces sites.19
In my estimation, the blogosphere is not characterized by a strong March 14
vs. March 8 divide. Especially some of the A-list bloggers whom I interviewed,
stress that they are not affiliated with any coalition and argue for blogging about
other issues than party politics.20 Furthermore, a significant number of bloggers
understand themselves as countering the sectarian organization of society, as the
blogging on the secular march in May 201021 and the movement against the
sectarian system in the spring of 201122 showed. Thus, the blogosphere only
partly reproduces the main political divide in Lebanon, while it also counters its
sectarian organization. The blogosphere is by no means the only realm in which
attempts to overcome sectarian and political divides are made.23 Nevertheless, it
reflects a range of these activities in which bloggers are equally involved.
Language use
The majority of the A-list bloggers post in English. Arabic is the second most
popular language to blog in, followed by French. And bloggers encourage each
————
by the rigid structure of the oppositional parties.
13 – See for instance: jou3an.wordpress.com (whom I will present later), hanibaael.wordpress.
com, and farfahinne.blogspot.com.
14 – One of the most prominent activist bloggers is Imad Bazzi, http://www.trella.org/.
15 – http://www.nadinemoawad.com/.
16 – http://saghbini.wordpress.com/.
17 – Ouwet is colloquial Arabic for forces.
18 – The party Lebanese Forces is part of the March 14 coalition.
19 – http://www.ouwet.com/.
20 – For instance blogger Rami from +961 (http://www.plus961.com), whom I interviewed
on December 17, 2010, and Maya Zankoul, whom I will present below.
21 – http://blog.independence05.com/2010/04/secular-lebanon-oh-is-it-another-dream.html,
http://besidebeirut.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/laique-pride-a-historical-take/, http://www.nadi
ne moawad.com/2010/04/thousands-march-for-secularism-lebanon/, all accessed April 27, 2010.
22 – See for instance the blogposts on http://trella.org and http://beirutiyat.wordpress during
the period from mid-February to mid-May 2011.
23 – There are various civil society activities on- and offline. For an online example, see the Face-
book group for abolishing the sectarian system in Lebanon with over 20,000 members: http://
www.facebook.com/lebrevolution.
other to write in Arabic, as a campaign to post in Arabic initiated on the blog

