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(iranbureau.com/webcult.gr)

A soon-to-be colleague has occasionally written, in advance of his arrival, to his soon-to-be colleagues asking for suggestions about what he might read in order to get 'up to speed' on his new soon-to-be country of domicile. Some have written suggesting that he read that hoary old staple 'Pity The Nation' (no more comments - see the other entries), or 'Understanding Arabs' or 'Killing Mr. Lebanon' and other constituents of the whole plethora of weighty, authorial tomes published about this country/region. Fair enough: forewarned is forearmed one might think, though it isn't - it simply means one arrives already armed with a series of 'official histories' and a ready-made collection of opinions that can then be thrashed out with others who have their own ready-made opinions, and so begins the agonising (in both senses of the word) discussions about historical opinion, bias, partiality and so on and so forth (most of my closest colleagues are Historians, so they love nothing more than this sort of professional self-flagellation anyway).
My own suggestion was that he eschew all of the other suggestions and begin to mine the waters of social media.
Now, of course, citizen journalism, blogging, twittering, facebooking and so on have their drawbacks: instantaneity does not necessarily indicate worthiness, immediacy does not necessarily engender quality. All of these points are well-known, both to observers as well as to participants. They are, however, a given, and, to a degree, such criticisms miss the point.
As an example, I first became aware of Twitter during the 'anhsyxia' that began in Athens, and soon spread to other European (and some non-European) cities just before Christmas 2008. Then, it was being used to publish photographs of what was happening, update participants on the movements of the various riot-police and snatch squads, and to coordinate movements and assemblies.
At times Facebook members ask each other if they would like to join this or that pressure group (I have less time for this - it strikes me as an antidote to civic participation and action rather than an encouragement to it) and, of course, recently (meaning, a couple of days ago), the leader of the 'defeated' Iranian opposition was making his most public announcements via his Facebook page, and was quoted as doing so by the august BBC ("In a statement made to social-networking site Facebook...").
Pinning down the precise nature of the uses and effects of one social media format or another is difficult and, arguably, a bit like counting angels on the head of a pin. Medium X may well be the choice du jour; tomorrow medium Y will usurp it. NowPublic may well be the current choice for citizen journalists, who knows what it will be tomorrow. And who cares?
Marshall McLuhan, of course, famously and presciently wrote that "the medium is the message." Social media forms exemplify this perfectly: it is not, really, the content of social networking sites and forms that is important, rather the message is about how people want to communicate, and what form of communication people find valuable and, increasingly, necessary. It is an antidote (to suppression, oppression, disenfranchisement, anomie...) and a cure.
All other considerations may well be interesting but they are all, in the worst sense of the word, academic.

Pity The Nation...

I recently moved house. In the process of packing boxes and all of the rest of it that comes with this tedious enterprise, I was procrastinating by taking some photos from the balcony. Across from me is the Beish police station-cum-torture centre, and right next to it is a run-down, two-storey building of two apartments with, from what I have been able to gather (in my many 'Rear Window' moments!) four residents in each. The apartments appear to be a kind of NGO/intern/freelance journo half-way house: every few months or so a new group of young foreigners moves in. Depending on what time of the year their shift is, they have a nice roof, where they do what we all do and organise furniture to their liking in order to take in the sun, enjoy the sunset, hold late-night rooftop parties...the usual. So, here is one of the residents, enjoying the Saturday morning sun in early June, and it seemed a nice photo to take. When I blew it up I realised he was reading 'Pity The Nation' by Robert Fisk.
Not at all surprising.
It comes as part of the package: foreigner moves to Lebanon, reads Fisk. I'm willing to bet my house on him doing certain other things too, again all of which come as part of the package: laptop, de Prague, Ristretto, Club Social...there's a list, of NGO hangouts, NGO dress codes, and NGO conversations. I'm not being churlish (well, maybe a little), but people trying to save the Lebanese from themselves are all over the place here, and I have noticed over the past few years a 'holier-than-thou' attitude to many of them (not all, by no means not all) but, anyway, that's not the point, and nor is the work they do.
The point is that we have elections the day after tomorrow. Big elections. Post-last-May elections, post-2006 War elections, make-or-break elections, post-Bush elections, 'Yes We Can'-with-the-help-of-our-new-best-friend-Obama elections...The massed ranks of foreign aid workers and the money they pull in and the ties and foreign government strings that come attached to that money all have an undoubted influence, and their effect will tell, in one way or another, on Sunday.
And many of their opinions, and the information that is used to back up those opinions, is coming from "the Fisk book" (as it is often referred to) and (I have written it before so I won't repeat myself) the same narrow range of sources. Not that "the Fisk book" is not 'relevant' (whatever that means - it makes for a great door-stop though as it's big and chunky), but that it's not particularly relevant now, unless the desire is to gut it for opinions about 'the Lebanese and the state of Lebanon' which one can throw about as though they were one's own, or unless the desire is to help to keep an idea of Lebanon in aspic, or to actually keep Lebanon in the state it has desperately been trying to get itself out of for god knows how many years so that we foreigners can maintain it as a place where we can come and Do Good and feel good about Doing Good, all the while having a great time ("a cheap holiday in someone else's misery" as the Sex Pistols once sang) and storing up a host of stories to dine out on when we return to wherever it is we came from.
It's a little like trying to understand contemporary Greece by mugging up on Herodotus and Thucydides.