BloggingBeirut.com has found its way into Journals of Political & Communication Sciences!

Read the snippet below. The full paper is linked to at the end of the post.

[hat tip to Philip Seib & TBS]

Reconnecting the World:

How New Media Technologies May Help Change Middle East Politics

By Philip Seib

In the Middle East, as elsewhere, politics sometimes receives an unexpected jolt that produces unanticipated consequences. This has happened during the past decade as information and communication technologies have become more pervasive and influential. This process is accelerating.

A key factor in this expansion of reach and power is the growing irrelevance of borders. New media will facilitate transnational trends in politics because the media themselves are increasingly transnational. This will affect the dynamics of democratization by reducing the isolation of movements for political change and by facilitating detours around obstructions created by those currently holding power.

The complexity of democratization should be respected, however, and no single factor�s impact should be overrated. Media effects, for instance, are just part of a large political universe, the constituent elements of which must come into alignment if democratization is to develop. That said we should not underrate the role of the media. As Mohammed Jassim al-Ali, former managing director of Al Jazeera, has said: �Democracy is coming to the Middle East because of the communication revolution. You can no longer hide information and must now tell the people the truth. If you don�t, the people won�t follow you, they won�t support you, they won�t obey you.�(1) That may overstate the situation, but the premise is sound in the sense that democratic reverberations are being felt in parts of the Middle East that rarely have been touched by such impulses in the past.

This is not merely a matter of theory. Media tools have been put to use in political protests in Lebanon, Egypt, and elsewhere. Transnational satellite television, for example, can�to a certain extent�evade controls imposed on news coverage within a country. The 2005 �Cedar Revolution� in Lebanon demonstrated how this can work on two levels. Regional/international coverage�such as is provided by Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, among others�could provide information to Lebanese audiences with less concern about political repercussions that might deter some indigenous media organizations. By showing the size and energy of the protests, such coverage helped fuel the demonstrations and encouraged broader pressure for Syrian withdrawal.

It is worth noting in this context that transnational media are not necessarily external media. Lebanese television channels, some of which are available on satellite, also intensively covered this story, as did radio stations and print media that reached regional and global audiences through the Internet. In Lebanon, as in any other country, indigenous news content is likely to be affected by the political, sectarian, and other interests of those who own and run media organizations. News consumers must take this into account when evaluating the information they receive.

The reports from Lebanon reached viewers throughout the region, letting them see political activity that they might decide to emulate. Later demonstrations elsewhere incorporated television-friendly tactics that were seen in the Beirut coverage. In Jordan, national flags were prominently displayed in front of the news media�s cameras, which helped avoid having the protests dismissed as simply factional discord.(2) Overall, notes Bernard Lewis, television �brings to the peoples of the Middle East a previously unknown spectacle�that of lively and vigorous public disagreement and debate.�(3)
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Yet another use of the Internet with significant political potential is blogging. Blogs amplify voices that may have previously gone unheard. As such they foster a degree of democratic parity at least in terms of expanding audience access for those who feel they have something worthwhile to say. The blogging firmament is already crowded and becoming more so (as of October 2005, blog search engine Technorati covered roughly 19 million blogs), but bloggers are good at finding each other and reaching audiences.

Particularly in countries where governments have tried to suppress political organization, blogging may prove to be valuable in orchestrating pressure for reform. In 2005, bloggers in Lebanon and elsewhere spurred debate about the perpetrators and aftershocks of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri�a debate that could be joined by anyone with Internet access, regardless of some governments� desire to stifle these discussions. Another example of political blogging could be seen in 2002 when Bahrainis dissatisfied with conventional media coverage of a scandal related to the national pension fund could read less constrained analysis on blogs such as �Bahraini blogsite� or �Mahmood�s Den.�(14) Talk about such matters has expanded from the neighborhood coffee house to global proportions, enlisting participants and encouraging electronic speech and the thinking behind it. Some time will have to pass before this phenomenon�s long-term political impact can be determined, but if bloggers� talk leads to expanded bloggers� activism, this may be yet another way that mass media provide impetus for democratization.

While the Internet is put to increasing use, an even more common communications device is proving increasingly useful in mobilizing activists. Text messaging on cell phones facilitates organization of demonstrations and circulation of political information. Particularly when political parties are restricted, text messages can be sent to unofficial membership lists. In Kuwait, women organizing protests about voting rights in 2005 found their effectiveness increased because they could summon young women from schools by sending text messages. In May 2005, Kuwaiti women were granted the right to vote and to be candidates in parliamentary and local council elections. In Lebanon, text messages (and e-mails) were used to mobilize anti-Syrian demonstrators in March 2005.(15) Fawzi Guleid of the National Democratic Institute in Bahrain observed that text messaging fosters expansion of speech because it �allows people to send messages that they would not say in public.� It also should be noted, however, that text messaging lends itself to the spread of rumors and anonymous attacks. Rola Dashti, one of the organizers of the women�s rights demonstrations in Kuwait, was the subject of widely circulated text messages that criticized her for her Lebanese and Iranian ancestry and alleged that she had received funds from the American embassy. Her response: �It means I�m making them nervous�and I�d better get used to it.�(16)
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Supplementing television�s influence, the Internet increasingly contributed to the new sense of intellectual community:
� From Lebanon, �bloggingbeirut� provided real-time Web video of the �Cedar Revolution� demonstrations against Syria�s presence in the country. This demonstrated how the speed and pervasiveness of the Internet make it a valuable mobilization tool; along with cell phones it can keep people abreast of what is happening and bring them into the streets.
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This is an important point: Democracy can be blocked or undermined by parties within and outside government. As the authors of the Arab Human Development Report 2004 noted: �There are some media outlets that are little more than mouthpieces for government propaganda, promoting freedom of speech only if it does not turn into political activity. Such captive outlets fail to stimulate intelligent and objective debate, enhance knowledge acquisition, and advance human development among the public at large.�(29) Without the advancement of debate and enhancement of knowledge to which new media can make substantive contributions, prospects for democracy will weaken. For those contributions to be meaningful, all involved in the information process�from the individual blogger to the big media corporation�must retain independence. Government pressure is inevitable but it must be resisted if the democratic process is to gain a foothold.

These issues raise many complex questions that have few precise answers. New media�s role in progressive political change is hard to define with certainty because the path toward democratization remains uncharted. Those who move in that general direction do so with more faith than certainty. They may get there, and their chances of doing so will certainly be affected by the ongoing evolution of new media in Middle Eastern societies.

Click here for the Full Paper including References -> Philip Seib at TBS

TBS is co-published by the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, and the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo.

Philip Seib is the Lucius W. Nieman Professor of Journalism at Marquette University. He is the author of The Global Journalist, Beyond the Front Lines, and other books.

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