From Blog to street

When Bahrain Online founder Ali Abdulemam and his partners were arrested in February 2005 for hosting a critical United Nations human-rights report about Bahrain, fittingly enough the first to respond were colleagues in the Bahraini blogosphere. Before the government could announce his arrest, a consortium of bloggers established the Free Ali web page and set in motion Bahrain’s first blogging-led mass protests. As the efforts gathered pace, the Shi’a-run Al Wasat and other liberal papers were swept up in the bloggist tide and denounced the arrests, garnering further international attention by adding their support to the protests in the streets of Manama. “Moblogs” pairing a protester on the street carrying a mobile phone with a blogger on a computer offered continuous updates that proved pivotal in mobilizing demonstrators and evading the police. In turn, the photographs spread around the world as other Arab, European, and American bloggers linked or copied the images on their own blogs. The demonstrations initiated by Bahraini bloggers reached the attention of viewers across the Middle East when Al Jazeera became involved and broadcast the protests live. As international pressure grew, the web-led movement succeeded where other movements have failed, achieving the release of the Bahrain Online founder after fifteen days. As the 2005 Free Ali Campaign dramatically shows, the development of blogging in Bahrain has enabled the emergence of a “citizens’ media” with the very real capability to mobilize dissent. Facing a minority Sunni monarchy, the Shi’a majority, traditionally excluded from public discourse and public advancement, has forged its own platform from which to speak. With almost a quarter of Bahrainis regularly accessing the Internet, activists have developed sophisticated online forums and individual blogs which have very quickly become the locus of movements for democratic change. In Bahrain blogging has magnified the emergence of the “new Arab public” brought about by the advent of satellite television. Blogging has not only provided a means for mobilizing citizen action, but also for widening the kinds of public debate that can take place. In this article, I argue that blogs can be vehicles of social change and that the rapid diversification of Bahraini blogs is expanding the arenas of public debate in Bahrain, leading to more rigorous and broader political landscape

Internet privacy · Media studies · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Public sphere · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Socioeconomic Development in MENA · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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