ABSTRACT
The beauty of weblogging is that it is the world’s cheapest-no, history’s cheapest-means of publishing. Weblogging brings the power of the press down to the people. And these people need it.
Of course, the audience in Iraq would be small at the start: tiny. But the audience who can connect in Iraq and the audience elsewhere in
the world who read this would be influential. Thus Iraqis would gain a voice in their country and in the world. And this instant free press would exercise muscles of expression that have atrophied in Iraq. It would teach them how to report and comment and how to find the truth from beyond their borders. (Jarvis, 2003)
As evidence grew of the West’s misunderstandings of Iraq, Jarvis might have been a little more cautious in the following years. But the comment misunderstands not only Iraqi politics but also blogging on public affairs, and so forms a useful jumping off point for this chapter. Jarvis’s post begins and ends, as blog commentary often does, with the technology and with a liberal emphasis on individual freedom. Important as these are to blogging, they have limited explanatory or predictive power. A theory of blogging’s power needs to account for differences in the cultural-political context between the different places in which it is used, as a glance at a few blogs from outside the US shows. “Akaevu.net” in Kyrgyzstan, for example, was used for a month in 2005 much as samizdat publications were in Soviet times to republish others’ views and then disappeared (see Sulikova & Perlmutter, 2007). The Syrian poet-intellectual Ammar Abdulhamid was exiled as a result of his writings at his blog “Amarji,” becoming something of a stateless peace activist (Abdulhamid, 2006). Yan Wenbo, author of an award-winning Chinese photoblog “18mo,” which features images and stories of the maltreatment of dogs in the East, was uncomfortable with any political symbolism attached to his writing: “I encourage
different interpretations of my blog” (South China Morning Post, 2005). Blogs do not conjure up an “instant free press,” but place their authors in a more complex relationship to the norms and forces of social life. Indeed, the technology-freedom-truth triangle invoked above does not explain U.S. blogging very well either. Many critics (see Ceren, 2006; Wall, 2005) note that political blogs, in the years following the September 2001 attacks, have tended towards narrow and fixed ideological positions much of the time.