aggregator in June 2010 shows.24 Whereas the English-writing A-list bloggers
are generally more linked up with other English-language blogs from or about
Lebanon, the Arabic-language ones often link up to other Arabic ones from
Lebanon and the region. The English-language bloggers describe it as “natural”
to post in English, saying that this is the internet language and allows their blogs
to be read more internationally. The bloggers writing in Arabic mainly want to
target a Lebanese or Arab audience. But choice of audience is only one part of
the story. Those who blog in Arabic often describe this as a political choice. As
blogger Khodor Salameh alias Jou3an (jou3an.wordpress.com) explained to me,
“it is only the real activists, the very radical activists, we are very radical for the
Arabic language,”25 whereby he means leftist activists like himself. Of course not
all bloggers who write in Arabic would formulate their choice in this way. But
overall, language use is surely related to political and identity belonging. How-
ever, sometimes language skills and especially Arabic typing skills lead bloggers
to write in English, because they are not used to writing or typing in Arabic at
all. For some parts of the blogosphere, language use also reflects the foreign lan-
guage education based in the Lebanese education system, which means English
or French (see Diab 2000). But it is not a simple fit, for some French-educated
bloggers also choose English to write in. The degree to which language use on
the blogs reflects real boundaries in society is a topic for further discussion.
Nevertheless, language is not a strict boundary in the blogosphere. A look at
different blogrolls, i.e., collection of links, or the lebloggers association, displays
cooperation across different languages. Furthermore, some bloggers use Arabic
and English or French alternately,26 and a mix of several languages can be found
in a single blog. Within the latter, one might state that, a “pluralistic or global-
ized identity” is expressed, because it counters the nationalistic view of language,
which is “the most prevalent” in the Middle East (see Wardini 2010).
Publishing platforms
The main publishing platforms used by Lebanese bloggers are blogger.com (owned
by Google) and wordpress.com (open source). Yet there is another blogging world
that, as far as I have observed, seems to be totally unconnected to these: the blogs
on the publishing platform maktoob.com. Maktoob is an Arabic internet pro-
vider, founded in Amman in 1998 and now owned by Yahoo. There are more
than 1,300 registered maktoob blogs in Lebanon, and, as far as I observed, they
are exclusively in Arabic.27 But bloggers from this publishing platform are not
————
24 – http://lebanonaggregator.blogspot.com/search/label/Blog%20in%20Arabic%20Day.
25 – Interview with Khodor Salameh, January 24, 2010, Beirut.
26 – See http://farfahinne.blogspot.com, or minbeirut blogger who has a blog both in Arabic
(http://minbeirutbilarabeh.blogspot.com/) and in English (http://anaminbeirut.blogspot.com/).
27 – See http://www.maktoobblog.com/country/Lebanon/type/date/. On June 17, 2011 there
were 1,358 registered maktoob blogs in Lebanon (http://www.maktoobblog.com/country/Leba
included in the Lebanese blog aggregator, nor do they take part in the blogging
association or in meetings in Beirut. Generally, the maktoob platform is used for
more personal blogging and also by more religious-oriented bloggers than other
platforms are,28 but also journalists29 use it to publish articles. The Lebanese
maktoob blogs are usually less interlinked among themselves and with bloggers
from other platforms. Blogger Tony Saghbini30 told me that among his circle of
bloggers the maktoob platform is considered a social networking site rather than
an independent blogging platform.31 I was not yet able to discuss this matter
with maktoob bloggers. Thus, this is only a preliminary observation and needs to
be confirmed or refuted through interviews with bloggers who use this platform.
To conclude this first part, I showed that the Lebanese blogosphere can be
described as a fragmented public and that within the blogosphere, political and
religious boundaries are not overcome. While language use and political orienta-
tion divide the blogosphere to a certain degree, the publishing platforms form a
further boundary. They hint at the existence of several Lebanese spheres of blog-
ging. The common political and identitarian boundaries are thereby partly re-
flected in the technological boundaries. All in all, the Lebanese blogosphere re-
produces some of the internal divisions in Lebanese society with regard to poli-
tics, language and religious orientation, etc. As I will show in the next part, de-
spite their differences, the bloggers often share a similar generational, social, and
professional background.
Publicness
The actors’ background
The two case studies I will present in the following represent different currents
within the blogosphere: one is an English-language comic blog by Maya Zan-
koul, who works as a graphic designer, and the other an Arabic-language blog by
Khodor Salameh, a leftist activist and freelance journalist.32 The two blogs differ
in political orientation and online networks, language use and intended audi-
ences, as well as the platforms used. Furthermore they symbolize different styles
of writing and, in Maya Zankoul’s case, drawing.
Despite their difference, the two bloggers also reflect some common tenden-
cies among the bloggers assembled in the Lebanese blog aggregator. First, both
are in their early twenties and living in or close to Beirut. The majority of the
Lebanese bloggers who are resident in Lebanon are ‘young’ and urban: with
————
non/type/date/).
28 – See, for instance, http://hasan-katerji.maktoobblog.com/.
29 – http://jihadbazzi.maktoobblog.com/.
30 – http://ninar.wordpress.com/.
31 – Email communication with Tony Saghbini (www.saghbini.wordpress.com), September
21, 2010.
32 – The criteria for choosing these two blogs were to provide different examples for blogging
activity concerning language, style, and politics and to base the analysis on intensive bloggers.
some exceptions they are in their 20’s to mid-30’s and live in Beirut or in the
surrounding area.33 And they have the financial means to be connected to the
internet. Since the internet infrastructure in Lebanon is not well developed and
is characterized by high prices and slow internet connection (Taki 2009: 284),
being based in the capital and having an economic standard facilitate having a
good internet connection.
Second, both bloggers, like the majority of these Lebanese bloggers, have ob-
tained higher education. In Lebanon, on the university level, this implies mostly
English-language education, but French is also still present as a language for
higher education. Whereas Maya Zankoul, after her French school education,
studied in English for her Bachelor’s degree, Khodor Salameh obtained his Bache-
lor in France.
Furthermore, the two bloggers represent the two rather ‘classic’ modes of en-
tering the world of blogging, as I observed in my fieldwork: the first mode of en-
try, exemplified by Maya Zankoul, comes through working in IT, web design,
graphic design, etc. and being familiar with web tools and, I suppose, being
more used to experimenting with them. The second mode of entry, as in Kho-
dor Salameh’s case, comes from being engaged in fields in which writing is a
main activity, such as academia, journalism, or activism; these people then dis-
cover blogging as one channel to express and publish their opinions on the web.
Thus, most bloggers are engaged in some kind of ‘knowledge work’.
Most Lebanese bloggers have, like most Arab bloggers, a middle or upper
middle class background (Haugbolle 2007), have obtained higher education,
and are equipped with a large amount of technological and/or cultural capital.
“Despite some truth to the myth that ‘anyone can be a blogger’ and that the
blogosphere therefore is a uniquely democratic space, socio-economic factors ef-
fectively favour academics, journalists and certain other professions.” (Haugbolle
2007: 13-14) Thus, in the question of access to the blogosphere, social bounda-
ries are rather reproduced than overcome. Furthermore, as I will show later,
blogging can function as a tool to promote one’s own writings or drawings, es-
tablish new contacts, and therefore strengthen the blogger’s social and cultural
capital. It can be argued, following Warde (who refers to Bourdieu), that “those
in the most advantageous positions within a field are those who have greatest
opportunities to increase their economic, cultural and social capital” (Warde
2005: 148).
Two bloggers’ going and being public

