Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people …

It is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

- Annalee Newitz

I almost made it through the second half of 2009 without entering a single movie theater. But then, at a mega-shopping center in Palm Desert – a consolidation of luxury cars, Christmas consumerism, and plastic surgery – I joined three generations of family members to watch Avatar, the record-breaking Hollywood blockbuster at a time when there are no longer supposed to be record-breaking Hollywood blockbusters.

I was ready to be impressed by the computer-generated actors, the special effects, the fantasy flora and fauna of the planet Pandora. And, indeed, I was. I was also ready to be skeptical and even annoyed by the not-so-subtle social commentary of a $300 million film in need of mass public appeal.

I was less annoyed than I thought I would be. Avatar is most certainly a “Dances with Wolves in space,” as Cameron himself put it, but it is also a modern critique of “the abuse of power and creeping imperialism disguised as patriotism.” And just imagine how it must feel to be a US soldier having returned from fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan to enter a movie theater with an audience cheering on ‘the bad guys’ as they shoot arrows through the hearts of US marines. Here is how conservative columnist Nile Gardiner put it in “Avatar: the most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made:”

When I saw the movie last night in a packed theater, I was disturbed by the cheering from the audience towards the end when the humans – US soldiers fighting on behalf of an American corporation – were being wiped out by the Na’vi. Washington is one of the most liberal cities in America and you come to expect almost anything here – but still the roars of approval which greeted the on-screen killing of US military personnel were a shock to the system, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan.

Imagine the public rage that would have been directed at Avatar and James Cameron if it had been released in October 2001. The fact that less than ten years after 9/11 mainstream America is now cheering on the oppressed as they fight back against the oppressors is something worth recognizing and celebrating. Cameron’s film elicits empathy and five years of Global Voices has taught us that doing so is no easy task.

Then again, Avatar is only the latest in a long history of narratives in which a male character (always the embodiment of Western masculinity) from the oppressors joins forces with the oppressed and becomes their leader to fight back against amoral imperialism. I’m sure that there are earlier examples, but the first such film I can think of is Lawrence of Arabia, based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. Other works in the “join and lead the oppressed” genre include Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully, The Last Samurai, District 9, Dune, and surely dozens of others.

This recurring narrative was pointed out in a widely cited article, “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” by freelance journalist and occasional academic, Annalee Newitz. The article does a wonderful job teasing out the appeal of a strange fantasy in which a member of an oppressive, imperialistic, unsustainable group abandons his own people to join forces with (and become the leader of) those they are oppressing. But I think it is a shame that such a well-researched essay then simplifies a complex psychological issue by dividing the world into “white people” and “people of color.”

Analee Newitz at Harvard Law School. Photo by Beth Kanter.

It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Why does Newitz, a feminist geek from Orange Country, describe us Whites in the third person singular? If she is going to divide all 6.5 billion people on this earth into just two categories, then isn’t it pretty obvious which bucket she falls in? By writing in the omniscient tone of academic commentator does she hope to transcend/escape race altogether? (Many of the hundreds of commenters on the article point out that it is filled with as much “white guilt” as the movie itself.)

Avatar’s “join and lead the oppressed” fantasy appeals to more than just Whites. My friends who most enthusiastically recommended the movie to me are what Newitz would call “people of color.” (Whatever that means.) You could call the fantasy “white” as Newitz has done, but you could also call it liberal, Western, hegemonic, or even universal.

James Cameron first began working on the basic plot line for Avatar back in 1994. That is the same year when “Subcomandante Marcos” – likely a middle class professor of graphic design from Tampico – led an insurrection of what Newitz would call “people of color” in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Is Marcos white? He is if you ask most Mexicans. But if you ask proud Chicanos in Los Angeles, Marcos is a member of the oppressed. Marcos fulfilled the Avatar fantasy – turning his back on white, middle class Mexico to lead their insurrection against the oppressors, but without letting go of what Newitz refers to as white privilege – like appearing on the cover of Gato Pardo magazine.

Che Guevara – the Argentine idealized hero of liberaldom – also came from an upper-middle class family until he joined forces with Fidel Castro to free the oppressed people of Cuba. In August 2001 a young leftist Dutch woman (cutie!) traveled to Colombia to join the FARC and fight for the poor and oppressed in Colombia. Perhaps most famously, John Walker Lindh joined the Taliban in Afghanistan and fought against US soldiers at the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi.

