Charles Levison has an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the political role of Egyptian bloggers:
After government supporters attacked and beat protesters in late May, Egypt's blogging community led the effort to publicize what had happened.
"I had never heard the word blogger until May 25," says Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist. "But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media."
Activists in Egypt rely on blogs like Fattah's to find out the time and place of future demonstrations, to learn who has been arrested and where they have been taken, and to debate the effectiveness of opposition strategies. In short order, Egypt's bloggers have become a political force, capable of more than merely commenting from the sidelines.
In early June, Fattah and two other bloggers decided they were tired of protesting in the same tired locations, with the same hackneyed slogans. Acting independently of opposition elders, they used their blogs to organize a protest in a working-class Cairo neighborhood, which attracted a respectable 300 people. The young bloggers' innovative logos, slogans, and choice of location prompted a sweeping debate among the Egyptian opposition.
Here's part of what I told Charles:
"Egypt's bloggers seem to have been able to make the transition from spouting hot air, to political organization and political work and that's impressive," says Marc Lynch, a political science professor specializing in Arab media at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
I have my doubts as to the short term political relevance of blogging in the Arab world - I remember saying to Charles during our conversation that Egypt strikes me as the exception rather than the rule. Translating the blogs into political activism is something which I don't see happening in a lot of other Arab countries (except for Bahrain, which gets a good sized box here, and Iran, which of course is not Arab). There are a number of nice, well-written, often fascinating blogs in many other Arab countries (in Arabic and English), but very few that I'm aware of are really political, and even fewer do anything like the political organization role that these Egyptians have pioneered. It's hard to find a single Jordanian political blog, for example, despite the ferment in that country's politics over the last year.
One other point is that in comparison to satellite TV, which has darn near universal reach now, blogs remain limited to a pretty small, elite sector in the Arab world. This is not a problem when the goal is to organize a political movement or to connect with the international media - the things at which the Egyptian bloggers have excelled - since you don't need to reach a wide public to accomplish those things. But it is a problem if you expect blogs to challenge the Arab "mainstream media" for the wider public. I'd wager that Arab political activists in other countries will start to imitate the Egyptian methods of networking and political organization through blogs ... even as governments will be ready to crack down.
Meanwhile, Steve Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting piece on a related theme in Slate (which marks a pretty serious upgrade in their usual Middle East coverage):
Abdulhamid is also a blogger, who, along with many others in the region with access to a computer and the Internet, has been sharing his thoughts about the state of governance and politics in his society with anyone interested enough to read. The Middle East blogosphere is not only an important vehicle of protest, it has become an invaluable tool to analysts stuck in New York, Washington, and elsewhere who are trying to make sense of developments in faraway places. Yet there is a risk of assigning more importance to these accounts than they intrinsically deserve. In addition to being observers, analysts, and interpreters of events, bloggers are activists. This is not to suggest that the Arab world's talented bloggers are not to be trusted, merely that looking through the straw hole of the Middle East blogosphere may provide a distorted view of what's going on in the region.
Cook takes on a question with which the group at Carnegie have recently begun grappling: how do you measure political change in the Arab world? It's a tough nut. Cook echoes a theme I often repeat:
While some columnists and editorial boards prematurely proclaim the triumph of the Arab spring, there is a tendency to lose sight of the fact that the defenders of Arab regimes have time and again proved themselves to be smart, flexible, and exceptionally brutal when confronting internal challenges. It seems unlikely that the gendarme states of the Middle East will allow themselves to be disarmed without much of a fight. Arab governments tend to engage in a combination of repression and cosmetic liberalization in their efforts to preserve their authoritarian political systems. That's why the number of protesters in the streets, the staging of elections, or the ability of Arabs to say nasty things about their leaders—without getting arrested—are fairly crude metrics for measuring political change. Observers need to look beyond these types of developments. What really matters are changes to the institutional mechanisms of political control. Thus far, the leaders of the Middle East, despite becoming adept at the discourse of democratization and masters of tactical political openings, have taken very few steps to fundamentally alter the authoritarian status quo.