Maya’s Amalgam: a comic blog
Maya Zankoul opened her comic blog Maya’s Amalgam in early 2009. Born in
1986, she grew up in Saudi Arabia and returned to Lebanon in 2005, where she
————
33 – Along with the bloggers resident in Lebanon, a significant number of bloggers within the
Lebanese blogosphere are also writing from the diaspora, whether from the US (see Salama
2007), Canada, Europe, or elsewhere.
studied graphic design. After completing her BA she has been working in this
field and recently opened her own design studio.
On her blog, Maya (present with her first name in the blog’s name, so I will
call her in this way in the following), publishes mainly drawings with English-
language texts about daily life experiences in Lebanon that entail a light humor-
ous criticism, whether on finding no parking spot in Beirut,34 political events,35
or political election campaign billboards36 – a post that attracted great attention.
She also posts her “secret recipes”37 or talks about her trips to the Cedars.38 Of-
ten she herself is the main protagonist in her comic stories, like in a talk with her
grandmother, in which she tells the latter about her blogging and artistic activi-
ties, and her grandmother just wants her to get married.39 This post for the Kol-
ena Laila initiative40 expresses the dilemma of young, not yet married women.
Another blogpost starts with her writing, “Living in Lebanon, I consider myself
lucky that my name is 100% religion-neutral … I actually like to abuse this”.41
Following this, the comic relates the dialogue between Maya and an older bour-
geois-looking lady who tries unsuccessfully to find out her religion by asking for
her family name, the region she comes from, etc. This post reflects her critique
of typical daily life encounters in Lebanon, where, by asking about someone’s
family name and town or village of origin, people try to gain indications of some-
one’s religion.
Asked why she went into blogging, she told me:
I was having problems at work, I was so sick of doing their commer-
cial work. I work as a graphic designer full time and ever since I came
to Lebanon, you know, this culture, because I grew up in Saudi Ara-
bia, I see all this stuff in the (Lebanese) society that really bothers me.
And all this time I talk about it with my friends. And the reactions I
get are so negative …I criticize plastic surgery with my friends, and
————
34 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/10/04/once-upon-a-parking-spot/.
35 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/06/03/flotillusion/.
36 – http://mayazankoul.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/elections-elections-elections/,
http://mayazankoul.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/sexy-elections/; accessed October 21, 2010.
37 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/08/22/sunday-recipe-updates/.
38 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/08/16/a-trip-to-the-cedars/.
39 – http://mayazankoul.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/quid-pro-quo/.
40 – “We are all Laila” is an initiative in which bloggers post annually about the problems con-
fronting women in the Arab world. See: http://kolenalaila.com/en/about/.
41 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/04/24/laique-lebanon/.
all of them have their noses done, so you can't really get a message
through, you know [laughing].42
In her comics she thus formulates observations about, and experiences living in,
Lebanon which she cannot easily discuss face-to-face. In the beginning it was
more like a personal diary, she told me, but then she was introduced to the
Lebanese blogosphere through a well-connected Lebanese blogger.
I was just blogging on my own, on my own island, and then Rami
from +961, I don't know how he came across my blog, I think
through Facebook or something. And he wrote an article, a post on
my blog on his blog, so I saw a link, then I saw +961 and I was really
so surprised, you know, I felt like there’s another form of life!
After that, Maya started to sign up on Twitter and connect on Facebook. In a
“blog-round-up” that French journalists initiated in September 2009, she got in
touch with a range of A-list bloggers, to whom she now belongs. Since then she
has become one of the most active Lebanese bloggers, changed her blog from
wordpress to her own domain name, and also published two books composed of
her blog postings. She was interviewed by several newspapers, invited to a TV
show on New TV, drew a comic for ELLE Oriental,43 and presented her works
in an exhibition at the French Cultural Center in Beirut. In her blog, she posts
about (and invites people to) these events and shares her experience with the
blog’s audience.44
While enjoying public attention for her blogging activity, she admits that it
mainly led to a change for her personally:
I feel on a personal level it has changed my life. Stuff that bothers me, I
don't think that it bothers me that much any more, because I feel
that I am doing something about it. I am not just seeing it in front of
me. So I feel better. I feel that I have contributed. Maybe in the end
nothing will happen, but at least I am trying. I am shouting some-
thing out and if it gets a reaction or if it doesn’t, we’ll see about it.
Publishing her experiences and social criticism on her blog provides a possibility
to make them public in a way that is not as easily dismissed as in her personal,
‘offline’ life – and she gets positive feedback online for the blogposts. By ‘shout-
ing things out’ to a simultaneously anonymous and vaguely known public, the
blog functions as a tool for relief. But it is not only about letting things out;
Maya also perceives her blogging as a form of social activism, contributing to a
————
42 – Interview with Maya Zankoul, December 1, 2009, Beirut. All following citations of her
are from this interview.
43 – http://mayazankoul.com/2010/02/03/meet-the-3-elles/.
44 – See for instance her posts about the Salon du Livre in November 2010: http://mayazanko
ul.com/2010/03/31/announcing-cc-salon-beirut/ and http://mayazankoul.com/2010/11/09/sa
lon-du-livre-is-over/.
more peaceful Lebanon. Furthermore, the networks established through blog-

