Latin American “national” blogospheres in a dialogic society

Álvaro Ramírez Ospina is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen’s Depart­ment of Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Media Stud­ies. His Span­ish lan­guage blog is called Ojo al Tex­to. (Read the Nor­we­gian ver­sion of this arti­cle).

BlogsMéx­i­co, PerúBlogs and BlogsChap­ines are part of a group of rare direc­to­ry web­sites that are facil­i­tat­ing the con­struc­tion of a myr­i­ad of small scale and unpre­ten­tious kind of “pub­lic spheres” in today’s inter­net. They are not as vis­i­ble as most promi­nent stars, politi­cians or media chan­nels, but they are gath­er­ing a young gen­er­a­tion of Span­ish speak­ing blog­gers that behave with ener­getic autarchy and a sheer sense of belonging.

Before and after the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in Venezuela this month, the lat­est exam­ple of the renew­al of the pub­lic spheres in Latin Amer­i­ca emerged: Blog­gers in Venezuela joined forces to report and dis­cuss the cam­paign and the elec­tion issues direct­ly on their own blogs.

Glob­al phe­nom­e­non, region­al dialects
This past sum­mer the British deputy prime min­is­ter John Prescott said: “I think it’s called the inter­net or some­thing — blogs is it? — I don’t know, I’ve only just got used to let­ters.” The remark is typ­i­cal of such an impor­tant per­son, and not an iso­lat­ed one. Politi­cians in gen­er­al ignore blogs for many reasons. 

Not many peo­ple can describe how a blog works or define its main fea­tures. But approx­i­mate­ly a hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple are cre­at­ing their own new blogs every­day and learn­ing about them in the process of pub­lish­ing. This has allowed David Sifry to pub­lish his “alerts”, which are quar­ter­ly reports about the state of internet’s blo­gos­phere based on data from Tech­no­rati, a search engine that by Decem­ber 2006 was track­ing over 62 mil­lion blogs all over the world. 

If few peo­ple in the streets of any big city in Latin Amer­i­ca have heard about blogs, the real­i­ty is that the phe­nom­e­non is roar­ing, main­ly among mid­dle class young­sters who live in a vast geo­graph­i­cal region that stretch­es from south of the Rio Grande in the US to the last tip of Patag­o­nia in Argentina.

Latin Amer­i­can blogs resem­ble their coun­ter­parts in the rest of the world but have a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture that deserves some atten­tion. They tend to gath­er them­selves around some sites that func­tion as phone cat­a­logue list­ings, where authors can find them­selves and oth­er blog­gers under coun­try cat­e­gories, region­al and even gen­der BlogsMu­jer forms of belong­ing. The major­i­ty encour­age the build­ing of nation­al blo­gos­pheres on their own right which are bits and pieces of the great inter­na­tion­al blo­gos­phere being tracked by Technorati.

Nation­al blo­gos­pheres as small societies
These nation­al direc­to­ries func­tion as vir­tu­al gath­er­ing places where Span­ish speak­ing blog­gers can be updat­ed about new blogs being cre­at­ed, recent post­ings, and a week­ly selec­tion of remark­able authors which are fea­tured in a spe­cial sec­tion of the site as “rec­om­mend­ed” or as “the blog of the week”. Not all of the notice­able blogs are nec­es­sar­i­ly high­brow, as many are per­son­al diaries (writ­ten most­ly by women) that engage can­did­ly and some­times expres­sive­ly in tales about their own experiences. 

These list­ings can be searched by means of a care­ful list of blog theme cat­e­gories. In most of them 15 cat­e­gories are fea­tured. The most pop­u­lar are the Per­son­al, Opin­ion and Cul­tur­al blogs. Oth­er pop­u­lar cat­e­gories are Fine Arts, Tech­nol­o­gy and the Inter­net, Foto­blogs, Humor, Music, Lit­er­a­ture and Politics. 

