Tackling "techno-utopianism" in Doha

Tackling "techno-utopianism" in Doha

Human Rights Watch put out a statement yesterday calling for the Egyptian government to drop charges against a blogger, Amr Gharbeia, accused of what the organization calls "bogus" crimes. Those sorts of press releases are remarkably common: Over the last 12 months, HRW has called for the release of bloggers and online activists from Vietnam, Syria, Iran, and dozens of other countries.

New media - particularly blogs and, more recently, Twitter - have certainly helped to revolutionize political speech. The use of Twitter after Iran's disputed election last June is the most commonly-cited example, but new media also play an ever-larger role in day-to-day dialogue around the world.

Still - as many critics of "techno-utopianism" often point out - there are huge obstacles that prevent political speech on the internet from leading to political change in the real world. That was one of the overarching themes at today's Al Jazeera Unplugged conference, an interesting six-hour look at the rapidly-changing role of new media.

There's a language barrier, for one thing, which matters both in domestic and international contexts. Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American writer, pointed out that China's blogosphere - like America's - is largely monolingual. That means bloggers outside of China are largely unaware of what Chinese bloggers are writing - and unable to amplify their message.

At the same time, there's a disincentive for bloggers and online journalists to produce content in languages which aren't widely spoken.

"English is such a widely-spoken language among Internet users, so there's a real incentive to produce content in English," said Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard University's Nieman Media Lab. "There's not as much competition in, say, Swedish."

Internet penetration is another obstacle, particularly in the Arab world, where overall levels of internet use are well below the global average.

Take Egypt, for example. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has excited Egyptian activists with his calls for political reform and open democracy. But his campaign is largely being conducted via the Internet - which means it doesn't reach a substantial part of the Egyptian population.

"They have a huge amount of followers for ElBaradei... through the whole social media campaign that he's doing," said Mohammed Saleh Kayali, a Syrian blogger. "But at the same time, looking at numbers, [just] 21 percent of Egyptians are using the internet."

And then there's the problem of bloggers being imprisoned, tortured, harassed and otherwise silenced.

One step towards tackling that: Wadah Khanfar, the director-general of Al Jazeera, announced a plan today to take up the cases of journalists, bloggers and other activists subject to persecution - to investigate those complaints, and to publicize them.

There are no clear statistics on the number of bloggers and writers subject to government pressure, but anecdotal evidence - the frequent complaints from groups like HRW and Amnesty International - certainly suggests it's a growing problem.