ging transcend the online realm, form a new kind of sociability in Maya’s life,
and also serve as a way of promoting her work.
Jou3an: “a citizen against the faked regimes”45

You risk something when you write… but I don’t mind. Jou3an46
Happy Independence,47 8 + 14 = 22, right, 22 reasons for a civil war,

22 reasons for emigration, 22 reasons for sin, 22 reasons for unem-
ployment and rising prices … the saying of this year: there is no dif-
ference between one leader and another except for the nationality of
his master.48
In this blog post published on Lebanese Independence Day, November 22,

Khodor Salameh criticizes the political divide between the March 8 coalition of
the opposition, and the ruling March 14 coalition, as well as all Lebanese politi-
cal leaders who rely on another country’s support. This citation from the post
shows his slightly ironic and poetic style of writing and also features his general
critique of the Lebanese political system.
Khodor Salameh alias Jou3an is a leftist activist born in 1986. After having
completed his Bachelor in social science in France, he is currently living in Bei-
rut and working in journalism and giving social media trainings. Some friends
————
45 – This sentence is found in the header of the blog.
46 – Interview with Khodor Salemeh on January 24, 2010, Beirut. All following citations of
him are from this interview. I translated the passages from French and Arabic to English.
47 – Originally Kullu istiql…l wa-antum bi-²ayr.
48 – http://jou3an.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/. I translated the passage into English.
encouraged him to launch a blog, since he had already been writing for several
years. Before starting to blog, he worked as a freelancer for the journal al-A²b…r,
a rather leftist but independent Lebanese journal that started in 2006.When he
came back to Lebanon in autumn 2009, he set up his own blog on the Wordpress
platform with the help of a Syrian friend and fellowblogger. The first step, he
told me, was to choose a name. And he decided on the nickname he obtained in
his political circles, Jou3an (hungry) or Abou Jou3a (father of famine), as a result
of his dedication to the topic of famine in Africa and Asia.49 Jou3an, as I will
call him in the following, then managed to link his blog through the Lebanese
forum Ÿawtak (your voice), where he is active as an administrator, as well as via
Facebook and its various leftist and activist groups.
With his Arabic-language blog he tries to connect to other activists in Leba-
non, Syria, and elsewhere. And he encourages other leftist activists to open up
blogs too. In the long run, he hopes that they can make an impact in the next
parliamentary elections in 2013, in which the age of eligibility to vote may be
reduced to 18. Jou3an was the first Lebanese blogger to face any state repression
because of his blogging activity. After publishing an article in which he criticized
the Lebanese President Michel Suleiman in March 2010,50 army security forces
visited him in the late evening and summoned him to the Military Security Ser-
vices Office in South Beirut the next morning. In the interrogation, the security
forces ‘suggested’ that he close his blog, change its tone, or write only poetry.
The case was not further legally prosecuted.51 Later MTV Lebanon, a Lebanese
media station, interviewed him on the issue of freedom of expression in elec-
tronic media.
When he talks about his blog, “critique” is the most frequently used word,
and indeed on his blog one finds different forms of social and political critique,
whether on the Lebanese army and security forces,52 the conditions of freedom
of speech,53 the Communist Party’s leadership, confessionalism,54 or the state of
women’s rights in the region.55
Laying out the roadmap for his blog in the following, Jou3an told me that
the goals would be:
First, ongoing criticism of the army and the Lebanese security forces,
and criticizing the Minister of the Interior, and (secondly) the cor-
rupt Communist Party, which is starting to be like a right-wing
party.
————
49 – See his text Li-m…÷… Þ™¼…n? (“Why hungry?”) on his blog’s profile.
50 – http://jou3an.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/.
51 – See also: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/04/01/lebanon-first-threatened-voice/, where
other bloggers’ support posts are included, accessed September 16, 2010.
So while on the one hand he criticizes the security and interior policies, etc. in
Lebanon, on the other hand criticism of the leadership of the Communist Party,
to which he has close ideological ties, is essential for his blogging activity. This is
problematic, especially with other leftist friends, as he outlined further, because
criticizing the leaders is not accepted in Lebanon, where it is believed that “if
there is a leader, all should follow him”. Thus Jou3an exposes himself to attacks
from the state, as became evident in his interview with the security services. Fur-
ther, criticizing his “ideologically close” political party involves another danger
