Since they didn’t find Bush or bin Laden newsworthy enough to put on their year-end cover, Time magazine decided to name “You” the person of the year. “You” is anyone using Web 2.0 technologies – web platforms that allow for ordinary individuals to be both creators and consumers of media, thus empowering anyone and everyone. The Indian media jumped on this bandwagon, including “You” in a number of their own year-end lists. This could have been an opportunity to look into issues such as the digital divide, Jurassic-era e-governance in the time of Web 2.0, or even what Web 3.0 would entail. But the overarching concern in the mainstream papers and online was that “bloggers can write anything they want without fear of law”. Also ubiquitous were reminders of cases such as that of the social networking site Orkut, which has been getting in trouble for its ‘Dawood Ibrahim fan club’.
Some of this bitterness against new media, especially on news channels, perhaps came from the experience of being at the receiving end of unflattering if not sometimes slanderous comments on a blog called War for News. This blog is almost dead now, as the journalist who runs it is rumoured to have been found out and threatened into a retreat. War for News would pronounce regular judgements on the coverage of events on TV news and make comments about the capabilities of a reporter or the pronunciation of an anchor that were not taken kindly. What was worse, the blog would refuse to censor objectionable anonymous comments on its posts that often had to do with who was sleeping with whom. The blog claimed to be committed to free speech, but it left a bad taste in the mouths of those at the receiving end.
“Why is there so much hate and venom on blogs?” “Why do blogs hate the mainstream media?” I was asked these questions on a TV show the day Time came out with its “You” gimmick, and I was expected to defend the blogging community against such charges. But I won’t: blogs have hate and venom because there is hate and venom in the real world. The only difference is that the venom now has a medium for expression. While everyone else is exposed to the critical eye of the media, the media itself is used to playing judge, jury and executioner. No wonder then that senior journalists are feeling uncomfortable at being nonchalantly written about and criticised. A lot of the focus is on anonymous blogs, but anonymous blogs help push the boundaries of fearless speech and as such one has the right to blog anonymously.
The conflictual relationship imagined between blogs and mainstream media (“MSM” in blogging lingo) because of the criticism conventional media often faces in the blogosphere ignores the fact that many bloggers in India and across the world are journalists. Indeed, the writer and most readers of War for News were journalists! If there is a war, it is as much within as it is without. But the relationship of cooperation between blogs and MSM is one that is often not acknowledged: journalists in India and the world over follow blogs for story ideas, leads, contacts, and generally tracking what their audiences are interested in.
Apart from this more recent spate of coverage, there have been some occasions on which blogging has made news. One instance was when bloggers created a Tsunami Help site in 2004. This not only collated information from the world over but also had Indian bloggers visiting and reporting on tsunami-hit areas for their blogs – sometimes relaying information via SMS where the internet was not accessible.
On another occasion, a management institute sent two bloggers a “legally notarised email” in an attempt to intimidate them into deleting certain posts critical of it. The bloggers made this a public issue, and their outrage gained wide sympathy and brought irreparable disrepute to the institute. In the brouhaha that followed, the management institute even managed to pressure the employer of one of the bloggers into sacking him one of the bloggers had to leave his job. The incident established an important precedent for commercial organisations dealing with bloggers.
Many Indian companies, especially in banking and telecommunications, now hire specialised Internet marketing agencies to watch what people are saying about their services online. Those expressing dissatisfaction with a company’s services are often approached directly in order to provide solutions to the problems they have faced. This is called “reputation managment”.
In a third case, the Indian government arbitrarily ordered Internet Service Providers to block 17 websites last year. Four of them were blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger service – essentially sub-domains on http://www.blogspot.com. Incompetent as they were, and unable to censor specific sub-domains, the ISPs blocked http://www.blogspot.com as a whole, thus impeding access by the entire country to millions of non-Indian and Indian blogs. The government and ISPs took a week to correct the mistake, after bringing themselves international embarrassment which included somewhat exaggerated comparisons with Internet censorship in China.
What was common to all three cases was that a few dozen bloggers had come together to share information and resources and to petition government officials or file Right to Information applications – all over the Internet. Almost like fifty journalists working on one big story, together and at the same time. The word collaboration is too mild to describe the excitement of such an experience. In the case involving the management institute, the bloggers that united in protest managed to unearth information about actions that the institute engaged in that were even more questionable than those that had originally caused offence.
