“In Gaza, we are subject to news but cannot see TVs.”

That's how Ayesha Saldanha titles her round-up of Palestinian bloggers today on Global Voices (who also have fascinating and necessary round ups from Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, as well as round-ups focused on reactions to the Gaza bombings from Chile and Taiwan). Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman is using her access to technology to gather voices, events and stories from the "other side," documenting protest marches in Israel, calling friends in Gaza and reporting their stories, and linking to blogs and video from across the web. Saldanha's moving pull-quote attests to two ways in which the internet can offer a space for alternative voices: first of all, it allows those who "cannot see TVs" (and are not often invited to speak on them) to see the news, and moreover to make it; second of all, it builds global community, where those who can see the TVs a) get an alternative perspective that may balance media bias; b) can offer support to those blogging (in various ways, for example Saldanha is posting SMS messages from her friend Hasan in Rafah who has no internet access); and c) can shift perspective from seeing certain populations or individuals as "subject to news" to seeing them as agents, and as full members of the human community.

Blogs, of course, extend what literature has been doing for millennia -- through narratives that touch on commonalities (whether it's the sense that "we're all bloggers -- I could be blogging from Rafah, what would that be like?" or details of daily life lived differently) that can encourage us to walk in another's shoes. Social networking, again like literature, can also be used as propaganda -- bloggers are alternately (cynically) impressed by and outraged at the Israeli government's use of Twitter to hold press conferences and dominate news cycles. Whatever the reaction, it's an example of governments recognising the power of the medium: Anthony Lowenstein of The Blogging Revolution has a great story today about the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards Corp setting up 10, 000 blogs to counter the perceived liberalism of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It's a truism but here goes: the internet moves faster than literature. That's its advantage -- for example, this Gaza care package campaign organised through Facebook -- and its disadvantage, as misinformation spreads wildly and the source with the fastest broadband (or any power and phone lines at all) wins. History has always been written by the victors, but now the victors can write it from their mobile phones in the midst of the battle, shaping global response as well as posterity. So blogs that emerge from communities that have less access to technology (and to power in both the political and electrical senses) stand as an important bulwark against the complete eradication of their side of the story. Sites like Global Voices and toot perform a critical function in gathering these voices into a shout, focused and centralised.

In doing so, they act like old-fashioned publishers, selecting and honing the voices that surround us. Novels and poetry, too, are an important bulwark, a record of diverse voices. Some would argue that they are more accessible (to writers) and influential (to readers) than the internet, as a poem can be passed from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, a novel smuggled out in sections if it has to be. Books are seen as custoded, collected, polished: a longer-lasting, more penetrating, and more effective representation of a situation, narrative, identity, image. And yet the gatekeepers are many, not least the gatekeeper of translation which means that many voices who are celebrated in their own linguistic culture don't reach ears beyond it. For English-language readers, that makes the value of books such as I Saw Ramallah, The Butterfly's Burden, and the novels of Elias Khoury invaluable, along with the promotion and support offered by PEN's Writers in Translation programme and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

I Saw Ramallah, with its announcement of witnessing as direct action and reclaiming the narrative voice, directly addresses the panic and powerlessness captured in Saldanha's quotation from Professor Said Abdelwahed, as reported in the Moments in Gaza blog. But its author Mourid Barghouti has also recently joined Facebook, posting poems old and new (in Arabic) as well as more diary-like entries that amplify his poetry's connection to, and influence on, his readers.

Digital technology offers dizzying possibilities to move from subject to storyteller, for those who can access them. The waves of rage, love, hate, anguish, activism and emotion pouring forth in the blogosphere can't, and don't aim to, replace poetry, but they uphold the spirit of art: "KEEP MAKING THINGS WITH WHATEVER YOU HAVE."

Alive! Blogging and the Resurrection of the Author

Susannah Tarbush reviews Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road to Damascus, and draws on the author's 'qunfuz' blog - and specifically a recent post about his wife's decision to wear the hijab - to draw parallels between the author and his main character. The article appeared in an edited version in Observer Woman magazine (and on the Guardian website) on November 02, 2008.

It's a small detail, perhaps -- a reviewer linking a perhaps common thought about a book (that it's timely, contemporary, that the author knows whereof he speaks) to a piece of the author's non-fiction autobiographical writing. But it's also a giant leap: a return to the idea of the living author, whose bodily, historical presence and experience might just have something to do with his or her writing. It's a thought that hardly comes as a shock to most readers -- after all, there are author bios on the flap of every book (and sometimes extended interviews and reading guides, often with biographical information, included at the end of the book), many authors also practice a lucrative sideline in op-ed or cultural journalism, and some are even gossiped-about celebrities (and some celebrities have become authors).

But the academy pronounced the author dead in the 1960s -- a profoundly liberating move for critical reading, releasing the critic from the burden of deciphering (the only possible) meaning as intended by the author. But as many feminist theorists have pointed out, that revelation happened at exactly the moment that people were starting to look critically at exactly who got to be an author, and realising that it was mainly white, upper- and middle-class, middle-aged men. As the end of colonialism, the spread of education, and new technological revolutions in publishing made the act of writing more available to the silent majority, untold stories both global and local began to translate -- for the first time -- into print, often closely hewn from the author's experience of a life that had not been described in fiction.

The internet has made publishing and storytelling even more immediate, with the proliferation of blogs (check out toot for a bewildering and wonderful range of Arabic blogging voices, and Anthony Loewenstein's excellent book The Blogging Revolution for an introduction to further voices, and a serious consideration of what this explosion in communications means for goverment, media and global culture). As well as increasing the number of voices, the internet increases the speed with which they can speak up, and with which readers can access them. In the past, readers might have waited much longer for a memoiristic piece by Yassin-Kassab that allowed them to make an incidental, but profound, connection between the events of his life while he was writing and the events of the novel he wrote.

On her blog the tanjara, starbush (who also reports on lots of author events where living, breathing authors meet their readers) is recognising what readers have always known: the author is palpably alive in the text. That doesn't mean we have to read the book as the writer wants us to, or read only for the things the writer tells us about him- or herself -- but it allows us to connect the book -- politically, emotionally, culturally -- to the moment in which we, too, are alive. It personalises the process of creating fiction, drawing us to look at our world, to think differently about aspects we may take for granted -- to think *inventively* about them, about their stories -- and that's part of the excitement (as well as political value and social justice, according to a recent University of Manchester/LSE study that showed novels can best communicate global dilemmas such as poverty) of reading fiction.

Welcome to the Blogging Revolution

Following the publication of a number of influential blooks from the Middle East, including those by Salam Pax and Riverbend, Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has collected together interviews with bloggers based in repressive regimes in his book The Blogging Revolution, which he's been talking about on SBS Radio Arabic and in today's Guardian. He asserts that citizen journalism and new media publishing can literally change the world, by providing freedom of information from within countries where media is closely state-controlled, and can allow internet users around the world to make connections with one another.

With the Online World Atlas, PEN hopes to become part of that revolution -- not least because good-news stories like Loewenstein's are balanced by increasingly frequent site closures and arrests of bloggers such as Moroccan Mohammed Erraji. The blogging revolution - like all change - needs _you_: send us links to news stories, new publications, great blogs, good books and interesting discussions.

As Loewenstein points out, "Allowing people to speak and write for themselves without a western filter is one of the triumphs of blogging. The online culture, disorganised and disjointed in its aims, is unlike that of any previous social movement." Like international blog collector sites Global Voices and The Literary Saloon, or Syrian aggregator al-mudawen, the World Atlas blog collects some of the new voices being heard in this fertile landscape -- and we want you to add yours.