The “Avatar Fantasy” of leaving one’s own group to join and lead a marginalized community is clearly more than just fantasy. And, unsurprisingly, it is a dynamic that I am sensitive to because of my own work. There is no doubt that the Avatar Fantasy is pervasive in the development sector, and this yearning by development workers to be loved and accepted by marginalized communities often leads to strange relationships. The Avatar Fantasy also idealizes Newitz’s “people of color” as flawless, ecologically sensitive victims. In truth, I have yet to meet any community on earth that is flawless, or for that matter, ecologically sustainable.

So what is our lesson from Avatar and from its criticisms? Should those of us who grow up in hegemonic cultures disengage from all other cultures? What, for example, should be done in Guinea which is creeping ever closer to violent civil war? Should international activists stay involved in the war in Darfur? Should Google work with the Suruí to fight against deforestation in Rondônia?

Influenced by cosmopolitanism, I believe that we should work across cultural and linguistic divides to shape a shared human morality that is tolerant of group and individual differences. But I think that we should also be aware of the strange and unhealthy psychology of the “Avatar Fantasy”. Rather than giving up on our own communities to attempt to lead others – especially those we treat as “marginalized” – I believe that we can be most effective by combining local political change with global discussion toward a shared vision and common objectives.

In Jordan, like in most societies, conversations among friends and family frequently turn into complaint circles with long lists of frustrations directed at the local and national governments, unresponsive banks, damaged roads, and corrupt officials. In September 2008 four Jordanian technologists developed Ishki to serve as a complaint brokerage which collects and organizes complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Their goal was to eventually expand the mission of the project so that the complaints would lead to conversations, solutions, and finally to better policies and responsiveness by companies and government officials. The project was active for about a year, but co-founder Waheed Al-Barghouthi says that they had a difficult time attracting new users and no complaints have been submitted to the site since the third quarter of 2009. Al-Barghouthi blames the site’s inactivity on the fact that they did not invest time or energy in spreading awareness about the project. He also wonders if some potential users might feel hesitant attaching their names to public complaints about powerful institutions and individuals.

Waheed Barghouthi is @waheedi on Twitter.

This sounds idiotic, but I was really hoping to leave the Middle East without new friends, and without a desire to learn more about yet another region/culture/language. ‘Make new friends, and keep the old’ sounds great, but it has its limits and I reached those a while back. But it is hard not to fall for the Middle East, for Arab culture, for the rich complexity of Arabic.

It has to do with music, a constant rhythm and melody behind everything: language, politics, identity, the way people walk and talk.

Pictured above is Palestinian blogger and musician Sa’ed Karzoun (Jillian will soon translate his posts into English.) I sat down next to him at our final group dinner in Beirut and he began to wax poetic about the importance of music in Arab culture. I asked him about his favorite songs and musicians. The list was interminable. “Just listen to it, man,” he said. “They will kill you. You will die.”

He was right. An Arab musician opens his mouth and out pours his soul. It is the kind of music that sounds cheap and ethnic when its played in some American cafe or bar. But there you are in a small restaurant in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut with a three piece acoustic band and it is the kind of music that brings tears to your eyes.

They start slowly with haunting instrumental music or a cappella singing that sounds almost like moaning. But then, inevitably, they hit a folk song that every Arab – from Marrakesh to Muscat – knows by heart.

And that is the point I am trying to make: they know all of these songs by heart. Dozens and dozens of folk songs that are both anthems and protectors of Arab culture. It is, I must admit, an awkward feeling to be the outsider in any group that knows the lyrics to every song. Songs you’ve never even heard before.

When I was living in Mexico in 2003 – 2004 there were essentially two television channels – TV Azteca and Televisa. This meant that 1) you were forced to watch crappy TV every night and 2) you could inevitably take part in conversations with everyone else in your office about said crappy TV shows the next morning.

Amazing music or crappy TV … common culture forms around shared media.

There has been an entertaining debate on All Songs Considered between Carrie Brownstein and Stephen Thompson about the role of American Idol on American music and culture. Brownstein says that American Idol is the anti-art, corporate monolith against which independent musicians and artists react to create real art, the “machine against which artists rage.” Stephen Thompson – a fan of American Idol – says that it is the hearth of our country during an era of media “shrapnelization.” We each have our own personalized, unique playlists drumming in our earbuds, but American Idol is the one scrap left of shared national culture.

My friends and I agree: this spring will be one of many live concerts in LA. I hope to fill the temporary shoes of Cindylu’s much-coveted concert buddy position. Alex and I already have our eyes on the St. Vincent (cutest indie rocker ever!) and The Album Leaf shows in February.

