Since the train bombings in Bombay, the Indian government has barred access to designated blogs, apparently in order to prevent intercommunal eruptions.
Blogging aficionados are most upset by this restrictive intervention, which they claim is an infringement of their rights. One condemns the action as “fundamentally wrong and morally reprehensible.” Is it really? Democrats have to be watchful of government censorship, but after Rwanda, when broadcasters incited Hutus to massacre Tutsis, even the most fundamentalist libertarian surely must understand the need for restraint during exceptional times or when crimes are involved.
The Internet has already become a coffee shop for pedophiles and violent fantasists. Most of us don’t think this freedom is a wonderful liberation, not even if it remains in the realms of ideas and unfulfilled hideous desires.
Most free countries already have sensible (and minimal) laws to curtail rabid expression. The Internet — which opens up the skies of knowledge and exchange — is harder to monitor and even harder to constrain. Attempts to discuss the chaotic fallout are foiled or silenced.
Blogging, the latest trend filling cyberspace, began in 1994 in the US as online diaries kept by nerds and mischief-makers who called themselves “escribitionists.” In 2002 came the moment when bloggers became newshounds uncovering stories. Strom Thurmond, a racial segregationist who once ran for presidential office, was fulsomely praised by Sen. Trent Lott.
A blogger attacked Lott, and kicked up a political storm that ended in the scalping of the senator. Thus began a tradition and one to be welcomed.
Investigative journalists — sadly a disappeared species in the mainstream media — have been replaced by well-connected, literate, expert bloggers who expose corruption and the depravities of the powerful. One is a good mate. Much of what he does is in the public interest, some unashamedly is not.
As traditional journalism is getting both brazen and more cautious, important stories disappear in the cracks between the two, to be sniffed out and dug up by bloggers. In despotic countries, bloggers have become the new enemy and the new martyrs. One of the most startling and informative books recently published is We Are Iran, the translated voices of witty, fierce, optimistic young Iranian web diarists.
They do this at their peril under an increasingly vicious government. In China in 2002, Lui Di, a psychology student, was imprisoned for his web thoughts, and more have joined him since. The “milblogs” by allied soldiers in Iraq displeased the authorities but gave us some insight into their troubled thoughts.
But with 35 million bloggers worldwide, there is also a glut of pathetic drivel and idiocy. And, increasingly, anonymous blackmail and intimidation is appearing. Individuals and groups are vulnerable, even if they can create a counter-blog and play the unwinnable game.
Sometimes I wish we could turn off this global mayhem. In the last 10 days, I have found myself plunged into blogland, an even more perplexing warren than Alice’s wonderland. A week ago on Sunday my phone came alive for hours. A foxy blogger had claimed I was being interviewed by the police over the cash-for-questions investigation. My poor husband, Probity, was dragged into the nonexistent scandal. Reputable journalists, now followers of bloggers, joined the chase.
I had to turn to a blogger mate to put up a correction and stop the deliberate provocateurs. Then on two live radio broadcasts, I found myself arguing with Islamists. One barked: “You cannot talk about this, you are a Bahai, a secret Bahai, we all know you are not a reel (I spell his pronunciation) Muslim.” Bloggers apparently have put this misconception about. Sometimes I do wish I was a Bahai, an admirable religion which embraces all prophets and seers.
But I am not a Bahai because I follow the faith of my beloved mother, going back to my great grandparents.
Other Muslim bloggers are trying to discredit a story I wrote about a woman in a burkha who followed me home. She was covered up to hide the most appalling attacks on her by her father and two brothers. And last week’s column on Zionism and anti-Arab racism has led to an explosion of abusive blog denunciations.
The truth is out there. Like hell it is. Ignore all gossip, as I was taught to do as a child growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else. And I hardly ever read blogs, but that does not mean I can escape from them.
Bloggers disseminate stories that are trusted by millions. Newspapers and broadcasters are vastly less respected, although they are carriers of checked facts and considered opinion. As the public gets mistrustful of politicians and the media — with some justification — they can believe conspiracists, mavericks who feed their inclinations to anxiety and disbelief.
The people who believe The Da Vinci Code is the truth, and the fiction a lie the writer was obliged to veil it in, will believe almost anything.
They are like scared little old ladies who buy unnecessary security systems from blackguards because they have convinced themselves they can trust nobody.
Where do blog writers and surfers find the time? When do they do the washing, cooking, eating, talking, cuddling, story reading to kids? Do they never help with school homework, go to the theater, read books, talk to friends, entertain? And please don’t tell me this is democratizing communication. Mass blogging may indeed be giving access to Everyman, but is he always worth listening to? When one or two bloggers inexplicably find fame, yet another wave joins the industry. A young Englishwoman in Paris has been sacked by her firm for her Internet thoughts on life and sex. Yet her readers seem to love this kind of pap.
The most successful bloggers are ex-politicians or very well known public figures afflicted by insufferable vanity. Go on, join them? Seek out the verbose writers; better still, become one. There is a glut of books that promise to help ever more people share their thoughts with the exhausted world — among them Blogging Made Easy, Create a Better Blog and Start your Own Blog NOW! Wait, do us all a favor, don’t start one. There are too many out there already. Or maybe do. When there are a billion blogs to surf, who will be reading them? Death through gluttony will surely end the misery. Till the next fad.
