National Highway

(An edited version of this article by me has appeared in the Hindustan Times today. HT readers, welcome this way!)

In May last year, impressed with the idea of bloggers being allowed into press conferences in the US, India’s Principal Information Officer Shakuntala Mahawal told The Economic Times that the government was considering doling out press accreditation to Indian bloggers. Far from impressed, Indian bloggers responded with conspiracy theories about how this could be a step towards regulation.

In May this year, lit-blogger Nilanjana S. Roy predicted a clash between bloggers and the Indian government in the next five years. She might as well have said five months, because in July the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) asked Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to 17 websites, of which five were blogs, and the incompetent ISPs ended up blocking the entire Blogspot and Typepad domains, thereby censoring, in effect, hundreds of thousands of blogs from all over the world. The error was corrected a week later after bloggers created a lot of hullabaloo.

In the list of seventeen, seven were right-wing American sites. Some of these contain considerable anti-Islamic venom of the Holy Book-flushing kind, but in the post 9/11 world you will find so many such webpages that it is practically impossible to block them all. They also blocked three NRI Hindutvawaadi sites.

Some of these sites are thanking now thanking the Indian government for bringing them in the news and increasing their traffic. How do I know this? Simple: I can still read those sites via anonymisers like anonymouse.org. Let’s get this straight, once and for all: You can’t ban anything on the Net.

Imagine the national furore if we were talking here about banning 17 books. As Indian citizens, many bloggers are planning to ask the government, through Right to Information applications, why these seventeen sites are being censored at all, and also challenge such censorship through public interest litigation.

The issue has served as a moment of crisis, bringing bloggers together, working collaboratively from across five continents, to resolve the issue, exchange information, email people to ask for help and clarifications, and perhaps most importantly, to get the news into the mainstream media so as to put pressure on the authorities.

The last time there was a comparable crisis with a clear ‘enemy’ was when a management institute was criticised by a youth magazine, the story linked to by the magazine’s editor on her blog, and then by other bloggers, one of who said that the institute “screws around with peoples lives.” Language that a newspaper would never use. The management institute sent the two bloggers legal notices to scare them into deleting the posts. They did not and the institute only made a fool of itself with adverse media coverage.

When there is a tsunami or a terrorist attack, the ‘help’ blogs come into action, collating help and rescue information. There are also individual bloggers reporting their experience of such events first-hand on their blogs, a model that news channels are trying to replicate as ‘citizen journalism’. Ordinary individuals as both producers and consumers of media is a done-to-death idea, coming as it is from the US. But the idea of collaborative online help sites in times of disasters is very much Made-in-India, replicated in events like Hurricane Katrina in the US, and the credit for this goes to the Mumbai-based communications consultant, Peter Griffin. Another aspect of such collaborative online fire-fighting is the appearance of angels who are otherwise not very active participants of the Indian blogosphere, such as Angelo Embuldeniya, a Bahrain-based geek.

But crises strike only once in a while. Bloggers usually go about blogging as part of their daily routines. Bloggers write (usually) short ‘posts’ and create meaning constantly created through hyperlinks. They link to articles on websites and other blogs to discuss them; they link their favourite websites on their blogs’ sidebar, and “blogroll” their favourite bloggers.

Links are important because the more people link to your blog, the higher your site turns up in search engines, the more visitors you get, and the higher rank you get in Technorati, which is to bloggers what Google is to journalists. They install a ’sitemeter’ on their sites by which they can see exactly who visited their blog, when and from which link.

Just like other online media, people meet each other through blogging, people make friends and enemies, find soul-mates and jobs. Sitting alone behind a computer screen, writing away whatever they feel like in whatever language they want to, being read daily by at the most a few hundred people, bloggers often do not realise that their words are going to be on Google. Even when a blog is personal, it is very public. As a blogger grows in popularity, he realises the power of words, and with power comes responsibility. There is of course a lot of abuse (’trolling’ and ‘flaming’) but that is par for the course.

Anonymous blogs seek to push the limits of fearless speech. One Delhi journalist writes a chic-blog about her love and sex life. Can a woman do that under her own name in even a progressive English-language newspaper in this sexually hypocrite country?

But considering how it is a very ordinary activity, I wonder why blogging makes a sexy story. I was once on a TV channel talking about “pro blogging” and was shown writing a post as though I was an animal from the zoo, on public display. A fellow blogger-writer, Monica Mody, tells me that the marriage of alternative and mainstream media is not surprising because when the mainstream sees “something they don’t understand, with people all smug and satisfied about it, they want to know what’s going on.”

Some journalists resent bloggers for their distrust of mainstream media (MSM, in blogging lingo). But individuals have always been distrustful of big media, only that for the first time they have a place to express it. Once a journalist in a Delhi supplement did a story about “splogs” or ’spam blogs’, and got his facts all wrong. A blogger called Saket Vaidya panned the story on his blog, calling the journalist a ‘dolt’. The journalist responded by landing up at a public bloggers’ meet in Delhi, posing as a lay observer, and then did a story the next day with lies about how these bloggers were praising themselves. Vaidya and others responded by permanently defacing the Google search on the journalist’s name. The incident is fondly remembered as a ’sting operation’ against bloggers.

The blogs-versus-MSM balance gets complicated when you realise that so many of the prominent bloggers are themselves journalists. And so it was that a scurrilous blog called War for News came up in January this year, with loads of gossip and bitching about journalists in English news channels. It is said to be the handiwork of a print journalist in Delhi. How have the TV channels responded to it? Some of them have blocked it in their offices.