On “Arab Media Today: New Audiences And New Technologies”
I wanted to share some reflections with those of you who attended or missed the one-day conference that took place in Brunei gallery today.
According to some of the presentations and talks given, there are two conflicting trends governing the performance of two major communication processes in the Arab world: satellite broadcasting and blogging. Broadcasting is moving towards transnational; cross-political-borders in terms of programming and targeted audiences, whereas blogging maintains national and excessively local foci (bounded by the imagined postcolonial political borders).
Such statements made me think about the paradigms we have been relying on @ SOAS Media and Film Center to think about blogging (in the global south) as a new and emerging communication mode/genre/activity … etc: The Habermasian public sphere and its extended baggage of critiques, and Gramscian hegemony (but particularly its contestation).
As I was over-thinking these two paradigms and their embedded concepts while listening to a group of 5 Arab bloggers and 2 blogger-wannabees; trying to pick up any similarities between their lingo and our diction, their frame of reference and our schemes of relevance, I failed to spot any linkages. No ‘subaltern(s)’ no ‘counter publics’, no ‘discursivity’, no ‘identity’, no ‘rationality, equality or clarity = publicness’. So I paused for a bit and thought, ‘could this be a theory vs. practice rupture?’
If there is a rupture, especially between these two paradigms and Arab blogging practices/trends I would like to reformulate it in the following question: ‘What happens after a post is blogged?’
Let me elaborate a bit here. I have been noticing, for a while now, an unjustified enthusiasm and fondness towards Arab & Arabic blogging by Western academic institutions accompanied with an aspiration for its potential to usher change and reform in the Arab world. But, I am personally developing the view that we are asking too much out of a mere novel mode of communication: simply, because change or reform requires political action and organization, whereas blogging (as a trend and a practice in the Arab world) contradicts these two.
I am worried that blogging has unleashed the Arab orality genie (excessive discoursing accompanied with minimal action) in a new form of “every one can speak out”. When orality in the form of techno-discursivity replaces political action and organization as the channels that assure democratic being, then we are not enjoying multi-publics but suffering from techno-ghettos. In other words, I am afraid that blogging has become the end rather than the means: when and where speaking out replaces voting or lobbying or working for structural changes.
Is it really too simplistic to assume that blogging in the Arab world is evolving into a channel where ‘bloggers’ release dissident feelings and don’t translate thought, ideas, and ideology into organized political – preferably parliamentary – actions and counter-action and therefore unintentionally create and prolong apathy – maybe it is!
Perhaps I have been a bit too harsh on the so-called Arab blogosphere, then again the performance that I witnessed today by a group of depoliticized bloggers (connecting political blogging to celebrity; and dismissing political actions) made me think twice not only about Arab blogging (as a mode of communication) but also about its practitioners as advocates for change!
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I will start my intervention (as Matti would call it
) with a note of skepticism about the current buzz on the Arab blogosphere and blogs in general (hoping to stay on topic):
- are we sure that the mere fact of starting a blog and writing down some lines could make a change? (I beg pardon for using a so much overused word in the post-Obamian era we are living in)
- search engines (google et similia) work on an area basis and “popularity”, so, say, google.co.uk will show as the first results links to UK content and your page rank. Therefore your visibility is a result of the effectiveness of your networking/promoting skills (being part of blogs which aggregate blogs according to area or interest similarities, exchanging links with other bloggers, contributing to more famous blogs) and the amount of hits your blog collects.
With reference to depoliticized bloggers, I see blogosphere as a “mirror” of society (or better, groups of people) in general. You find those discussing politics, fashion, football, etc… Therefore, I am not shocked nor disappointed to see a number of bloggers not advocating for change.
Whether political blogging would naturally be translated in political actions in the “real world” and create a sparkle in a civil society? Well, it is quite a controversial notion. This process, if possible, does not seem automatic to me.
Obviously I am not denying the existence of great bloggers who have injected several sparkles into the political debate and somehow created the premises for “change”, but the assumption of a direct switch from virtual to real seems a bit simplistic to me.