Ecuablogs have short news about its mem­bers and activ­i­ties while Blogs­Colom­bia gives blog­gers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to chat and to plan annu­al face to face meet­ings. Veneblogs func­tioned as “god­fa­ther” and ref­er­ence to oth­er blog­ging com­mu­ni­ties for a while, but its founders have showed recent signs of been stalled after four years of run­ning their site. A much new­er ini­tia­tive Blogs­Do­mini­canos with help from some of their most active and enthu­si­as­tic mem­bers orga­nizes reg­u­lar real life group encoun­ters (Coroblogs). The main func­tion how­ev­er of all of them resides in the search for peers, the exchange of links and the abil­i­ty to ping the direc­to­ry serv­er every time a blog­ger pub­lish­es a new post in his own blog. By send­ing a cod­ed ping, each blog­ger acti­vates the con­tin­u­ous rolling list of blogs that are updat­ed as new entries are pub­lished. In that way he or she gets to be “top news” with­in their com­mu­ni­ty, for brief peri­ods of time dur­ing the day or week.

Nam­ing them, Ticoblogs, Ecuablogs, BlogsPana­ma, BlogsPerú, and BlogsChile, one can notice their sim­i­lar nam­ing pat­tern and by vis­it­ing them their sim­i­lar­i­ty and motives can be summed up as sites that intend to con­struct a sense of read/writing com­mu­ni­ties of inter­ests. Two of them, La Union de Blog­gers His­panos and Blo­galax­ia ignor­ing nation­al bor­ders, attempt to gath­er the whole spec­trum of the Span­ish speak­ing blog­ging experience.

When inter­net for­mats favour hor­i­zon­tal mediations
A clue in good media stud­ies has always been the analy­sis and com­pre­hen­sion of the “medi­a­tions” that mass media pro­vide. It should be a study not about “tech­nolo­gies” but on how peo­ple use them and how audi­ences make sense of the mes­sages, images and com­mu­ni­ca­tions strate­gies that are medi­at­ed through those tech­nol­o­gy channels. 

In spite of the fact that mass media behave as a very ver­ti­cal, one way only form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, recep­tion stud­ies proved that audi­ences where attend­ing, react­ing and resist­ing much of what was broad­cast­ed or pre­sent­ed to them via film, radio, TV and the press. Audi­ences were not as pas­sive as many the­o­rists intend­ed them to be.

With the inter­net how­ev­er new forms of a less ver­ti­cal approach to com­mu­ni­ca­tion are emerg­ing. The world wide web was born and used at the begin­ning in a sim­i­lar ver­ti­cal mode that imi­tat­ed tra­di­tion­al mass media approach­es to audi­ences. But new chan­nels, for­mats and gen­res are emerg­ing, and with them a new trend towards a some­how more hor­i­zon­tal approach to the way images, mes­sages and com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies are medi­at­ed. The fact is that mil­lions of peo­ple are adopt­ing for­mats like blogs and wikis, for the fun of it, work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tive fil­ter­ing and improv­ing their oppor­tu­ni­ties and abil­i­ties of becom­ing vis­i­ble and opin­ion­at­ed con­sumers, and some­times cit­i­zens too. 

In Latin Amer­i­ca the blog­ging activ­i­ty is just emerg­ing with a pecu­liar inter­est in empha­siz­ing the social and the local aspects of the author­ing tools, in an attempt to swim in the vast waters of the glob­al ocean called internet.

Wikis and blogs, as new and unique for­mats with­in the web, allow audi­ences to jump into a two way dia­logue chan­nel of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In wikis any­body, in the­o­ry, can par­tic­i­pate and add their five cents of knowl­edge to a par­tic­u­lar theme, dic­tio­nary or repos­i­to­ry of infor­ma­tion. In blogs, pod­casts and vlogs or videoblogs, mil­lions have found a way of express­ing them­selves, while giv­ing oth­ers (usu­al­ly their own read­ers or audi­ences) the oppor­tu­ni­ty to respond on line, com­ment or con­tra­dict what these creators/bloggers show or state.

This change of per­spec­tive is chal­leng­ing main­stream media out­lets around the world and presents a chal­lenge to the tra­di­tion­al monop­o­lists’ game of media indus­tries in Latin America. 