It’ll be good to sing along to some songs that I, that we, know well.

I’ve been back in the United States for four days now, but I still feel like I’m stuck in first gear, always ready to take a nap but never able to fall asleep. The end of December is, in many ways, both exciting and challenging. I need to wrap up all the projects of 2009 and prepare for an exciting new project for the first half of 2010 (more on that soon). Then there is catching up with friends and family, and all that goes into Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Fortunately the weather gods have given me a warm welcome back to California. It has been between 70 and 80 degrees ever since I returned. While the snowpocalypse pounded the East Coast my friends and I were drinking beer and barbecuing carne asada on the patio.

While I desperately need to apply some kung fu to a massive to-do list, I find myself missing and reminiscing about all the amazing people I met during 2009. It is a blessing to have been able to meet them – and to stay in touch through the infinite dribbling streams of communication – but a curse to not be able to call them up on a Saturday morning and say ‘come by for a beer and taco this afternoon.’

I was hoping to write something of a comprehensive post about my time in Beirut at the second Arab Bloggers Meeting. Lately many of my friends have done a great job debunking the myth that internet tools and culture will inevitably bring about a more just and transparent society, but in doing so I feel that many of them have simplified the ways in which clever activists are adopting new tools to advocate for a progressive society. They have no illusions of ‘tweeting the revolution’, but they are fully committed to sticking around for the long haul that is required for social change to come about. Here is just one example, an interview I did with the ever impressive Rebecca Saab Saade from Meem and Social Media Exchange.

You can learn more about street harassment at Stop Street Harassment!. In April The World’s Aaron Schachter aired a short piece on the Lebanese gay rights movement.

At the Arab Bloggers Meeting I also interviewed Manal Hassan, Jillian York, Abdelrahman Hassan, Ghaida’a Al-Absi, Noha Atef, Doreen Khoury, Ahmad Gharbeia, Jacob Appelbaum, Wissam, and Sudanese Thinker.

Eddie also interviewed Eman AbdElRahman, Hisham Khribchi, Nasser Wedaddy, Saed Karzoun, and Lina Ben Mhenni.

Ahmed, Donatella, and Jillian have all published thoughtful summaries of the event and their time in Beirut.

I stayed for roughly a week after the conference and it was especially nice to spend some quality time with Noha, Ayesha, Sami, and Antoun. Conferences are conferences, but two blown out tires on a dirt road outside of a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon is what really brings people together.

Finally, before I venture into my work-filled, caffeine-fueled hermitage over the next couple days let me sprinkle one last pinch of link-love on Rebecca MacKinnon’s latest post, “We are Global Voices. Five years on.” During the first two years of Global Voices Rebecca fully dedicated herself to get the project off the ground. She offered us useful journalist advice, supported us with encouraging feedback, and made sure that we all felt a sense of ownership. Without her early and active support, and the values she instilled in the community, I don’t know if I would have stayed involved. Today Rebecca is less involved in the day-to-day operations of Global Voices while she works on a book, tentatively titled “Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World.” You can get a taste of her research over the past couple years on the topic by reading the transcript from her impressive address to the World Press Freedom Committee (slides and audio on her blog).

Five years ago I boarded a flight from San Diego to Boston to attend the 2004 Internet & Society conference at the Berkman Center. This was just a month after George Bush won the 2004 election and so there was an element of group therapy to many of the panel discussions. 2004 was the year when, according to Wired Magazine, the Internet invented Howard Dean. Dean’s campaign was supposed to be the harbinger of a new era of net politics where the progressive grassroots took advantage of online tools like blogs and Meetup.com (this was before YouTube even existed) to bring about more enlightened, representative governance. Instead, according to the ever-snarky Register, “organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush.”

While the majority of the 2004 Internet & Society conference was focused on deconstructing the US election, two of the fellows at the Berkman Center, Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman, wanted to widen the scope of the discussions to look at how the internet was affecting society and politics worldwide. Disillusioned by the arrogance and frequent incompetence of big media, Rebecca had just left CNN where she was working as the Beijing Bureau Chief. She came to the Shorenstein Center to study the relationship between blogs and international news coverage, with a specific focus on the coverage of North Korea.

Ethan meanwhile had recently published Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower, which served as a foundation for much of his later thinking and research about 1) the role that bloggers play in filling voids of information from “under-covered parts of the world” and 2) the role that “bridge-builders” play in amplifying their voices across cultural, national, and linguistic divides.