than the Lebanese system, because he risks facing problems with his own peer
group – especially because he sometimes writes his blog posts when he feels “real
anger”, as he told me, and then does not review them before posting: “I don’t
read them afterwards, not another time. Because I refuse to take something back, my
opinions, I am afraid if I reread it, I would change my ideas or something like this”.
But at the same time, the blog is more than a politically motivated blog. On his
blog you find, as he puts it,
emotional, patriotic, pure politics, love things, romantic stuff, you
find anything. Because I see the blog as a notebook, you can write,
draw, you can do anything in this notebook. When you finish writ-
ing you give it to the readers to read.
In addition to his political critique, his blog also has posts with love poems like
“A loaf of bread and a kiss”,56 to which a romantic picture of a naked woman ly-
ing before a nebulous background is added, or a poem called “I am writing your
face”,57 in which he writes about the face of his beloved.
When I objected that normally you don’t publish your notebook, he re-
sponded:
Let’s say it’s an open window in your house. Anybody who passes by
can look into your window, see what’s going on in this house, what
you’re thinking, what you’re doing, what you would like to do …
That’s very strange, some years ago it was strange, but after the change
in the information technologies it’s totally normal.
Even if Jou3an tries to use the publicness of his blog mainly for his political ac-
tivism, it also displays what else is going on in his life. For him personally, this
public visibility, whether of his political thoughts, sometimes charged with emo-
tions, or of “romantic stuff”, does not pose a problem in itself. Rather, he under-
stands it as a “normal development” in the new media.
Dynamics of publicness
What do these two stories of bloggers tell us about the overall dynamics of pub-
licness? In my opinion, they shed light on the ways people have of going public,
————
what it can mean for bloggers to be public, and how their subjectivity is made
public.
Ways of going public
The ambitions of opening a blog are, at first glance, quite divergent; in Maya’s
case, frustration with her work was a starting point for looking for other forms
of artistic expression. For Jou3an, it was rather a continuation of his writing ac-
tivities on yet another platform. A common point between Maya and Jou3an is
their experience of returning to Lebanon after having lived abroad. This is true
about quite a few of the bloggers, who spent extensive times abroad or still live
outside the country, and is typical for Lebanese society, which is greatly marked
by diasporic connections. The experience might have strengthened a certain ex-
ternal perspective on events in Lebanon – certainly stronger in Maya’s case, who
has lived abroad for the greater part of her life and who explicitly refers to this.
Both examples show that going public is first and foremost a question of
networking. I would briefly define ‘becoming public’ for a blogger as being linked
and read by a readership that transcends one’s immediate circle. Such a public-
ness proceeds either through newly established networks online, as in Maya’s case,
when a fellow blogger promoted her blog on his own blog, or through already
existing networks, as in Jou3an’s case, i.e., his political environment and his
other online circles on the forum. Blogs may be “public” in quite different ways.
They can address one’s own ‘personal public’ of friends and acquaintances, i.e., a
limited readership to which the author also maintains face-to-face contact. In
contrast, other blogs address a broad readership in Lebanon and abroad and
transcend the bloggers’ friends and acquaintances (on- and offline) by far. Most
blogs, like online diaries, “address simultaneously multiple audiences – known
and unknown, welcome and unwelcome readers alike” (Sorapure 2000:11).
Maya’s and Jou3an’s blogs are in the middle of this spectrum, because neither
concentrates solely on their ‘personal’ public, but both also seek a larger audi-
ence. Still, especially Jou3an’s blog started from a rather know readership and
expanded towards a wider audience. In both cases the networks transcend the
online world by far and include offline meetings with other bloggers/activists
and, in Maya’s case, also the Twitter community. Particularly for Maya, going
public on a blog with her experiences meant starting on her ‘own island’, her
own little blogworld, and then connecting to others and spreading out. Her sin-
gular blog was integrated into a whole world of blogging, which she describes as
“discovering another form of life”.58
Being public
So, what it can mean for bloggers to be public? For Maya, as mentioned above,
————
58 – Once a blogger has begun, his new networks and the blogging practice itself catalyze
more blogging. This means that the practice itself creates the desire to continue, as Ardevol et
al. (2010) point out.
the blog functions primarily as a way to express and share her experiences with a
