There's been a debate brewing over at neweurasia.net and registan.net (which are symbiotically connected in ways I don't fully grasp) about the role of social media and "citizen journalism" in covering the tragedy of Abadan, an explosion of an ammunition depot in Turkmenistan near the capital of Ashgabat.
You would think with this much shrapnel, and this many bodies blown to smithereens, there'd be enough disaster for everyone to cover in all forms of media -- traditional, mainstream Russian and Western media, alternative emigre and Western news sites, and yes, domestic Turkmen-language social media on fledgling chat sites --without people arguing about which is "better."
But the narrative has cropped up immediately, before the buildings ceased to smoulder and the bodies, many no longer intact, were buried, that there was something especially authentic, indispensable -- and even requiring a new political strategy -- about the coverage of Abadan by some brave Turkmen citizen journalists. As Annasoltan laid out in a very didactic and political piece counseling that new strategy, we must cease our (alleged) lecturing from the West and our presumed pressing of social movements into the straitjackets of the West and East, oh those Cold-war templates, and allow "Turkmens to decide for themselves."
I find that to be a narrative that Western "progressives," and some of their emigre friends, often spin, as a way to grab social media as a tool and a phenomenon for their own particular political purposes. And I call them on that, because I think social media has to be for everyone, open to a wide variety of purposes and causes, and you can't script and impose how the outside world and inside world of social revolutions are going to interact.
Joshua Foust has also waxed very enthusiastic about Turkmen social media -- but it comes with a hortatory message, like Annasoltan's, with whom he is "in violent agreement" about how social media interaction has to be "engagements" and not "dictations". That is, he's giving us a dictation about an engagement, see...
My comments didn't get any response from Foust, but an anonymous person with the nickname of BEgenc has come to flog me as "an old guard of the traditional media with a monopolistic approach [who] is defending at all costs her own business interests and that of her allies who are certainly to lose influence if the media situation improves in Turkmenistan because their experise would not be needed as much."
Sigh.
My reply:
Oh, stuff it, BEgenc, I'm no "old guard of the traditional media" and I don't have any business interests, don't be silly. I have several of my own independent blogs, I am an early adapter on Twitter since *2007* (when's your join date?), I run Second Life servers, for Christ's sake. All the news services I write for are non-profit operations, not businesses, and I don't seek profit or influence whatsoever. Do you see the world in this skewed fashion because *you* do? Neither are available in the low-paid non-profit sector I work in, trust me on this.
Impugning malign motives to someone who merely criticizes a claim of "explosions of sites not blocked in Turkmenistan" when...they all seem to be blocked now...means you aren't really a worthy interlocutor. However, I'm going to look over your shoulder at other people reading registan.net and neweurasia.net and go to some length to answer you on my own blog because these are very important issues, that will shape the course of events in Turkmenistan and other countries similarly living under authoritarian regimes.
What I do see here is the sort of manipulation of the story I've seen elsewhere in the region where there is both irrational exuberance about "Twitter revolutions" (which I have a lot of time and support for, unlike Evgeny Morozov) and also a vested agenda of the "progressives" to harness social media to bring about certain kinds of social revolutions, baking leftist and often anti-Western doctrines into the tools themselves. (I took up this theme with Ethan Zuckerman regarding Moldova.)
And I see more of this today with this very one-sided concoction of Christopher Schwartz's on Al-Jazeera -- never mentioning chrono-tm.org, the Turkmen emigre site which has led the news coverage (although using their video) never mentioning Russian independent media Ekho Mosvky and others which are tremendously important, never mentioning (for ideological reasons, no doubt) RFE/RL, although they have published footage of a journalist who risked his life and may have died already for getting pictures of the fireball of Abadan. Honestly, you can't zoom out past your own parochial interests?!
I spend a good deal of my time reporting civic activity in Turkmenistan, such as it is, and wish it very well. Sorry, but I don't believe criticizing nascent civil society is the same thing as somehow not believing in it or not supporting it. (And what I'm mainly doing is criticizing how *outsiders* are portraying insiders.)
What I am saying is what's truthful about this situation -- the social media presence is extremely limited in Turkmenistan, and if it were not for the replay value of the emigre, Russian, and Western media, both alternative and mainstream, it would not be heard. That's the serious reality of this situation, and portraying the tragedy of Abadan as a story where only fledgling Turkmen-language social media sites bravely saved the day, making all these other forms of media obsolete, is dangerously ideological, and deprives those very brave citizen journalists of the real outlets that they will necessarily need to work with as they get out their story.
