http://pajamasmedia.com/
“But the phenomenon of blogging is much more than that; it’s the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg revolution, a way of putting not just published material in the hands of the public—but publishing itself.

Where journalists once gave us “experts say,” blogs give us the experts themselves. And where faceless, “objective” editorial boards once handed down opinions and endorsements, bloggers sound off, the numbers on their public sitemeters lending them unassailable credibility as voices for the rest of us.”

And I’d really hoped the subject would become the flexibility of language and the long tradition of literary dissent, but here we go again with technology and innovation.

What else would I expect from people who are more interested in inventing new musical instruments that learning to play them well.

The Holy Roman Catholic Chuch was devasted.

What’s it going to be this time?

Three guesses…

“Not all voters have purple fingers this time though, a useful learnt technique has spread and is being successfully used throughout the family. Putting some vaseline on the finger before putting it in the ink, then wiping the finger after putting it in the ink, seems to do a very good job at removing the evidence of voting..
Voting is no reason to be ashamed of though, but mom says the ink makes her hand look ugly!”

Thanks Colin, chilling indeed. The “chilling effect” at the end of the article is for me the scariest part—a prof has now decided against teaching a course on terrorism because it would put his students at risk. Just when someone is going to encourage young people to think beyond the stultifying platitudes of The War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security squashes it. Long live the Ministry of Propaganda.

So in the West when we read Venezuelan blogs, we tended to read blogs written in English by the uppper middle class elite, who were disproprtionately anti-Chavez. This helps to explain, I think, why so many in the West were shocked by the result of the recall vote.

Hopefully the ‘access to a computer’ issue will become less of a problem over the next few decades, but until we in the West (for example, as regards Iraq) actually bother our arses to learn some Arabic we will always get a one sided view of the situation.

The lack of knowledge of foreign languages in the West Brandon brings up may to some extent be a good thing. It does make it a lot harder for foreigners to start large propaganda efforts to corrupt the exchange of information, leaving the locals somewhat free to develop their own dialogue. We know CIA bought stories in Iraqi newspapers, and they would probably want to swamp all of the Iraqi media with their own sanitized stories, but I doubt they have the people to do it.

As for the use of political allegory as political weapon, it definitely has a long history. Anyone studying the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution will recognise the use of cultural critique of a popular historical play at the time as the initial tool to attack Mao’s political enemies and launch the GPCR.

NEW BEDFORD —A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm

An appropriate response might be to publicize these links:

http://art-bin.com/art/omaotoc.html

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/

I think the basic problem with international blogging is far simpler than most people think. I don’t want to sound like a tedious old reactionary here, but one of the most disturbing things about the way Britain and the US (and to a lesser extent, Australia and Canada and the rest) are going is simply the fact that less and less young people learn a foreign language at school.

But if you restrict yourself to English you commit yourself (obviously) to only reading and accessing what English speaking people can say. There are translations services but of course they can cherry pick what they translate and translate in the most ‘unfriendly’ possible way (not thinking of anyone in particular here…….).

So in Iraq I think blogging is going to be a huge force for democracy and freedom……for Iraqis.

Whether it will help outsiders understand the situation is another question. ‘We’ can only read the blogs that are written in English, which tend to be orientated (reasonably enough) towards those who have been educated in English speaking countries or who have done business with English speakers: i.e. the highly educated middle class. This is an important part of Iraqi society of course, but we always run the risk of extrapolating, and deciding that the views of these people are representative of the views of Iraqis as a whole. For example, if it is true (and it may not be) that Allawi has done far worse in the current elections than we were led to believe by the Western media, this may be because Allawi’s broadly secular, pro-American policies were more popular with the secular pro-American middle class, and I would guess that a disproportionate number of these people are bloggers.

This goes double for the rest of the world. There are growing numbers of bloggers in African languages and South American languages (not to mention, as the article above, Chinese bloggers) but how many of us will have a chance to read these in the original?