Where online activism meets offline action
Imad Bazzi, an outspoken 29-year-old Lebanese blogger and a seasoned social activist, recalls vividly the reasons that pushed him, in the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1990s, to adopt blogging as a platform from which to champion the causes that he supports.
“I used to write weekly articles on mailing lists and in publications, and in 1998, I wrote an article for a Lebanese newspaper that got me arrested.” he says.
The episode, Bazzi adds, made him realize that writing in the print media could expose him to more arrests. “That’s when I decided to go to blogging.”
A decade later, “e-activism” – a term that has been coined to speak of activists who resort to blogging and a host of other social media such as Facebook and Twitter – has become a driving force in the Middle East.
For many internet activists, the birth of the e-activism trend in the region can be traced to countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where
right e-activists mounted spectacularly successful campaigns before anyone else had.