readership that is beyond her face-to-face contacts and thereby draws a different
kind of feedback. Furthermore, being public also provides her with strong feed-
back and approval of her work. The drawing for the blog and the publishing of
her two books are a major part of her life, and the interviews on TV and in news-
papers also led to a certain publicity for her. For Jou3an, blogging is primarily
an extension of his contacts with other political activists and a tool to publish his
writings and spread his thoughts. The blog reflects which topics he is dealing
with and how he ‘reads’ or rather criticizes the political currents and develop-
ments in Lebanon. He understands his blog as an “open window into his
house”, in which you can read what is going on in his life. This metaphor holds
some critical potential. Since great efforts are made in the Arab world to keep
privacy protected,59 the openness of a window that allows to view behind the
curtain may be understood as a call for a broader opening.
In both cases, blogging means and is equivalent to a form of social and po-
litical critique, handling social and political issues that one faces – even if in
quite different ways. This cannot be generalized for the whole Lebanese blo-
gosphere, even if it is a common trait. Nevertheless, to reflect from one’s very
subjective standpoint current developments as well as one’s personal experiences
lies at the heart of the blogging activity. Maya’s as well as Jou3an’s blogs are
based on their subjective accounts of events and experiences, reflecting their per-
sonal critique. Jou3an in particular exposes himself to attack, both from his left-
ist comrades (with his criticism of the Communist Party) and the Lebanese state
organs.
The public self
Calvert (2004) highlights the culture of “self-disclosure” in his discussion of the
dynamics of contemporary “mediated voyeurism”, which is based mainly on dis-
cussions of “television exhibitionism”. Whereas I would not place blogging in
the exhibitionism frame, which always has negative connotations, the concept of
self-disclosure can highlight some of the features of blogging. Calvert distin-
guishes four aspects of self-disclosure: 1) self-clarification, 2) social validation, 3)
relationship development, and 4) social control, i.e., impression management
with the aim of manipulating the opinions of others (Calvert 2004: 84).
Whereas the first two aspects function intrinsically, “providing heightened un-
derstanding of self through communication with others”, the latter aspects func-
tion extrinsically, “turning personal information into a commodity”, as Miller
and Sheperd point out (Miller and Sheperd 2008). Maya and Jou3an exemplify
at least three of the four aspects. In their blogging they gain self-clarification (1)
and self-validation (2) by formulating their thoughts in writing or expressing
them in drawing, thus “letting things out” and sharing and engaging with oth-
————
59 – This is especially apparent in closed curtains and even curtained balconies, a common fea-
ture in Beirut.
ers. New contacts and relations are thereby established (3). The last aspect, social
control (4), seems too clear-cut, as if self-disclosure were a simple means to an
end. Even if it can be argued that Jou3an’s blog tries to make an impact on its
readers’ opinions, he tries to make them read and thereby reflect upon certain is-
sues, rather than manipulating them.
Furthermore, the two bloggers do not simply ‘disclose’ themselves and make
their opinions and privacy public, but carefully negotiate their going public.
Jou3an for instance consciously puts his critiques online, thereby risking offend-
ing certain politicians, but did not change his style or tone after being interro-
gated by the army’s security forces. His being public in the blog is characterized
by being exposed to attacks and letting his spontaneous and sometimes furious
critiques out. This is his chosen style of writing, so that the blog is not an un-
reflected type of disclosure. As he underlined in the interview-sequence quoted
above, he refuses to recant a statement. In a similar vein, Maya makes some per-
sonal experiences public, but not her most intimate experiences, and thus avoids
exposing herself completely. Her disclosure is a well-managed account of au-
thenticity – or “appropriate display of authenticity” (Hine 2000: 148) – whose
product she can use as a tool to market her drawings. But whereas in Maya’s
blog there are strong references to her offline life and to events she participates
in, such as a book signing, an exhibition she gave, a journey she undertook, etc.,
Jou3an does not provide accounts of where he went and what he did, but rather
of what he thinks and of the issues he is dealing with. Thus, based on these two
examples, the blogosphere evolves as a space of individuals who disclose them-
selves with their critique and provocations and make themselves publicly vulner-
able, while deliberately managing their exposure.
Conclusion
The Lebanese blogosphere ought not to be understood as a homogenous coun-
terpublic, but rather as a fragmented sphere in which different actors try to get