Even when we do have some information about under-covered parts of the world, we have another problem, what Ito terms “the caring problem”. People pay attention to subjects they care about. They tend to ignore subjects they know little about. Media, trying to serve its customers in a free market, responds by giving them more information on subjects they’ve demonstrated an interest in and ignoring other subjects. As a result, consumers don’t get interested in new topics, as they’re not exposed to them. So even if people blog or report about situations in the Congo, readers don’t pay attention to these reports and the noosphere, the realm of thought and culture, remains weak in those areas.

To solve the caring problem, Ethan continues, “will require a focus on bridge builders,” people who are able to contextualize conversations, issues, and debates from one community and introduce them to another. Some of the greatest examples of online bridge-builders at the time were Hossein Derakhshan from Iran, Joi Ito from Japan, Xiao Qiang from China, Ory Okolloh from Kenya, Salam Pax from Iraq, and Jeff Ooi from Malaysia.

Rebecca and Ethan wanted to bring some of these bridge-builders (later dubbed “bridge bloggers“) together to discuss, debate, and shape a shared vision for an inclusive, unmediated, global, grassroots conversation. About forty of us gathered in a medium-sized classroom at Harvard’s law school to discuss how “the use of weblogs and other new technologies enhance online global dialogue and political advocacy.” At the end of the day Joi Ito and Jim Moore led a session with the objective of drafting a manifesto, which is just as applicable today as it was then.

Two of the most outspoken participants throughout the day’s discussions were Hossein Derakhshan and Jeff Ooi, who are now in prison and parliament respectively. Reflecting on just how much can change in five short years, I decided to make a list of some of the international participants from that first Global Voices meeting and look at where they are now.

Ory Okolloh (Kenyan Pundit): At the time of the first Global Voices meeting Ory Okolloh was a student at Harvard Law School and an enthusiastic blogger known as “Kenyan Pundit.” Like other bridge bloggers, she frequently wrote about Kenya for a mostly Western audience and wrote about the West for Kenyans. Throughout 2005 she wrote seven posts on Global Voices introducing some of the pioneers from the African blogosphere. Today Ory continues to blog at Kenyan Pundit. She has spoken at both TED and Pop!Tech. And she has left the legal world to focus on the use of technology in activism with Ushahidi and Mzalendo.

Omar and Mohammed Fadhil (Iraq the Model): A mild controversy surrounded the participation of Iraqi brothers Omar and Mohammed Fadhil in the first Global Voices meeting. First of all, their trip was financed by Spirit of America, a patriotic US non-profit which supports the work of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. (At the meeting Jim Hake announced that Spirit of America had developed the first blogging platform to support Arabic text. As far as I’m aware the platform was never actually launched. Jim says the platform was used for three and a half years by “Friends of Democracy“.) Second, when Omar and Mohammed arrived to the US to attend the conference they received an unexpected invitation to visit President George Bush in the White House. A couple years later Bush even cited an Iraq the Model blog post in his address to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (seriously):

The Iraqi people are beginning to say — see positive changes. I want to share with you how two Iraqi bloggers — they have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we’ve got here — (laughter) — “Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed. We hope the governments in Baghdad and America do not lose their resolve.”

There were even rumors that Omar and Mohammed were receiving funding from the CIA, an allegation that New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer found no evidence for. Today both Omar and Mohammed are based in the US where they are the Middle East Editors for the conservative online media network Pajamas Media. Mohammed is now studying programming at Open Source University while Omar is a graduate student in International Affairs at Columbia University. Omar still writes at Iraq the Model and published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in September.

Isaac Mao: Isaac is the co-founder of the first Chinese blogging platform CNBlog.org. As he wrote last year in The Guardian, his first post was published on August 5, 2002, and his infectious enthusiasm for blogging and sharing information quickly spread across China. If anything, Isaac’s enthusiasm about the positive social impact of blogging has only grown. He was a fellow earlier this year at the Berkman Center where he continued his research on “Sharism.” In June Isaac and I co-curated the Cloud Intelligence Symposium at the Ars Electronica festival. He remains active in organizing barcamps and conferences in China, and is an advocate of online free speech.