These are examples of what is somewhat pompously called ‘citizen journalism’, a phenomenon mainstream media outlets in India and the world over are desperately trying to co-opt. TV channels have begun asking viewers to send their stories on video tapes or pictures of events on email and these are broadcast from time to time; in times of calamity channels actually ask people to send such material.
But on an average day blogging is hardly journalism, and although the media features stories from time to time in which ‘prominent’ bloggers are displayed like exotic animals in a zoo, none of these have really been able to capture the mood of the Indian blogosphere or to analyse the place it holds as alternative media.
Perhaps it is difficult to understand the world of blogging if one has not experienced the bliss of creating a media platform single-handedly in which one is writer, editor, and marketing agent all at the same time. It is once one’s site has a hit counter, which tells how many people have visited and from where, and who has read which posts, that blogging begins to excite. The stereotype that bloggers are lonely individuals sitting in dark rooms and typing away to catharsis is untrue as bloggers are actively participating in a public sphere. As Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN journalist and co-founder of the blog aggregator Global Voices Online, famously said, “We use the Web not to escape our humanity but to assert it.”
Instead of repeating ad nauseaum that blogging is trash, as The Times of India does ever so often, the mainstream media should be interested to see what this ‘sphere’ is actually up to. What are the concerns, motivations and trends it reveals? If the blogosphere is an adda – and it can well be likened to a teashop where people meet and discuss the day’s news over a cuppa – what is being said there?
What is perhaps most fascinating about the Indian blogosphere is the great presence here of right-wing voices – far greater than is to be found in mainstream English media. Many, for instance, have long insisted that the India-Pakistan peace process ought to be scrapped as Pakistan has not given up the use of terrorism as a state policy. When the Bombay train system was bombed in July, these blogs seemed to say “We told you so.” This is a direct contrast to the insipid way in which the media toes the South Block line on relations with Pakistan.
Debates on economic policy in India often centre on whether or not profit-making Public Sector Units should be privatised. A group of bloggers who would insist that the answer is obvious have organised themselves into what they ironically call “the libertarian cartel of Indian bloggers”, and which has its critics too.
While the Indian English media is largely dominated by various shades of left-liberal opinion, the fact that much of the BJP-voting middle class does not share it is an uncomfortable truth often reflected in the blogosphere.
But it is not only when it comes to ultra right-wing views that the blogosphere provides a space for issues and opinions that do not receive coverage otherwise. The Blank Noise Project, started by Banglore-based photo-artist Jasmeen Patheja, is one example. On the eve of Women’s Day, this site invited visitors to write posts on street sexual harassment, abuse that is suffered by virtually every Southasian woman but which receives next to no space or airtime in conventional media. The web thus once again became a space in which people frustrated with a problem could become the media themselves. The Blank Noise Project soon expanded from its origins on the internet to become a movement on the street, and the coverage it attracted brought the issues it raised to much wider attention – yes, on prime-time news.
When the Indian government announced its intention to extend reservations to the Other Backward Classes, coverage on TV channels and in newspapers was overwhelmingly in opposition. One was constantly reminded of the protests against the first measure to bring about reservations for OBCs in 1991. Images of a Rajeev Goswami immolating himself that year were played and replayed, as if the media were calling students out into the streets: can we have some protests please? The protests did come some ten days later, but until then there were taking place on the web, especially on blogs. It was perhaps the first time in India that an internet protest became the lead story in a paper: “Mandal II is being fought in Cyberia”. But among the voices the MSM missed, and it seems deliberately so, were those that defended the government’s move. These included a new blog called ‘OBC Voice’, written by a Hyderabad-based copywriter. At a time when the media – conventional and online – was piling wholesale on to the anti-reservation bandwagon, OBC Voice had stepped in to fill a gaping void. (I got to know him better. When he called me for the first time, he said, ‘Hi, I’m OBC Voice.’)
But the media and the blogosphere are ultimately united by the blinkered nature of the middle class. Terrorist attacks in Mumbai or Delhi recieve so much attention in the blogosphere, but those in Guwahati don’t. Events in the rest of Southasia or the larger world are immaterial, and even diasporic blogs rarely write about the politics in their countries unless it concerns the diaspora. Why can’t we cross boundaries that don’t even exist?