Some of them, includ­ing the writ­ten news and TV pro­gram­ming, are jump­ing on the band­wag­on, try­ing to catch up with this two way dia­logue approach. They have cre­at­ed pro­grams were audi­ences can phone in with their ques­tions or opin­ions or send text mes­sages to tele­vi­sion chan­nels to be viewed by all. But tra­di­tion­al media lag behind in their approach because what they want pri­mar­i­ly is to be heard, as the mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­er Eric­s­son used to say in their old slo­gan: “make your­self heard”. It was Eirik Sol­heim who not­ed that Nokia, on the oth­er hand, has always point­ed in their slo­gan to the inno­v­a­tive medi­at­ed approach that inter­net elic­its: “Con­nect­ing people“. 

In Latin Amer­i­ca, instead of want­i­ng to be heard most blog­gers, vlog­gers and pod­cast­ers are about con­nect­ing, shar­ing and build­ing com­mu­ni­ties. They help each oth­er fil­ter­ing the loads of infor­ma­tion com­ing from all over the world, while devel­op­ing new forms of dis­sent, con­tro­ver­sy and dia­logue between authors and audi­ences in what the Clue­train Man­i­festo has coined as conversations.

The dia­log­ic society
The exis­tence of these emerg­ing nation­al direc­to­ries is a good exam­ple of still weak but inter­est­ing for­ma­tion of small com­mu­ni­ties (with their own rules and codes of con­duct), that resem­ble an ear­li­er for­mat, the news­groups. It was there that peo­ple devel­oped what lat­er became internet’s neti­quette, just a few years ago. In some nation­al blo­gos­pheres it is com­mon to find dis­cus­sions about codes of con­duct, how to tack­le insults, flames, trolls, spam and oth­er forms of improp­er con­duct while shar­ing thoughts, poems or dai­ly expe­ri­ences. Some blog­ging com­mu­ni­ties are inter­est­ed in eth­i­cal behav­iour, while oth­ers fierce­ly defend the free­dom, inde­pen­dence and auton­o­my of their blog­ging activity. 

The pro­fuse use of links, not only to oth­er blogs, news­pa­pers, video, and oth­er on line media resources, allow blog­gers to engage in a larg­er web of com­plex exchanges that are rel­e­vant not only as enter­tain­ment, and social inter­ac­tion but as a cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al phe­nom­e­non in itself. It has even begun to show how rel­e­vant they can become in the polit­i­cal are­na, espe­cial­ly dur­ing elec­tion peri­ods in each country. 

In a recent inter­view with the Finan­cial Times Eric Schmidt, the chair­man and chief exec­u­tive of Google, said: “Many of the politi­cians don’t actu­al­ly under­stand the phe­nom­e­non of the inter­net very well. It’s part­ly because of their age … often what they learn about the inter­net they learn from their staffs and their children.”

Politi­cians who have mas­tered their skills in com­mu­ni­cat­ing via radio and tele­vi­sion face now the chal­lenge to adapt to the new tribes of inter­net natives. Blogs and blo­gos­pheres are a very young phe­nom­e­non. They are in rapid change and it is impos­si­ble to pre­dict where and how they will be used by the peo­ple who are empow­er­ing them­selves with these tools. As with all tech­nolo­gies they will be used for good and not so fair pur­pos­es. But one thing seems clear: if the Guten­berg Era was piv­otal in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of knowl­edge and shar­ing of new ideas, polit­i­cal actions and renew­al of think­ing, the inter­net looks today as a new are­na that can deep­en the impact of net­work­ing knowl­edge and dis­cus­sion on soci­eties in need of wider forms of con­nec­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment, because it seems to expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a wide vari­ety of “pub­lic spheres”. 

As sev­er­al and new areas of dis­cus­sion, action and dia­logue appear in the inter­ac­tion between blogs and news media, the hopes for more demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties are increased. At least in Latin Amer­i­ca where pow­er­ful elites still dom­i­nate all kinds of venues of polit­i­cal delib­er­a­tion, and few can afford to take the risks, or have the will to engage in it. Whether or not those hopes are ful­filled is a mat­ter of time, chance, pow­er rela­tions and a crit­i­cal mass of inter­net activists.