In fact, frankly, I don't see the people *inside* Turkmenistan fussing and fretting about that evil imperialist Western or Russian or emigre media with its agendas, but I do see some "progressive" bloggers doing that outside the country. In fact, the people inside the country risking to cover Abadan themselves sent their photos to chrono-tm.org, fergananews.com, rferl.org, eurasianet.org without any scripting or prompting -- they sent them *anywhere* they thought someone would care.
The government heavily controls the Internet. Good Lord, the authorities shut down cell phone service for *2.4 million people* on MTS. All the links that Annasoltan supplies in her story are dead -- they died some months ago in some cases or they are inactive. To be sure, there is this evidently very vibrant chat site teswirler, and that's great, and the people there can talk to each other in Turkmen. But Turkmen isn't a Google-translatable language even, and no one else is going to understand it -- well, except for Annasoltan and the editors of chrono-tm.org I kept checking teswirler during this disaster, and I didn't see the links she provided refresh with much new text. Maybe there are different chat channels that change like IRC does but whatever the case, and whatever it's use, it isn't accessible to the outside world, and requires then sherpas to interpret it.
I simply disagree that chrono.tm.org "has only a few reporters" or that somehow the discussion of news coverage by mainstream and social media has to be about a numbers game, with citizen journalists fielding "more" than mainstream outlets. In the case of Turkmenistan, I don't see these numbers. They're not evident. In part, this is do to the heavy level of oppression and the need to stay anonymous, but there are only about 2-3 bloggers known outside the immediate environs of Turkmenistan and it looks like a few dozen enthusiasts with access to the Internet others don't have.
I realize there is this lovely myth of the citizen journalist, who is going to break all categories and break all previous diametrically opposed politics and lead us all into that promised Third Way or Autonomous Zone where neither evil West nor nefarious East will prevail. But in reality, there's a few people, and they send their stuff everywhere, to anyone who will get the word out.
As for the idea that rferl.org is "copying citizen journalists the next day," I'm also simply not buying that story either. RFE/RL has established -- at huge personal cost to the people involved! -- its own network of stringers. You can read up about some of the awful things that have happened to some of them, from death by torture in imprisonment to stoning and hate graffiti on their homes. One certainly has to have a lot of respect for these people who are in a completely different category than the casual "citizen journalist" who can snap a photo, post it on a social media site, and go back to working for the regime the next day with no one the wiser. Both kinds of people and many in between are needed for social change, but I'm not going to glorify the citizen journalist as somehow "pure" or "untainted" because he doesn't file his stories in some authentically independent space or the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, the avatar of anti-Western authenticity.
I don't have any "friends" at rferl.org Turkmen Service. I don't even know the people there. And if they don't articulate their own views, perhaps it's because they're doing a job as a journalist, and covering the news? Not everybody has time to blog if they are in a news operation. I'm not the one "placing against" these sites -- but you are somehow holding social media apart as something more authentic, native, true. And I totally dispute that as hogwash. It's a small country. Internet connection is scarce. There aren't that many people who risk doing this stuff. They overlap extensively. Good! If more citizen journalists appear, they will rapidly acquire the same set of issues and problems that seem "political" that anybody just trying to tell the story there faces. It's not like it will be "bad imperialist-funded RFE/RL and Russian media stringers and politicized emigres over here, pure and independent citizen journalists over there." The regime will not tell the difference, and you won't be able to if they persist, either.
The political differences between alternative and new media, however, are something like the differences we saw between the Soviet dissidents of the 1960s-1970s and the nyeformaly civic groups that appeared after many of the dissidents were imprisoned or exiled or emigrated, and after Gorbachev's reforms. The nyeformaly, fearing to be marginalized by the only partly-reformed regime, would also posit these false political narrations, like the famous "Either service, or struggle," of Olga Alexeyeva, i.e., NGOs had to stop fighting the regime and do quiet single-issue social work to be attractive to a wider public. Well, events in Egypt and Tunisia will show you that things happen much more rapidly, if you can't remember how they got out of hand when the perestroika liberals of the Soviet Union tried to control them.