We can ask questions like those, and begin to answer them, if conversations are nurtured between citizen-generated media and the mainstream media, leading to a braodening of public debate. Journalists need nothing more than a thick skin that allows them to go beyond the personal to read the political.
[First published in Himal Southasian]
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
In the brouhaha that followed, the management institute even managed to pressure the employer of one of the bloggers into sacking him.
Dear Shivam,
I was not “sacked” by IBM. I resigned. Everyone knows this, especially you, as is evident from this post of yours – http://mallroad.blogspot.com/2005/10/art-of-writing-legal-notices.html
I request you to please make the appropriate change in this post.
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Ab Gaurav bhai, language has a peculiar way of behaving. At times it speaks for the hidden or deferred meanings. Shivam is wrong in taking a little Gaurav away from you. But he is right in bringing the symptom to light. As you may well know by now sometime we resign because we apprehend the sinister act of sacking is lurking behind the corner to trample upon our dignity. So before the robbers inevitably strike you dead, you throw your ‘creative possessions’ joyously to the wind and savour the spectacle of the robbers cringing with the rest of them in dust to pick up your stuff. But let me assure you, ‘resigned’ or ‘sacked’ would be matters of mere technical details. The larger issue is human dignity.
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While i agree with a lot of what you do say, there are a few things i am not entirely sure about. I guess you could call them tangles that i havent resolved myself – so would be useful to get feedback on.
The first being the idea of anonymous blogging, and how we approach it as readers – Yes anonymous blogging is indeed a freedom that must be protected – one should have the right to shed one’s identity atleast in “cyberspace” if nowhere else; but how do we, as readers, react to anonymous texts? wdo we priviledge texts that come from an identifiable source – even if that source itself is a psuedonym. So we dont know who riverbend is – but we would like to believe that most posts on her blog, that are signed riverbend, belong to a fixed source.
But where does this come from? perhaps from the fact that a name-whatever it may be- builds a relationship between the reader and the writer – it creates a space where i can engage with the text. This relationship may not always be cordial – there are columnists i read everyweek simply to be outraged by their smugness. This i think is where my anxieties with the blogosphere begin. I agree that is probably the gut reaction of a MSM reporter – but the fact that the writer seems to be so divorced from her text unsettles me.
The separation of blogs and mainstream media also seems rather forced to me. Of course the blog frees you from bosses, deadlines, funding sources and editorial “lines” on things – and this difference cannot be understated – but as you point out in your post – a majority of bloggers have rather predictable and boring takes on things.
so when you say “While the Indian English media is largely dominated by various shades of left-liberal opinion, the fact that much of the BJP-voting middle class does not share it is an uncomfortable truth often reflected in the blogosphere.” – you actually make the blogs sound mainstream and conservative and the indian english media sound alternative and almost cool. (which it isnt of course)
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but we would like to believe that most posts on her blog, that are signed riverbend, belong to a fixed source.
Aman: blogs, like mail ids, need one to sign in with a username and password; and unless the blog is a collaborative one, there is only one person who can post. Why would you doubt that the content has been posted by the same person?
As you can see, I’m an anonymous blogger; but surely the general tone of my writing remains the same over time? Anyone can gather that from reading a blog over a period of time.
Also, one engages with the text; not with a name. Writers have used pseudonyms even before we thought of the word ‘cyberspace’; and whether or not we ever figured out their ‘real’ names, we engaged with the texts they produced.
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The fact of the matter is that in the anonymity of the blogger, the ‘author’ is finally not only disowned but quite concretely lost. And nobody, just about nobody is interested in her recovery. This has been happening – the erosion of linguistic finesse and ideas as a resonance of sound – in the media for a while but bloggers have given it/her a decisive push from the precipice. Unfortunately for the ‘authors’, they have forgotten their para-diving equipments at home and they are heading towards a perdictable and fatal thud even as they menacingly approach the ground(reality).
