Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Blogging---again ?!

I think that the bloggers need to coalesce over one single issue at the time and try to break it open inside out in the public view so it can turn into the talk of the town. This is the only way that public officials will begin to pay attention to what the bloggers are saying. At this point in time each blogger is blogging about anything and everything, there is no one particular issue [except may be for the snow] that would attract a collection of bloggers to debate in a deliberate fashion and prosecute a particular issue from A to Z.
The bloggers can if they want to- become the lobbying voice- the public defenders- if you will for- the general public, they have the ability to understand the issues more than anyone else, they have the necessary education to fathom the most intricate details surrounding the issues, and they have the technology to spread the word around with relative ease.
I think that the bloggers can operate as a pressure group by explaining the pros and cons of every issue that affects the citizens of the country, be that health care or lack of it, education, immigration, taxation, foreign labor, and so on and so forth.
So why aren’t they doing it?! I think that part of the reason is apathy, and part of the reason is their impotence toward believing that no matter how hard they try they aren’t going to be able to change anything and business will continue running the way it has been running for the past several decades.

The final part is probably fear of retribution by the government against them personally or against members of their families. Perhaps some of these concerns are quite legitimate and others are just imaginary.

Where do we go from here? I say we go toward coalescing, toward a synergy like effort, toward parsing every issue in a manner that is comprehensible to the average citizen of the country.

If we continue to blog with no aim in sight we are going to be blogging for the rest of our lives about things that no body read except the authors themselves. By contrast, if we can show that we are dead serious about plowing the rugged fields and prepare it for reform, we are serious about seeing a change taking place in the country during our life time not our children or grand children’s time, then just may be and that is a big may be somebody out there will begin paying attention to what we blog about and why.

There are a lot of grievances’ out there; there are a lot of people that don’t know what is going on and why they have arrived at where they are at right now. There are a lot of people that were better off five and ten years ago.

There are people that lament the good old days and wish that they are still living in the past. All these feelings combined need to be articulated and simplified. It doesn’t take a lot for the people to be content in Jordan, but the constant influx of foreign workers, regional immigrants, refugees with no refugee status, sky rocketing real-estate prices, have put the Jordanian citizen in a state of shock and bewilderment.

Bloggers can and should collectively discuss and parse some or all of these issues, they can help put the citizen’s mind at ease by creating a group of informed citizens, ones that know what to do to find jobs for their children, where to go to get an annual check up, how to apply for a scholarship, how do you get a tax relief and exemption.

I guess I’ll stop here before I veer too much away from my main objective which is the need to coalesce toward a primary issue and stay with it from A to Z.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Blogging

I just learned that there are more than fifty million blogs out there and the number is expected to double by year end. Most blogs are read by the author only and by no one else. Most blogs don't generate any type of profits.The Blogger isn't recognized as journalists. Bloggers are called pajama journalists because most bloggers blog while they are at home, they don't go out on the field looking for stories to report about. Bloggers can be considered as an add on, an accessory, a supplement to real journalism. Journalists aren't worried about the bloggers taking over their jobs. I guess the bottom line is that bloggers aren't being taken seriously by anybody. Their future is unknown, some have already run out of the passion for writing and others are on their way out as well. It would be interesting to find out what will become of blogging five to ten years from now.