Columnist Ellen Goodman has weighed in on the plight of bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan whose swift exit from John Edwards' presidential campaign was necessitated by what they had written on their respective blogs - Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister.
We are living now in both the blogosphere and the mainstream. One is ironic and edgy, challenging and partisan. The other is cautious and modulated. Ms. Marcotte's and Ms. McEwan's fate raises the question about whether it's possible to move from the world of AnkleBitingPundits to presidential politics without every word sticking to your shoe.
We already know that in the digital world, the past is never past. As Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a progressive advocacy group bridging these two worlds, says, "All of us are going to be living every moment of our past lives. People are living with things they did and said in their youths in a way they never did before."
President Bush once famously said, "When I was young, I did a lot of foolish things." Bill Clinton said he smoked marijuana but didn't inhale. Barack Obama admitted doing "a little blow." But we didn't have postings of the partying George, the smoking Bill or the snorting Barack.
These days politicians are one "macaca" away from videotaped disaster. If you don't believe it, see Rudy Giuliani as a drag queen flirting with Donald Trump on YouTube.
According to Goodman, with the advent of blogs, My Space and other e- bulletin boards, bloggers have assumed the role of freewheeling, strident town criers, a role they may find difficult to live down in the buttoned down environs of traditional public forums. We know that already. The next question is: Will society gradually learn to take in stride the off-the-cuff and somewhat exaggerated performative nature of discourse that the cyberspace has spawned? I think it will. Because the genie is not going back in the bottle. But it may take some time. There are going to be some hiccups on the way like the short lived real life political activism of Marcotte and McEwan, the embarrassing shutting down of blogs in India, the sinister censorship in China and now the latest extreme reaction to a blogger's exercise of free speech in Egypt.
An Egyptian court has sentenced a blogger to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president.
Abdel Kareem Soliman's trial was the first time that a blogger had been prosecuted in Egypt. He had used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.
A human rights group called the verdict "very tough" and a "strong message" to Egypt's thousands of bloggers.
Soliman, 22, was tried in his native city of Alexandria. He blogs under the name Kareem Amer. A former student at al-Azhar, he called the institution "the university of terrorism" and accused it of suppressing free thought. The university expelled him in 2006 and pressed prosecutors to put him on trial.
During the five-minute court session the judge said Soliman was guilty and would serve three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mr Mubarak.
(Thanks to my co-blogger Dean for the link to the Egyptian blogger's story)
Update: Lindsay Beyerstein of the popular liberal blog Majikthise explains in Salon why she refused to join John Edwards' blogging team.
An update to the Abdel Kareem Nabil blog case appeared in yesterday's Washington Post. He is appealing his conviction, although it appears he has little local support. Not only has the Foreign Minister proclaimed, "No one, no matter who he might be, has the right to interfere with Egyptian legal matters or comments on Egypt's decisions"—not quite sure whether "comment/s" is intended as a verb or a noun—but to compound the injury, "[h]is family, devout Muslims, did not attend any of the trial sessions."
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | February 28, 2007 at 12:30 PM