their voices heard through extensive networking. Within this sphere, social and
political boundaries are both reproduced and countered.
Based on the examples of two bloggers with some common traits within the
Lebanese blogosphere, I showed that the production of public culture through
blogging is blurring the boundaries between publicness and privateness. What
these bloggers make public often does not follow a strict agenda, but displays
political criticism as well as “love things” – the boundary between personal and
political blogging is thereby put into question. As just elaborated, subjectivity is
the point of departure for the two blogs presented. The self is put in the public
eye and engages on various levels with the public. Moreover, the disclosed sub-
jectivity can be understood as a tool to transform and merge the spheres of pub-
lic and private – as expressed by the image of the blog as a “window into my
house”. The metaphor in this context does not mean eliminating one’s own pri-
vacy in the strict sense. It rather stands for disclosing one’s subjective standpoint
in the world. The private is thereby both public and political; in this sense, the
metaphor holds a political ambition and an ideal of a new society that erases tra-
ditional boundaries of speaking and writing. Blogging can thus lead to the for-
mation of new subjects – both criticizing and exposed to attack – and may func-
tion as a laboratory for a new society.
References
Anderson, J. (2009) “Another Free-Speech Panacea for the Middle East?”, NMIT
Working Papers, 31.01.2009 (available online at http://nmit.wordpress.com/2009/
01/31/197/, accessed 25 April.
Ardevol, E., G. San Cornelio, T. Roig, and E. Gómez-Cruz (2010) “Engagement and
creative labour in new media practices”, paper presented at the EASA conference,
Maynooth, 24-27August.
Armbrust, W. (2007) “New Media and Old Agendas: The Internet in the Middle
East and Middle Eastern Studies”, International Journal of Middle Eastern Stud-
ies, 39, p. 531-533.
Baym, N.K., and Annette N. Markham (2009) Internet Inquiry: Conversations about
Method, Los Angeles, Sage.
Calvert, C. (2004) Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy and Peering in Modern Culture,
Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press.
Chalhoub, N. (2008) “Mesurer la société de l’information dans le mode arabe: de la
difficulté d’une nécessité”, in Y. Gonzales-Quijano and C. Varin (eds.), La societé
de l’information au Proche-Orient, Beirut, Université Saint Joseph, p. 19-37.
Diab, R. (2000) “Political and Social Factors in Foreign Language Education: The
Case of Lebanon”, Texas Papers in Foreign LanguageEducation 5, 1, p. 177-187.
Etling, B., J. Kelly, R. Faris, and John Palfrey (eds.) (2009, Mapping The Arabic Blo-
gosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/
2009/Mapping_the_Arabic_Blogosphere accessed 8 January 2010).
Habermas, J. (1962) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kate-
gorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Neuwied, Luchterhand.
Haugbolle, S. (2007) “From A-lists to webtifadas: Developments in the Lebanese
blogosphere 2005-2006”, Arab Media & Society 1 (http://arabmediasociety.sqgd.
co.uk/topics/index.php?t_article=91 accessed 10 March 2009).
Hine, C. (2000), Virtual Ethnography, London, Sage.
Jurkiewicz, S. (2011), “Is the Blogosphere a Counterpublic? The Lebanese and the
Egyptian Blogosphere in Comparison”, in: N.-C. Schneider and B. Gräf (eds.):
Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching Change in Times of Media Convergence, Berlin,
Frank & Timme, p. 27-47.
Klaus, E. (2009) “The Integration of Weblogs in the Egyptian Media Environment”,
in Heinemann A., O. Lamloum, and A. Francois (eds.), The Middle East in the
Media: Conflicts, Censorship and Public Opinion, London, Saqi Books, p. 252-
267.
Miller, C.R., and D. Sheperd (2004), “Blogging as Social Action: a Genre Analysis
of the Weblog”, in L. Gurak et al. (eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Commu-
nication, and Culture of Weblogs (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_
as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.html, 2004 (accessed 10 Oc-
tober 2010).
Salama, V. (2007) “From Long Island to Lebanon: Arabs blog in America”, in: Arab
Media and Society1 (http://arabmediasociety.sqgd.co.uk/topics/index.php?t
_article=91, accessed 7 August 2009).
Sorapure, M. (2003) “Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the
Web”, Biography 26,1, p. 1-23.
Taki, M., “The demise of ‘virtuality’: A case study of weblogs in Lebanon and
Syria”, in: N. Carpentier et al. (eds.), Democracy, Journalism and Technology: New
Developments in an Enlarged Europe, Tartu, University of Tartu Press, p. 281-
292.
Warde, A. (2005) “Consumption and Theories of Practice”, Journal of Consumer
Culture 5,2, p. 131-153.
Wardini, E. (2010) “Language as Marker of a Pluralistic Identity: The Case of Leba-
non”, announcement for a presentation at IMES, University of Edinburgh, May
3 (http://www.imes.ed.ac.uk/news_and_events/article.php?article_id=41, accessed
15 October 2010).