The point is that newer (and sometimes not as brave and public) activists, using the somewhat removed interface of anonymous social media rather than either open dissent on alternative web sites or mainstream media, have to be seen as only part of the way the news gets out and gets understood, and also part of the way the societies change. It's humorous to me that you would see the dissidents of an emigre site like chrono-tm.org or fergananews.com, which have been using Youtube and Facebook and other social media for years, as somehow not in the same camp as somehow "more authentic" citizen journalists. I can only reply back to you: can't they co-exist? Don't they already work interdependently regardless of whether you or anyone else wants to control them?!
As for "dividing the forces of democracy," oh, baloney. You need pluralism and you need debate and that means *gasp* splits in social movements. It's all good. It is not something you can stop.
As for bias in the media, well, I'm not the person who reported that a supposed Facebook group of Turkmens was plotting to overthrow Berdymukhamedov, now, was I. Did this turn out to be...two guys in a dorm room in Turkey? Or...what, exactly? No one can be free of error or bias when it comes to Turkmenistan because it is a closed society, where we cannot get access to the news, and a variety of perspectives. There's no foreign news presence in Ashgabat; you can't just get a visa there easily.
My job is to do round-ups of existing media on Turkmenistan in the English language. The sites that I contribute to, mainly EurasiaNet and RFE/RL, have their own reporters in the region and some go to Turkmenistan and cover it from there. I'm failing to see why I can't call out the story here as following a certain political agenda, even as it sees itself as correcting another political agenda -- when it's obvious.
As for your other notions, that somehow falsely oppose paid bloggers and reporters to valiant Turkmen youth who only want to improve their society, I personally think the worse thing you can do to media of any kind, new or old, is impose on it some social betterment role. The role of the media is not to improve society. It's to report the news and views as fully as possible and with as much diversity as possible. On the basis of this media, then people can make up their own minds about how they want their society to be, developing the institutions of democracy that will help them achieve various goals. I don't believe that we do any fledgling citizen journalists' community a service by exaggerating or lionizing their role.
A horrible thing happened in Turkmenistan last week, like many horrible things there and in this region. Many people lost their lives and we can't even understand what happened. Thanks to an existing network established through chrono-tm.org, that took many years and a lot of personal suffering to form; thanks to RFE/RL and its stringers and capacity for drawing citizens to cooperation, thanks to Russian independent media like Ekho Moskvy and news-asia.ru who got correspondents into the area and got interviews with survivors on the ground quickly, and yes, thanks to some emerging citizen journalists making use of even heavily restricted Turkmenet, *the world knew about this story quickly, and pressure could mount on the government of Turkmenistan to stop lying.* We are very far from the truth,however.
Whether we like it or not, the people of Turkmenistan mainly learned about this carefully gleaned and relayed truth not from teswirler, or even chrono-tm.org, in this country with a tiny percentage of Internet users, but from Russian television accessible on their satellite TVs. And frankly, Russian news agencies and TV got most of their news from chrono-tm.org and rferl.org and the citizen journalists they worked with, not from Turkmenet. The record on the Internet establishes all this easily, so there isn't any need to fantasize about it.
It's not a slam on people risking their freedom or even lives to get a photo out that starts on Turkmenet to state the obvious things that go into successful social media "revolutions". These involve large Facebook groups or vkontakte groups, such as were made by Egyptians, or Belarusians. They involve dedicated Twitter accounts, such as were created by people getting the news out about the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan last June or the elections crackdown in Belarus. And while this is a reality a lot of people dislike, unless these tweets and Facebooks and whatnot are in Russian or English, the rest of the world can't learn about them in this region. Social media in the native language is important for people to build solidarity and talk to each other, but Turkmenistan is a place not only with a sizeable Russian minority and Uzbek minority, it's in a region where Russia is the closest thing we have to an "Al Jazeera" sort of TV situation -- and RT is no Al Jazeera, except for the anti-Western bias. If it were, things would be very different in Belarus and a lot of other places.
Acknowleding the role of emigre, Russian, regional and Western media in the coverage of the tragedy of Abadan isn't a slam on Turkmen citizen journalists, it's a reality check about how interconnected they must be to break out of their isolation, and where the visible news channels are. It's a truthful statement about the state of affairs as they are, not as we wish them to be.
Recent Comments