The Faster Times
May 22 2010
Armenian Bloggers Seize Influence With the Power of ¦ Live Journal?
May 22, 2010
by Nicholas Clayton
When the Live Journal `virtual community’ first came online in 1999,
it basically operated as a venue for whiny American middle-schoolers
to overshare, write bad poetry and meet pedophiles. At least that’s
how I saw it. I was in middle school at the time.
Ten years later, after Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and
iPhones apps seemed to have successively killed off the first
generation of blog platforms and social networks, I was stunned to
find that not only was Live Journal not extinct, but was in fact an
influential vehicle for grass roots activism, social discussion and
independent news sharing in Armenia ‘ a country lacking in all three.
Armenia is rated `partly free’ on democracy and `not free’ on the
status of its freedom of the press by Washington-based pro-democracy
NGO Freedom House. According to internetworldstats.com little over six
percent of Armenia’s population uses the internet, while most turn to
exclusively pro-government broadcast media for information. But for
Armenians, seeing isn’t believing.
According to the OSCE, 10 people were killed March 2008 when the
government violently dispersed protesters who disputed presidential
elections widely considered to be fraudulent. The mainstream media
coverage of this event, however, proved to be to a total
pro-government wash, causing confidence in media institutions to
plummet and blogging boomed.
Today, Armenia’s most popular bloggers get tens of thousands of page
views a day while the average circulation of Yerevan’s many newspapers
is around 3,000 each. The community of approximately 500 live journals
and stand-alone blogs has become an active force in Armenian society,
meeting in person and in cyberspace to organize petition campaigns and
flash mobs to protest local policies and use their growing influence
to spread information.
The government has taken notice.
Artur Papyan, creator of the Armenian Observer Blog, said government
officials have hired staffs of consultants to deal with the phenomenon
and many high-ranking officials have created blogs of their own. And,
earlier this month, when unveiling a controversial new proposal to
create a small number of foreign language schools in Armenia, Armenian
Education Minister Armen Ashotyan held a nearly 3-hour-long meeting
with various bloggers to present the government’s plan.
This makes Armenia a unique case as blogging in the other two
countries of the Caucasus region, Georgia and Azerbaijan, largely
reflects each of the countries’ respective political environments. In
pro-Western Georgia, where freedom of expression is arguably the most
respected, the number of blogs is higher, but the blogging community
has a much smaller impact on the political dialogue, and in
dictatorial Azerbaijan nearly all blogs are apolitical ‘ with two
political bloggers already having been sent to prison for
`hooliganism.’
In Armenia, meanwhile, the contrast between the country’s largely
closed political and media society and the level to which new media
has been able to drive the discourse is striking.
Not all Armenians are optimistic about the future of its small,
influential blogging community, however. Anna Simonyan, one of the
founders of the online magazine Yerevan.ru, which heavily incorporates
blogging into its interactive format, believes that Facebook,
currently the fastest growing social network in Armenia, will
gradually usurp the discussion. Independent bloggers will either be
disempowered, or will take salaried positions in media organizations
and will be gradually brought into the fold, as very few have made any
real advertising money from their blogging exploits.
But information security analyst and blogger Samvel Martirosyan
disagrees. He said that Yerevan’s blogging community is already seeing
a collaboration between individuals using both Live Journal and
Facebook.
`It is a real cooperation; Facebook is good for activism, but blogs
are better for brainstorming, creating ideas,’ he said. `Platform is
nothing, the idea is everything.’
In the end, although Armenia’s levels of internet penetration affects
the impact of new media activism within its borders, it hasn’t been an
obstacle for the overall consumption of blogs as much of the existing
Armenian blogosphere is geared more towards the larger, more
internet-savvy Armenian diaspora, which greatly outnumbers the
population of the small Caucasus nation of 3.5 million.
With issues like the normalization of ties with Turkey, resolving the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan and balancing the influence
of America, Russia and Iran on the country’s politics and economy ‘
issues on which residents and diaspora are often fiercely divided ‘
there’s bound to be plenty to talk about and plenty of places to do it
for years to come.
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