Joi Ito: At the time of the first Global Voices meeting Joi introduced himself as the Vice President of International and Mobility for Technorati and his blog was called “Joi Ito’s conversation with the living web.” He was at the time the ultimate internet geek, a clear writer with an international outlook and strong technical fluency. His personal IRC channel was a meeting place in 2004 and 2005 for everyone interested in blogs, wikis, and the social web. Even today you’ll regularly find 50 – 100 people connected and just hanging out. Back in 2004 Joi focused much of his writing on “the caring problem” (and, to a lesser degree, getting Angelina Jolie to blog). He was also active with Isaac Mao back in 2005 trying to promote dialogue between Japanese and Chinese bloggers during a period of escalated antagonism between the two countries. Today Joi is the CEO of Creative Commons and a legal resident of Dubai. Earlier this year he led a workshop on Creative Commons and digital media with the Royal Film Commission of Jordan.

Jeff Ooi: Back in 2004 Jeff was blogging at Screenshots, which was hosted at Blogger. He also had launched USJ-Subyang Jaya, an English-language online news portal, ran a podcast called SuiteTalker, and managed a community of Malaysian photographers. Later he blogged for CNET Asia, and in 2007 he and Ahiruddin Attan were sued by the New Straits Times Press for 10 blog posts which they alleged were libelous. Last year he ran for office as a DAP candidate in the 2008 general election and won a seat in Malaysian parliament. He continues to blog regularly for Asian Correspondent.

Rashmi Sinha: We all went out to dinner at some Cambridge restaurant after that first GV meeting and I remember how everyone was circling around Jay Rosen, Hoder, and Joi Ito like they were celebrities. Such fawning always – especially among bloggers – drives me crazy. So I took a seat in the corner of the restaurant with a soft-spoken woman who said she was from India and that she recently finished her Ph.D. in neuroscience. (I had recently been in India and studied neuroscience for a couple years in college.) In January 2002 Rashmi founded Dialog Now, a blog which encouraged dialog between Indians and Pakistanis during the 2001–2002 India–Pakistan standoff. You can read her post from December 2004 about Global Voices here. Five years after the Global Voices meeting and she was voted by Playboy magazine as one of the ten sexiest CEO’s in the world. Rashmi founded SlideShare in 2007 with her husband Jonathan Boutelle.

Hoder: At the first Global Voices meeting Hoder led a session titled “How to build a blogosphere.” The title is a somewhat pompous allusion to his claim that he is personally responsible for the tremendous growth of Persian-language blogs in Iran. In November, 2001 he created a step-by-step guide on how to set up a blog in Persian and in the next couple years the Iranian blogosphere grew to become one of the most vibrant and politically active around the world. At the second Global Voices summit in London Hoder met our then-contributor from Israel, Lisa Goldman, and decided to visit her a month later. It is so interesting to look back at the New York Times op-ed he published during his visit, and also at Lisa Goldman’s account of their time together. Hoder was arrested in Tehran on November 1, 2008. He is allegedly being held in Evin Prison and there has lately been a lot of talk about his role in the Iranian show trials following the Green Revolution. Hoder is an extremely complicated guy. I’m pretty sure he’s managed to piss off every single person who has ever considered him a friend. Of course, we all want him out of prison. But it is difficult to know the best way to advocate for that to happen; especially when we don’t even really know why he’s in prison in the first place. Cyrus has been following the story closely and I assume that he will continue to do so until Hoder is released. You can get more context about Hoder and all the controversies surrounding him on his Wikipedia page.

Yvonne T. Chua: Yvonne is an investigative journalist and journalism trainer for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. In 1999 she wrote “Robbed: An Investigation of Corruption in Philippine Education” and at the time of the Global Voices meeting she was interested (way ahead of her time) in how new media would change journalism training. Today PCIJ is one of the leading centers in teaching digital media for investigative reporting in South East Asia. Their 20th anniversary conference in September was focused on new media and democratization.

Akwe Amosu: She joined allAfrica.com as its founding executive editor in 2000 and at the time of the first GV meeting she was working on Peace Africa, an aggregator of news and information related to peacekeeping missions in Sub-Saharan Africa. At our third Global Voices Summit in Delhi, India she organized a small meeting of African and Chinese bloggers to encourage more open discussion about the impact of Chinese presence in Africa and African presence in China. She is now the Africa Advocacy Director for Open Society Institute and the Senior Policy Analyst for Africa at the OSI Policy Center. She is also a member of Global Voices’ board of directors.

Other participants of that first Global Voices meeting include Krista Baumane, Alex Steffen, Dan Gilmor, Darius Cuplinskas, David Weinberger, Debra Bowen, Ejovi Nuwere, Janet Haven, Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Drucker, Jerzy Celichowski, Jim Moore, Jonathan Peizer, Kwindla Kramer, Marc Danziger, Matt Burden, Michelle Levesque, Oh Yeonho, Philip Carter, Ramu Dhara, Rodger Desai, and Terry Fisher.