Between Everyday Life and Political Revo PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Between Everyday Life and Political Revo PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Nuova Serie, XCI 1 – 2011

NUOVA SERIE, ANNO XCI, 1, 2011

BETWEEN EVERYDAY LIFE

Armando SALVATORE, Before (and After) the ‘Arab Spring’: From

BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’:

Old and new media in the ‘Arab Spring’

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 5-12

From everyday communication to political revolution

in spite of diffuse and enduring authoritarian rule. Eickelman reminds us how

New actors, fresh strategies

forces killed hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young people. Detained for 11

MEDIA IN ISLAMIC AND AREA STUDIES:

There are decades when nothing happens,

T he new communications media are transforming what it means to be part

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 13-22

The personal dimension

Socialization into academic fields

dents (Ortner 1984). I got my initial bearings in anthropology from an under-

NEXTOPIA? BEYOND REVOLUTION 2.0*

Revolution through the ever latest technology?

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 23-39

book activism, in 2009 as a “form of masturbatory self-congratulating cyber ac-

A preoccupation with the ‘new’ and the ‘political’

Taking serious the social dimension of social media

A change of attitude: individuals vs. authority

The weight of individuals: a generational evolution

A development with roots in the eighteenth century

BRIDGE BLOGGERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

T he Middle Eastern region is typically seen as characterized by political in-

Research on the Arabic, Middle Eastern and/or Muslim blogosphere

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 41-60

common political theme across this blogosphere is Palestine. Another popular

Bridge blogging and social network theory

sonal versus topical and individual versus community-oriented. This classifica-

Exploring bridge blogs

available software, TouchGraph’s Google Browser,4 which allows the mapping

Graph 1: Global Voices Middle East and related networks6

Graph 2 — Sabbah Report and associated networks

Graph 3 — Mahmood’s Den and associated networks

Mahmood’s Den is represented by the large circle in the middle, marked

FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE TO THE STREET:

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 61-74

Emergence of the blogosphere

by conditions of intense poverty, environmental toxicity, infrastructural neglect,

The alliance online

representative governance, but their viewpoints generally remained marginal

distinction further by deploying a particularly vulgar form of the vernacular.

FROM BLOGOSPHERE TO BOOKSHOPS:

Contextualizing the Egyptian blogosphere

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 75-89

tures of the Egyptian blogosphere.2

Diary-writing in the Egyptian blogosphere

Literary features of personal blogs

Egyptian publishers go online

ing a series called Mudawwan…t mi¡riyyah li-l-Þayb (Egyptian Pocket Blogs).13 In

Unlike the literary project of D…r al-Šur™q, we published these books

From screen to paper: differences between weblogs and book-form

nificant example is a post published on Unbrainwasher blog on February 16th,

Abdel-Messih, M. (2009) “Hyper texts: avant-gardism in contemporary Egyptian

WHY BLOGGERS BLOG IN LEBANON AND SYRIA?

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 1, 2011, p. 91-103

social relations”. Trammell et al. (2006) content-analysed front pages of 358

Table 1 — What motivated you to start a blog?