Not just the blog-sphere, even the MSM has become boring beyond belief. Rajdeep Sardesai’s “Is hamaam meiN sabhi naNge haiN” is a symptomatic picture of how cliche-ridden and trivial the MSM discourse has become in these post-choleric times. (I wonder if there is some way of taking a bath without bein ‘naNga’ in the ‘hamaam’. Whoever coined this phrase must be a very unhappy wo/man.) Barkha Dutt has lost it somewhere in the middle, in the rhizomatic uncertainty of which road to choose; Karan Thapar frowns and scowls no longer able to trifle with your blood pressure; poor Vinod Dua is tame like a near domesticated lion; Pankaj Pachauri hasn’t completed a simple sentence in Hindi in a long long time in any of his shows; Prabhash Joshi, the lion in winter, is a near retired author; Javed Akhtar and Purshottam Aggarwal predictably too expensive.
Eventually, it is the language that is losing out. The discourse of the common sense abounds and more often than not we have to negotiate the river of tedium and wallow in it for the other end of the trivia is nowhere in sight. As they might say, make hay while river of sand flows. The third world dons now don the first world robes of theory in the ingratiating hope of accomodation in Princetons and NYUs. The political class is in a state of perpetual fight with the state even as no one believes for a second that the state would listen to the PC with even an iota of concern and micro-iota of compassion. Ghalib’s “hota hai shab-o-roz tamaasha” is getting so farcically redefined each passing day.
Within these uneven equations, the blog-sphere has given the blogger an opportunity to revel in her/his endless choreography of the self getting increasingly steeped in the mild hysterium of our barren epochs of 9% growth rate. We know the ground we stand on has lost all water at its core; we know how ‘dry’ all our houses have become and how completely arsenically contaminated; we hear the sound of primeval snow chipping off the glaciers of thought; we feel the undrinkable water of emotions rising and rising. Nobody cries anymore even when driven to the brink. People just fall and die even as the stray bullets of this new hysterium hit them all too predictably.
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Panini, I did not resign because a sacking was imminent. IBM has a well-documented blogging policy which I was not violating. Neither were IBM bosses keen on firing me. I resigned because of the shrill threats from IIPM which were unnecessarily dragging IBM into the picure. Saying that IBM was pressured into sacking him is factually misleading, and not a semantic quibble. It implies that IBM buckled under the pressure and fired an employee, which it clearly did not.
I hope Shivam will make the change when he gets time. I already got a response from Himal’s editors saying they would be issuing a correction.
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It seems that i wasn’t sufficiently clear/ lucid on my take on anonymous blogging. The way i was seeing it, blogging as “Space bar” or “Riverbend” is not “anonymous” – simply because whether u call yourself “space bar” or “shumanto bahri” (and no thats not space bar’s name, i dont know space bar’s name), it means very little to the reader – she doesnt know any space bar, nor does she know shumanto bahri, so the name is pointless in terms of affixing birth-cetificate/rationcard type of id.
If, instead of giving myself an obviously “internet -type name” (i use this in the loosest way) like “Ctrl F7” or something, i call myself “Rohan Jain” in blog – then it is as efficient a cover- or maybe even more so cos u dont expect anyone to rename themselves Rohan Jain – all due apologies to Rohan Jains. So that isnt really my point. In fact, deliberately chosen ids/handles are often more revealing than real names – I am Aman Sethi cos my parents called me that- it is involuntary, but i surf the internet as “Fire wire” or “Ctrl F7” then it says something about the wy i consciously choose my handle. but i digress.
I am looking at the hypothetical case where one comes across an entirely unreferenced text – maybe while trawling the internet – or perhaps printed on a page that has been re-used to wrap a packet of channa chor-garam. What is the value you accord to that text – there is no previous user history, no reference to anything – nothing that tells me what circumstances this text was written in.
It is only then that i would say it is entirely anonymous.
Riverbend’s blog says “girlblog from iraq” – and that is all i need to know when i read it because i think it makes the same text more interesting if its written by an iraqi in baghdad, than by a concerned, cosmopolitan delhi’ite.
Which brings me to the idea of recovering the author – the author does not have t be the person. the author is often the circumstance. Occupation, isolation, a life-changing experience, becoming the world’s richest man, becoming the first woman in space, being saurav ganguly – these are cirsumstances that make authors out of the most disparate of individuals. And so, when riverbend says “girlblog from iraq” – she is no longer anonymous- she may not be identifiable person – but she is an engageable circumstance.
