Blogging for Sovereignty: An Analysis of Palestinian Blogs

Background

Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa including Palestinian Authority are lagging behind the rest of the world, having only a 29.8% Internet penetration rate compared to other regions (Internet World Statistics, 2009). Despite that, the International Telecommunications Union quotes an impressive number of 64 million Arab netizens that surfed the Internet as of 2009 (International Telecommunications Union, 2010). The distribution of Internet users varies greatly within the Arab nations. Bahrain, for example, has the Internet penetration rate of 88% whereas Libya has only 5.5% (Internet World Statistics, 2009). The comparatively late adoption of new communication technologies and the fluctuation of penetration rates among Arab countries can be traced back to a host of reasons including Internet connection costs, a high adult illiteracy rate, the dominance of English language on the early World Wide Web, and a reluctance to loosen state controls over the flow of information (Hofheinz, 2007; Warf & Vincent, 2007). This explains why blogging is a relatively novel phenomenon for the Arabic Internet.

Abdallah Al-Miheiri, a blogger from Abu Dhabi, is credited with the Arabic translation of the word blog, “al-mudawwana” (Hofheinz, 2005). Arabic Network for Human Rights Information counted near 40,000 Arabic blogs (as cited in Hamdy, 2009). A more detailed tally identified close to 45,000 Arabic-language blogs and blogs with mixed use of Arabic, English and French (Etling, Kelly, Faris, & Palfrey, 2009).