Muslim Lifestyle

Blogging All Over the World

Issue 9 Jan / Feb 2005

Sometime over the last decade or two, the Americans lost their youth. The unconventionality and lack of regard for establishment that marked out the country from the rigidity of the European continent began to segue into establishment of its own. The government started to do what every empire eventually does, and act like one.

Now to see creativity in government, one has to look at the emerging nations that will make up the future power-brokers; Brazil, India, the Muslim countries of Malaysia, Iran and the Gulf, and of course China, that enormous, millennia-old nation that is rapidly growing into a superpower, for at least the second time in its history.

Fortunately, no-one has told the American people that they are no longer young, and no-one has warned the new nations that they are not yet mature. In fact both groups of people share a psychology that is not easy to explain: a sense that they have a vital contribution to make to the future. And the best place to see this psychology in action? Blogs.

Blogging, committing your thoughts and observations to the internet regularly in the form of personal websites called weblogs, as promoted by websites such as blogspot.com, is one of those silent revolutions taking place around us. Thousands and thousands of people jot down the minutia of their everyday lives on the internet, written by people all over the world and read by strangers across it.

As with everything on the internet, quality is an issue, and not all blogs are particularly interesting to read. But some are fascinating and here’s the dilemma. I’m wary of naming individual sites, chiefl y because I think the great asset of blogging is that it undercuts the mainstream media and institutions. Advertising widely a particular blog gives it a responsibility it has not asked for, and changes the nature of what is written because the author is suddenly aware people are watching. Blogging should not be a way of transferring into the “mainstream”. Some have made the leap, for example Salam Pax, a blogger from Baghdad who now has a book. Mainly blogging is about sketching out the details of one person’s experience - the individual details of a particular place. In a world of big media those authentic voices, with no remit to represent, can be hard to hear.

There’s a case to be made that blogging is a sign of increased openness and confi dence. It’s extremely encouraging that Iran’s Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi is a blogger. In fact bloggers can make a real difference. When Iranian bloggers took exception to the name of the Arabian Gulf, they collectively linked to a spoof page that brought up the notice: “The Gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf.” And when sorryeverybody.com, a US site featuring photos of people apologising for George Bush’s re-election, went nationwide, it did so through the thousands of blogging links.

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss bloggers as just a bunch of exhibitionists wittering on about their dull lives for public consumption. That’s true in many, many cases. But there’s a big concept at the heart of blogging – and at stake. It’s about agency. The academics Amartya Sen and Naila Kabeer have both written about agency, in differing contexts, but the main idea - that individuals should have the ability to set and pursue their own goals - crosses distinctions. Harnessing the opportunity of the internet is a way of reclaiming agency, whether from political institutions, or the media or even just from your own community.

Unpack that thought. What blogging can do, at its best, is plant an electronic fl ag in the sand that points to how you live, unfi ltered by either the mainstream media or people’s conceptions. It’s a way for people to talk openly about what is happening in their daily lives and reach others who are also writing.

We have yet to see the, perhaps anonymous, day-to-day account of a young Muslim woman growing up in Bradford or Bethnal Green, or how a young man balances faith in a largely secular society. At least, I haven’t seen it. But it should be out there, alongside all the myriad other views people have.

Blogs are the stirrings of confi dence in a community, a small way of announcing that the way you live and what you think are important enough for everyone to read. All communities and nations go through periods where they lose that confidence and feel their agency taken from them. Gaining it back is a slow process that starts at the very grassroots.

And if that doesn’t convince you to start your own blog, this might: without realising it, bloggers are writing history. It may not seem important now that your G3 phone doesn’t work, or that another green space near your house has vanished, or that the owner of your favourite clothes store is now Polish, but these are the details of our time. The historians of the future will have a wealth of information to recreate the minutia of how we live. Assuming, of course, that Chinese historians are interested in this small island.