A.
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Anonymity has to do not with the self-assigned name/s which the bloggsphere encourages as an existential masquerade. No quarrels on that score whatsoever. The anonymity refers to the loss of flesh and consequently of soul – as in Bazinian phenomenology where ‘body becomes soul’ – when it comes to the use of language as a highly specific and creative act. The author is both an individual and a generic term in that case. The idea of eliminating or ridiculing the ‘person’ as an author makes me very uneasy indeed. You speak of ‘authorising investments’ – and you give many interesting examples Mr Sethi – that lead to the ‘manufacture’ of an author. You may well be right about one kind of an author. There is also another kind that takes shape as a result of the processes of ‘non-authorising states/moments of existence’, historical denials and deferrals.
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Apologies for taking so much time to respond here: I was travelling and have briefly returned to civilisation, to disappear again very soon!
Gaurav: An editorial in Business Today magazine had given the impression that, ‘depending upon whose version you believe’, you either resigned or was sacked. I wanted to maintain the ambiguity by saying that you had to leave, but in a hurry ended up writing that you were sacked. I maintain the highest respect for your brave conduct when faced with bullying from a powerful, unethical institution. I regret the inconvenience thus caused to you and apologise unconditionally.
Panini: language main bahut gadbad ho jata hain, ky karein, if only I knew some Urdu…
Aman: You raise different and rather interesting issues about our response as readers to anonymous texts. But before I comment, let me say that my article/post was in reaction to the drivel against anonymous blogs I constantly hear from non-bloggers who find anonymous blogging problematic because of issues of ‘hate speech’ ‘abuse’, ‘libel’.
I followed your (first) comment tile the point you say “but the fact that the writer seems to be so divorced from her text unsettles me”. As I see it, the writer in fact come closer to his/her text by anonymous/pseudonymous blogging. Rather than an abdication of responsibility towards one’s written text, it signifies the expression of apprehenmsion that his/her sppech may get him/her in trouble. It’s a result of a desire to say things one can’t.
On your point that “The separation of blogs and mainstream media also seems rather forced to me” – the illustration of why it’s not forced is in front of you on this very page. Sabnis is able to protest on this page, and write a post called “Shivam Vij and journalistic ethics” on his blog (so typical of him!) whereas the Himal page doesn’t even allow comments. I don’t say this as a criticism of Himal, but just as an example of how form dictates content in both cases.
you actually make the blogs sound mainstream and conservative and the indian english media sound alternative and almost cool. (which it isnt of course)
Sometimes I really have felt that way! But I think both have their coolness quotient, and it makes a lot of sense to respect their differences with and from each other even as one notices the similarities. Actually, the intro on the Himal page explains best what I meant: that both blogs and MSM ultimately reflect the “blinkered nature of the middle class”.
Space bar: You will have to read Aman’s comment carefully: he does acknowledge your point but is raising more complex issues.
PP: On your comment “The fact of the matter is that in the anonymity of the blogger, the ‘author’ is finally not only disowned but quite concretely lost” – that’s a fascinating disillusionment, but I don’t think I agree. What we have at hand is Noise – a collection of myriad voices that you have to filter in your own mind. Once you do that, then authorial voice will be concretely ‘found’ :)
Aman: Okay, but so what? Where do we take it from here? Once you have found an anymous blogger’s context and ‘located’ him/her, so what? Are you saying that some blogs do not allow themselves to be located/contextualised? I disagree, because you only have to read them for a while to find that.
P: The “processes of ‘non-authorising states/moments of existence’, historical denials and deferrals” you talk about are, I would argue, actually carried out through the very authorised voices (within and without the blogosphere) that according to you are ‘disowned and concretely lost’. By the way, it’s ‘blogosphere’ and not ‘blog-sphere’!
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Thank you, Shivam.
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By now most of us are used to the attention some kind of news gets and how some others get ignored — by media as well as the blogosphere. And the pressures that work. Nothing really new about it.
I was still sursprised I couldn’t find a single mention of the day-long hunger strike in New Delhi by the families of missing people from Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday (22nd). Is there a filter working inside Google India like, say, the one in China? I am not sure!
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