By Waleed Al-Shobakky
It was a Wednesday, exactly one week after the 25 May constitutional referendum, and the crowds in front of the Journalists’ Syndicate in Downtown were wearing black. It was no freak fad. The somber trend was a response to a call from a political scientist at Cairo University that black be worn to protest the violations that security forces had committed against demonstrators, particularly women, on the day of the referendum. One driving force behind the spread of this message was the activity of Egyptian bloggers, who had picked up the call to wear black and succeeded in spreading it through banners on their sites. Agence France Presse, reporting on the event, said that “the Internet, including a variety of blogs on Egyptian politics, have become the tool of choice for reform activists to exchange ideas and communicate.”
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Blogs (a contraction of “web logs”) are newcomers to the Egyptian political scene. It looks likely, however, that they are here to stay. Although blogs based in Egypt have been around for little more than a year, they have garnered a great deal of attention. The independent weekly paper Al Dostour, for instance, began publishing snippets clipped from Egyptian blogs earlier this year (it stopped doing so this summer because of copyright issues, much to the chagrin of readers). Al Arabi and Al Ghad newspapers, meanwhile, have published photos taken and posted by bloggers. The writings of some political bloggers have been picked up and noted upon elsewhere, notably in the opposition press, with which many bloggers have affinities.
Right to the Mainstream
“It was 9/11 that pushed blogs to mainstream awareness,” says Naila Hamdy, lecturer in Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo (AUC), recounting how the blogging phenomenon emerged in the United States as Americans responded to the devastating attacks. But it wasn’t until the war in Iraq and the emergence of blogs authored by soldiers, journalists and ordinary Iraqis that the medium gained widespread acceptance as a source of unique kinds of information.
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The war drew attention to blogs as a tool ordinary people can use to add nuance and detail to mainstream media coverage, or even to call the dominant narrative of events into question. One of the early signs of blogs’ growing power was the case of longtime CBS news anchor Dan Rather. In 2004, CBS broadcast what it claimed were the National Guard records of US President George W. Bush. The segment came under withering criticism from pro-Bush bloggers, many of whom maintained that the records in question were forged. The storm soon spread to the regular media as the criticisms proved justified, hastening Rather’s resignation.
Egyptian blogs began cropping up in a noticeable way during the summer of 2004. Many of these forums dealt with political topics. This tendency, according to Hamdy, “is not limited to blogs. The internet in general allows the opportunity for alternate voices that can’t get heard in the mainstream media. This is true as well about countries that have wider freedom of expression [than Egypt],” says the former television broadcaster. In light of the current maelstrom surrounding political reform and new political movements such as Kifaya, the political nature of Egyptian blogs is quite understandable.
“In a country like Egypt, it’s natural to speak politics,” says Alaa Abdel Fattah, 24, a well-known Egyptian blogger and activist. “Being very personal, and not bounded by the usual limits of regular journalism, blogs have covered the constitutional referendum deeper and more comprehensively than old media—both local and international. By the end of the referendum day there was no news to break or information to disclose. It was ordinary people who wanted to share with others their personal experiences of protesting—or being beaten—in the demonstrations.” Abdel Fattah wrote about his own experience with police excesses, generating higher-than-usual traffic on his own blog, www.manalaa.net.
You Trust This?
Although bloggers’ audience may be fast expanding, there is no guarantee that people believe what they read. “Credibility is a major concern when it comes to accepting blogs. I have to know who is telling me this,” says Hamdy. “If a blog is written by a reporter who’s already on the spot and working for mainstream media and he’s giving a small perspective, then I’ll give it more attention.”
Ehab Mahmoud, former editor of the blogs page at Al Dostour, says that contemporary youth approach media content differently. Previously, according to Mahmoud, media selection was based almost solely on the identity of the author. Many Egyptians would buy Al Ahram every Saturday to read the column of prominent journalist Mohammed Hassanein Heikal. Today, by contrast, people browse and search the web in a multitude of ways to read what interests them. The author’s name may end up being merely incidental. “The culture now on the rise is not that of buying the print edition of a newspaper, but rather visiting that paper’s website,” Mahmoud says.
Those bloggers interviewed by Cairo agree that Egyptian bloggers share a few common characteristics. First and foremost, they are people who “have something to say in a candid and open way,” says Mostafa Hussein, 24, an aspiring physician and enthusiastic blogger. Abdel Fattah, meanwhile, explains that those who start blogging with a hidden agenda tend to discover that blogs are not for them. Blog readers, says Abdel Fattah, easily detect any sort of propaganda, and are not hesitant to respond with invective of their own, either in responses to postings or on their own blogs.
An oft-cited example of this phenomenon is the case of a journalist from state-owned newspaper Al Gomhouria who started his own blog. His posts, which many considered tedious and repetitive, attracted a torrent of negative responses. In reaction, the site’s comments function was turned off. But that did not deter bloggers from sounding off on their own sites, and soon enough the site disappeared.
Technological savvy, not surprisingly, is a second attribute common to bloggers. Some pundits, like Hamdy, see blogs as another “interactive participatory technology,” like emails, discussion boards and web forums. But most bloggers disagree. Amr Gharbeia, 25, who maintains a prominent blog at gharbeia.blogspot.com, says “web forums are somewhat feudal. There’s always the forum’s moderator who can delete your posts or block you totally. Generally, forums aren’t rich in content. Blogs, on the other hand, are more personal. More freedom is guaranteed.”
Blogs allow maximum personal freedom to bloggers, who can do what they want with their site with a minimum of technological know-how. “Bloggers may allow comments, or may not. And those who want to comment but can’t can have their blogs to speak their minds,” says Abdel Fattah. Many blogging services, such as Google’s Blogger service, are available free of charge.
