Armenian Bloggers Conference
Monday, May 1st, 2006Art Tonoyan from iArarat.com has emailed me and a number of other bloggers in Armenia to discuss the idea of holding an Armenian Bloggers Conference in Yerevan when he’s over at the end of May. Personally speaking, when the media here is largely controlled by pro-governmental and pro-opposition political and economic forces, blogging represents an excellent medium to allow civil society activisits, citizens, foreigners and independent journalists to disseminate alternative information and opinion to an audience inside and outside of Armenia. Actually, this is apparently not too disimilar to the potential of blogging elsewhere.
Web logging, or blogging, is the new kid on the media block, complete with its own, unique lexicon. The verb is to blog and the participant in blogging is a blogger. If you are part of the blogging community, you are also part of the blogosphere - presumably with its own weather system.
A blog is simply a series of updated posts on a web page in the form of a diary or journal, often including commentary on, and hypertext links to, other web sites. Posts are in chronological order and can contain anything from simple text, to music, images and even streamed video.
Blogs tend to be highly personalised - an online stream of consciousness. Nothing particularly unusual about that when you consider the rise of the personal home page, for example. But the phenomenon is that so many people are interested in what bloggers have to say.
Perhaps one attraction of blogging lies in its unmediated and dynamic quality. Without an agenda, editorial stance or pedantic sub-editor standing between the writer and reader, blogging can provide reportage in a raw and exciting form.
“Readers are flocking to online news sites by the millions for the latest news about the war in Iraq,” JD Lasica, senior editor of the Online Journalism Review, told dotJournalism. “But the story doesn’t end there.
“They are also streaming to weblogs for sceptical analysis, critical commentary, alternative perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media, [such as] the views of foreigners, and the occasional first-person account. A handful of reporters in the Gulf region are maintaining weblogs to provide fuller, more personal and colourful reporting of what they are witnessing first-hand.”
Of course, the problems with blogging are also the same, especially with regards to the need for information to be factual even if it is still to be opinionated. Too often individuals think they can just set up a blog on their own and not adhere to certain practices that are still necessary even in the most unbalanced of media in the West. It’s also no surprise that given the rise of the blogosphere that even media outlets are starting to introduce their own blogs to appeal to a readership that is eager for a more personal account on global news and events that might not otherwise be covered due to budgetary and time restrictions.
They are opinionated, ranting, often incoherent and frequently biased with little regard for accuracy or balance. They are also compellingly addictive and threatening to emerge as a new brand of journalism.
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Then blogging went mainstream. Established print journalists from outlets such as MSNBC and Guardian Unlimited started to create their own weblogs to sit alongside news and features, blurring the distinction between journalism and blogging still further. And the tools to build blogs became more widespread with internet service providers such as AOL offering blogging tools to their users and Blogger.com receiving a financial boost from its acquisition by the search engine company Google.
But while some bloggers believe that a new brand of journalism is emerging, some new media pundits remain sceptical.
“It’s like all stuff on the web,” Mike Smartt, editor of BBC News Online, told dotJournalism. “Dissemination of information is great, but how much of it is trustworthy? They are an interesting phenomenon, but I don’t think they will be as talked about in a year’s time.
Despite the skepticism in the above quoted article from 2003, the situation with blogs has vastly improved. In the Armenian context, for example, the increasing number of Armenia-related blogs means that a plurality of opinion is narrowing the divide between views. It is now more difficult to push propaganda for example, and the ability to comment on posts also means that discussion can be initiated and encouraged.
The essence of the original blogs was that they were individual expressions of information and opinion, however eccentric or extreme. This raised an obvious credibility question. Some blogs may have been accurate, but many more clearly come off the wall. For every dissection of the CBS report on President Bush and the National Guard, we had 1,000 rants and 100,000 accounts of daily activities of interest to nobody except the author. The limits of the free-for-all were well demonstrated by the chaos that resulted when the Los Angeles Times opened its online editorial page to unrestricted contributions.