Jill Walk­er and oth­er schol­ars have been observ­ing, ana­lyz­ing and reflect­ing on blog­ging com­mu­ni­ties around the world. Some papers have been writ­ten on the vig­or­ous and ener­getic dia­logue that has emerged main­ly in the Eng­lish speak­ing inter­net com­mu­ni­ty the last two or three years. Oth­er projects like Glob­al Voic­es have begun to look into oth­er dynam­ic com­mu­ni­ties around the world, speak­ing dif­fer­ent lan­guages and eager­ly engaged in their cre­ative and expres­sive goals. As a mat­ter of fact things are chang­ing and the Eng­lish lan­guage hege­mo­ny in blogs will soon be a bygone era because of the mas­sive erup­tion of blogs on oth­er lan­guages, espe­cial­ly Japan­ese, Chi­nese and Spanish.

For my part I plan to con­tin­ue observ­ing and study­ing the way blogs have been adopt­ed by the Span­ish speak­ing com­mu­ni­ties around the world, com­posed main­ly of peo­ple from the old Span­ish Empire, their old colonies in Latin Amer­i­ca, and the dias­po­ras of peo­ple who have emi­grat­ed from their home lands but keep using their moth­er tongue in blogs. Many things are hap­pen­ing and track­ing their rapid evo­lu­tion is not an easy task. The rewards can be fruit­ful in many areas of soci­ety, espe­cial­ly in the field of edu­ca­tion, where these for­mats and tools are show­ing their dynam­ic potential. 

Blog­ging and pol­i­tics in Venezuela
In the pub­lic sphere of pol­i­tics the recent pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in Venezuela showed the poten­tial of a nation­al blo­gos­phere. The social dynam­ics of that blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty was set in motion under the lead­er­ship and inspi­ra­tion of young jour­nal­ist and blog­ger Luis Car­los Díaz. In his own blog he pro­posed to orga­nize a net­work of blog­gers in order to fol­low, report and pub­lish in their indi­vid­ual blogs direct­ly from their neigh­bour­hoods, vil­lages and cities around the country:

“… let’s try to con­verse with our neigh­bour… ask ques­tions, and also pay atten­tion to the other’s voice. If you can do this with your friends and neigh­bours, con­grat­u­la­tions, you can post about it if you find it inter­est­ing. No need to stick a micro­phone in front of their mouth and pre­pare an interview.”

The call got an imme­di­ate and enthu­si­as­tic response. A group of blog­gers of the dias­po­ra joined in and decid­ed to cov­er “Elec­tion Day” (3rd of Decem­ber) from embassies and con­sulates around the world. Luis Car­los’ idea was to add a third voice or dimen­sion to the Venezue­lan pub­lic sphere. Up to this elec­tion day Venezuela’s pub­lic are­na was fed only from press releas­es from elec­tion author­i­ties and the mass media cov­er­ing of events around elec­tion day. This time around blog­gers con­tributed with a more per­son­al approach telling sto­ries and relat­ing to people’s expe­ri­ences and tales.

It took them only five days to get orga­nized and run­ning. Iria Puyosa ini­tial­ly offered a free domain name and site in order to col­lect all their post­ings. A bet­ter solu­tion came some hours lat­er from the new­ly formed Venezue­lan direc­to­ry To2blogs.com. They had the peo­ple, the engine and tech­ni­cal solu­tions in order to set up an auto­mat­ed RSS aggre­ga­tor to col­lect and update on line all post­ings refer­ring to the theme of elec­tions under the ban­ner Elec­ciones 3D (Elec­tions 3 dimen­sions). One thou­sand blogs have joined the the ini­tia­tive and many of them are still pub­lish­ing in the after­math. The site got more that ten thou­sand hits on elec­tion day. This unprece­dent­ed event in Venezuela’s elec­tion cam­paign was tracked by Tech­no­rati and by a cou­ple of pres­ti­gious Eng­lish speak­ing blogs.

Some peo­ple called it cit­i­zen report­ing, for me it was an edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence, too.