AUC’s Hamdy thinks that bloggers are not regular internet users, but rather internet activists. “None of my students are blogging,” she adds. Gharbeia, on the other hand, does not believes that Egyptian bloggers are necessarily activists. “Nearly all shades of the Egyptian spectrum are represented in the Egyptian blogs: Islamists, nationalists, opposition and freewheelers. If you find that the Kifaya (Enough) movement enjoys wider coverage in blogs, that’s because it enjoys wider coverage in the real world,” says Gharbeia.
In Interaction?
The war in Iraq, together with the activity it triggered in the “blogosphere,” has stirred up a discussion of the relationship between blogs and regular media. Is it rivalry or symbiosis, or something of both? According to AUC’s Hamdy, blogs will never be more than “complementary” to older media. “There are many elements that are missing in blogs. For instance, there’s no news gathering in blogs—old media do this job,” she says. Gharbeia agrees, to a degree. “In most cases, we comment on and give perspective to news from traditional media. But I think it’s likely that old media also pick up something from the blogosphere,” he says.
A third model—that of ongoing renegotiation—is perhaps most apt to characterize the interface between blogs and traditional media. Hamdy thinks online journalism is evolving quickly, and that blogs will be a pivotal part of the developing process. “I hope that the new web-publishing tools will change the face of journalism. But I don’t think that any of the current models in publishing or content delivery will dominate. Experimenting will give rise to yet more possibilities,” Abdel Fattah says.
Nevertheless, it appears unlikely that traditional media will so easily relinquish their leading role. Many are trying to catch up. The online version of the British newspaper The Guardian, for instance, is much more extensive and content-rich than the print edition, and also features blogs. Stories are updated round the clock, and feedback from readers is quickly incorporated. And while technology-focused publications like Wired magazine have long encouraged their writers to start their own blogs, or at least to manage blog-like columns on the magazines’ websites without the usual deadline demands, the trend is spreading. The leading French daily Le Monde, for instance, offers free blogging services to its subscribers. But what about Egyptian papers?
“Forget it,” says Al Dostour’s Mahmoud. “Most of them are using even untraditional media—like the internet—in a too-traditional way. Check the websites of our state-run newspapers and you’ll see,” he says.
Egyptian newspapers are not turning a completely blind eye to new media and content-delivery technologies, though. Opposition newspapers Al Ghad and Al Arabi used blog photos in their coverage of the 25 May referendum events. Blogs such as Wahda Masreya (Egyptian Female) and Al Wai Al Misri (Egyptian Awareness) were the main sources. Al Dostour’s use of blogpics was even more striking. In its second release after a seven-year ban, Al Dostour hit newsstands with almost a full page of shots culled from Egyptian blogs. “The idea popped in my mind when I came across some of these blogs around the end of 2004. These blogs were vivid, with novel thoughts and language. I wanted to present this to the common reader who doesn’t have internet access,” said Mahmoud. For nine issues running, Al Dostour included bits and pieces from an eclectic collection of Egyptian blogs, representing a wide range of tastes.
This marriage of “old” and “new” media represents a relatively novel approach, even on the international stage. The arrangement was disrupted when bloggers complained (on their blogs) that the way their posts appeared in Al Dostour distorted the posts’ message. Nor was any agreement reached on the editorial guidelines for publishing blog posts. It seemed that the two media might not be so compatible after all.
On the Rise
Though the number of Egyptian bloggers has grown steadily of late, it remains tiny in the absolute sense. In a country of more than 70 million, of which around five million have access to the internet, Egypt has only about 400 bloggers, according to Abdel Fattah, who co-maintains the Egyptian blogging web confluence www.egybloggers.com and runs an aggregator for collecting posts from Egyptian blogs (www.egybloggers.com). In other Middle Eastern countries, meanwhile, blogging has caught fire. In Iran, an online population of only one million supports almost 75,000 blogs.
Blogging is now so commonplace a medium in Iran that the president, presidential candidates and many government officials have their own blogs. The vice-president maintains his blog in Farsi, Arabic and English, according to Al Dostour’s Mahmoud. In Syria, Kuwait and Bahrain, blogs are conspicuously causing a similar revolution—with governments reacting by arresting bloggers or imposing constraints on their sites.
These technological developments might seem so rapid as to be wholly unpredictable. Yet in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, a MIT professor and director of the Media Lab, forecast a phenomenon similar to that which is now emerging. Negroponte called it the “Daily Me,” a phenomenon by which people no longer need to consume mass-produced media content. Everyone, he predicted, would be able to “program” the specific content he or she wished delivered electronically. According to the Daily Me paradigm, no more will media consumers opt to buy the local daily, only to skim a couple of headlines and toss the rest. RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a relatively new web technology that allows users to subscribe to “feeds” from blogs and other websites, is the most obvious example of technology that allows internet users to tailor the content they want to read.
“Daily Me scares me,” says AUC’s Hamdy. She is concerned that if such a model becomes dominant, people, particularly the young, could be locked within their own narrow set of interests, like football, fashion or music. Gharbeia sees Daily Me as a double-edged sword. The technology advancements allow for personally tailored choices regarding media consumption. At the same time, people could more easily insulate themselves from important events and views that fall outside their constricted areas of interest, he says. Novel ways of doing things will no doubt emerge from the experimentation now occurring. But in general, says Abdel Fattah with a technology advocate’s optimism, “technology empowers ordinary people to choose what content to read or view, and this is better.”
Copyright2005 Cairo Magazine