Such problems will encourage the growth of a more responsible online-information system that exploits the medium’s possibilities, but which also adheres to self-imposed standards that would have been seen as unacceptably restrictive by the original bloggers. The idea that the internet meant complete freedom will have to die in at least a part of the forest if the medium is to realise its potential as an information tool. Serious providers will have to accept that they are not free from responsibility.
Basically, civil society activists, academics and journalists bringing their own experience to this new medium will sooner or later be required to take writing in the Armenian blogosphere further. Again, this is no different from the situation in the rest of the World, as the Economist’s World in 2006 pointed out. It might also provide a necessary check and balance system to the local and global media that has both economic and political dependency on external sources of funding. This is especially true for Armenia and the Diaspora.
This will not come about primarily through any legal constraints, which remain cloudy in the blogosphere. Rather, a group of information websites will emerge from the world of blogs—small in relative number, but weighty in impact—which accept that the internet is not just a licence to peddle prejudices and pursue individual interests. The hierarchy of links pioneered by Google will become a key factor, discriminating in the good sense between the reliable and the dross, and creating a virtuous online circle. Thus can brands be built.
This will present newspapers, already hit by declining circulations, with an extra challenge, and the growth of video and audio feeds from citizen-reporters will drive at least the smaller broadcasters to try to co-opt them as contributors. Conventional media enterprises will have to find creative ways of drawing on the proliferating sources of content and channels of distribution to satisfy their customers. If they do not adapt, fast, they may all too easily find themselves overshadowed as new media come of age, taking their responsibilities seriously and exploiting new ways of connecting with consumers.
Anyway, I do believe in the power of blogging and especially on Armenian-related issues, and so welcome Artyom’s move to initiate a meeting of bloggers in Armenia. Hopefully, all going well, he’ll be able to do something in the Diaspora as well. Certainly, for my part, aside from attending the recent Global Voices Summit staged by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Reuters’ Headquarters in London as well as a workshop in Oxford on e-Participation in Established and Emerging Democracies during December 2005, I’ve attempted to encourage others here.
Bloggers recognize they are early-adopting elites - and that the conversations happening on the blogs in most countries are not representative of the population as a whole. There was great interest expressed on Saturday in doing outreach to communities that currently have some internet access but are not currently blogging. People feel the need for better training materials and guidelines for outreach so that they can spread the blogging gospel more easily and efficiently.
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Put it this way: for a conventional media organization, “content†is the end goal and “content creation†is the primary activity. For a Conversation Community like Global Voices, “content†and “content creation†are means to a larger end: conversation and dialogue. The first step towards conversation is having one’s voice heard around the discussion table. By linking to people’s blogs, our editors and contributors are in effect inviting people to the discussion table and moderating the conversation.
Zarchka, for example, started off here before the civil society activist and student migrated to her own blog, and new contributors to my own blog include two NGO workers, Nessuna and Headache, as well as a young journalist, LoonyMoony. Armyouth started up only after I spent hours evangelizing the power of blogs for civil society in Armenia, and I am especially interested in getting others to post on existing or new sites. Garo at Notes from Hairenik started blogging when I suggested the medium would be ideal for his writing, and Nessuna has also been prolific in translating what little exists in the Armenian-language blogosphere.
Anyway, blogging at its most basic form is very easy just as writing on a scrap of paper is. However, there are far more issues involved — both in terms of technical considerations as well as in terms of presentation and ethics. Therefore, I hope Artyom’s idea of meeting in Yerevan at the end of this month yields significant results and the further evolution of the Armenian blogosphere. If you would like to know more about this meeting please contact me at onewmphoto@yahoo.com or Artyom at ararat01@gmail.com.
Existing bloggers in Armenia are of course invited, but we’d also like to see students as well as young civil society activists and journalists attend as well, and not least because I suppose blogging in Armenia will really come into its own during the 2007 parliamentary elections. I also believe that blogs can play a vital role in encouraging civic participation in monitoring and decision making processes in the area of the environment and anti-corruption initiatives. More as of when.