I prefer the phrase "nasty little weasels" to describe Arab regimes, but the point is the same. Cook's piece also fits nicely in the Greg Gause challenge from yesterday.
Bloggers in lebanon were very politically active as well as able to make the transition to on the ground impact. Of course many would argue that lebanon is somewhat atypical, but lebanese play a major role in arab media life, and should not be ignored (that is beyond the pop icons that you cover so assiduously).
Posted by: hummbumm | August 24, 2005 at 09:39 AM
Should have mentioned Lebanon too, my bad. And Iraq is kind of a unique case. But the wider point stands, I think, unless other commenters want to argue the counter case.
Posted by: the aardvark | August 24, 2005 at 11:33 AM
The Lebanese indeed do play an outsized role in MENA media (a negative in my mind, as Leb Land obsessions and habits get written large as "Arab World"), but in the end I fail to see the meaning for the wider Arab world. Even for Lebanon, the blogs served a rather narrow and rather too special little elite rather too caught up with itself.
Blogs may be an interesting tool on the margin, as we say in economics, for effecting organisational work, but too few Arabs read them, even among elites, and there is too little internet penetration to really make them effective. Bou Aradvrak is right, Arab Sats are the real influence driver.
Posted by: The Lounsbury | August 24, 2005 at 01:52 PM
Of course blogs are limited to a small group of people, usually elite. Of course they don't have the reach of satellite TV. Nor, I think, do they aim to compete with the mainstream media for a piece of the media market pie. Their goals are limited to getting information out to their (usually highly politicised) constituency and coordinating political mobilisation. The importance of networks has often been stressed in social movement theory, and blogs often reflect such networks, friends passing them on to friends, students to fellow students, and so on. They offer a new tool to a group of people already interested in challenging existing hegemonies. The pool of potential political activists in any society is relatively small, so I don't see this as unusual. Students will reach out through student clubs, Islamists through their dawa networks, this is just another variation.
I also suppose that for young activists tired of existing political parties, blogs offer a low-cost way of networking and coming up with alternatives. It's a hell of a lot more convenient than setting up party branch offices or leafletting the neighbourhood.
It certainly is easy to be taken in by the sudden mushrooming of symbolic protest and blogs in the Arab world and see it as a sign of larger political ferment - it is all too common to see the average Cairene window-shopping in complete ignorance of a protest two blocks away - but even symbolic protest does have a demonstration effect and encourages more people to speak out. Not to mention the relief of being able to speak one's mind for a change. For many people it is refreshing just to hear slogans openly criticising Mubarak. I suppose the real question is whether all the talk will serve as a pressure valve or as a first step to greater things.
Posted by: SP | August 24, 2005 at 02:49 PM
Protest! Alaa (and Manal) do a great job but to say that Egypt's blog scene is leading antigov. protest is a big big stretch -- Eg. bloggers are not THAT influential. Compare with the stream of SMS messages about activities, phone calls, e-mails, blogs haven't made it yet. For an audience outside, maybe yes. The attempted vigil has nothing to do with the move for change, it was a sporadic attempt by a few bloggers here and one or two abroad. It's like me calling my friends and try to meet up and demonstrate and then let media quote as as reps or leaders of egypts political opposition movement who do a great job at a huge risk. If there were an important blogscene, sure Charles could have came up with other blogs to put in the side bar than these who are largely playing on the side as commentators -- just like me?
Aardvark & Sat TV is more influential.
Posted by: Ritzy Mabrouk | August 24, 2005 at 09:18 PM
Social blah blah theory or whatever, it is quite simply the case there are not enough blogs or blog readers in the Arab world for them to genuinely matter.
Overreading the role of blogs reminds me of the nonsense regarding e-government and the like pimped by the Development types a few years back - it's reading developed market concerns onto another situ. Period.
Posted by: The Lounsbury | August 25, 2005 at 05:38 AM