With reference to your reformulated question (‘What happens after a post is blogged?’), I think the question could be changed to ‘What happens after a sentence is uttered?’
Basically no one knows, we could assume that audiences should have a sort of reaction (active or passive acceptance, active or passive rejection) or they could even ignore your sentence and change topic.
Well, just some random thoughts, I hope to see many comments on this post in order to discuss this issue further.
I am interested in how you formulated the reformulated question. But I can see that you are inflecting the concept of a transmission model over blogging practices. Consequently assuming a communicator, a communicating process, and some receivers or audience as you describe them.
Again, this is what is worrying me about blogging in the Arab World: the conceptual shift from a political process to a communication process.
I want to stress as a reminder for any coming discussions that I am talking with reference and specific interest to the Middle East and Arab blogging.
You are arguing that “the assumption of a direct switch from virtual to real … seems a bit simplistic…” I am not talking about a ‘shift’, I am looking and problematizing the lack of continua between the two.
I was so pleased to read Osama’s intervention and his remarks re: discursivity/orality in the Arab world and action after attending a rather long day on “Arab media today: new audiences and new technologies”. Yes, there is something to be said about the lack of continuum between the political and communicative processes and about discursivity, talk and action. Chairing the first session titled “Assessing Arab audiences’, I was immediately struck by the disconnection between critical theory and practice, in this case academic practice, too. Papers were generally weak and unchallenging and my feeble attempt to contextualise the discussion failed as I was flagged by one of the organisers to cut the session short and send everyone off for a much-needed coffee break. In fact, it seemed to me that the agenda for the day was already determined by presuppositions about what new Arab media and new audiences are about. Khaled al-Shami, of the independent Egyptian al-Hewar TV, captured one theme of debate with his remark that there is too much politics in the Arab media, and too much media in Arab politics. Is that correct? I think it was too much money, and spare time. Jihad Fakhreddine, who has done extensive marketing research, gave a pretty good summation of what the audience is or how it is imagined and what audience research is about. I cannot say much about the second panel. The third, The Arab bloggers panel, chaired by non other than Marc Lynch, was about procedures and practices, what blogs can and can’t achieve, but not about their contribution to the public space, the public sphere or participation. I had the feeling that the day was mainly about marketing and image, who has done what best, and what people are doing and how they are breaking the competition and surviving in dire markets and unappreciative governments, and, dare I say, audiences. So yes, it is definitely about practice, as a business, not as an intellectual endeavour or as ‘knowledge’. Now, of course, this begs the question about the link between practice and theory.
I personally find it rather interesting how the discussion about new technological forms is a bit like watching television genres: the Middle Eastern blogs always have to be the political detective show; Africa is the struggling underdog with mobile phones beating odds towards development; China / Korea is about the young lonely men that play video games … and so forth and so on.
So perhaps the discourse about blogging as political in the Arab World reflects wider concerns and fantasies about the region rather than only what is taking place. Might most blogs be just simply, like ordinary life, simply banal and without effects? Farts in the wind. Must they be automatically political (even though such great political sites do exist …)?
Well yes, of course. But they are also political in the sense that politics is the banal, the everyday and the casual.
One aspect of blogging I find interesting is the narcissistic element of it…well, self-importance, really.
Is there a sense that it is a hyper-real sense of self and identity??
Theoretically speaking, I tend to prefer nowadays moving away from abstractions like “political” and the “everyday” towards more situation-based metaphors such as “singular” and “ordinary.”
So perhaps a clearer language for me to use here would be: some blogs are “singular” – that is, they are important or unique as events in political struggles insofar as they cause some change (event affecting the series in technical language). Most blogs, however, are ordinary insofar as they do not cause major changes nor affect change.
This would perhaps allow us to move the task of research from looking at abstractions to looking at situations where and when such singular events take place – in blogs, satellite television and everyday.
Thinking aloud …
A reflection on a reflection:
I came a across the following line and thought it could be relevant: ” … the dangers of a media-constructed or media-usurped public sphere, transforming participation into spectatorship in the name of enlarging the audience” (Chaney, 1983 in Routhenbuhler, 1998).