It was, looking back on it, a mix of elite bloggers, affiliates of the Berkman Center, and affiliates of Open Society Institute’s Information Program.

The most important outcome of the meeting, however, was an agreement to develop an index of bridge blogs from around the world. Hoder began the process by listing the blogs of all the participants at the meeting on his own personal wiki. That list was later transferred to the Global Voices wiki. (Here is what the wiki looked like back in 2005.) We soon realized that a static wiki-based list of blogs wasn’t interactive enough. Rebecca proposed using Bloglines as an aggregator of “bridge blogs” from around the world. (Very interesting to look back and see which bloggers from early 2005 are still blogging today and which countries – like Madagascar – aren’t even listed.) Ethan suggested that we use the tag “globalvoices” on Delicious to track bridge blog posts. But it wasn’t until Paul Frankenstein – then a summer intern at the Berkman Center – began posting daily roundups of the global blogosphere that Global Voices began to take its present form.

My first post on Global Voices was exactly five years ago to the day. I suggested that BloggerCon IV be held outside of North America and Western Europe. (It seems that the 2010 Global Voices Summit will be our first south of the equator.) In June 2005 I was hired as the first Global Voices regional editor and began posting daily roundups of what bloggers throughout Latin America were writing about. My first roundup post summarized reactions by Mexican bloggers to a 2005 communique posted by the Zapatistas (shortly after I had traveled to Chiapas). Throughout 2005 I recruited as many authors to write about Latin America on Global Voices as possible. Iria Puyosa, Eduardo Ávila, Georgia Popplewell, Roy Rojas, and Alán Flores were among the first contributing authors.

I could spend hours reminiscing about those first months of Global Voices. It was such an exciting time. We really believed that we were on the cutting edge of a sea change in how citizens around the world would communicate and find out about one another. And we were. That’s not to say that our mission was complete. Even now, we’re still only about 10% there. But what an amazing 10% it has been. Over the next few years following that first meeting we would discover three major obstacles to our mission and we would develop new projects to meet those challenges.

Today I am sitting at De Prague Cafe in Beirut, a meeting place of poets, intellectuals, and bloggers. I hear Arabic, English, French, and Italian. Sami just stopped by. Then Noha, Donatella, and Ayesha. We hadn’t planned on meeting up here, but bloggers find fast wi-fi like camels find water.

I am reading a post that Rebecca published on December 3, 2004. It is about what an ideal world news service would look like. And I am realizing that we did it. We built that. We worked our asses off to do something that we should all really be proud of.

Yes, we still have a long, long way to go. I am more cognizant of that than ever after attending last week’s Arab Bloggers Meeting. Evgeny’s latest article in the Prospect does a pretty good job listing just a few of the challenges.

But the point is, we’re not just making lists of what is wrong. We are making lists of what needs to be done to make it right. And, month by month, year by year, we’re slowly checking those items off.

Salam Pax in Beirut for the Arab Bloggers Meeting.

Six years ago:

One day, like in Afghanistan, those journalists will get bored and go write about Syria or Iran; Iraq will be off your media radar. Out of sight, out of mind. Lucky you, you have that option. I have to live it.

Salam Pax, 2003

Four and a half years ago:

But I needed a break from this Dostoyevsky kid so I started reading The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi by Salam Pax, which is actually a blog, but on paper. This, I thought, was a crappy idea, but once again I was so wrong. For whatever reason I never got into the craze surrounding Where is Raed? even though most bloggers were mentioning him at least as often as I mention my gastrointestinal happenings. I probably checked out a couple posts, but something I’ve noticed is that when I come to a blog with 200 or 300 comments after every post, I get turned off …

But man, this guy’s great. And reading a blog in a book is so much better than reading it on a screen. Everything comes together so much more clearly and effectively when you read through an entire year of some person’s life in just a couple hours.

Me, 2005

I remember almost everything. I remember the exact way that the furniture was arranged, the upholstery on the chairs and couches, the menthol smell of the senior citizens all around me in La Jolla’s public library. I read The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi from cover to cover in a single afternoon. And I remember thinking, ‘I’d love to grab a beer with this guy sometime.’ I didn’t want to be just one of the 400 commenters on each of his blog posts. I wanted to sit across a table from him and … well, you know, just chat.

Almost five years later and here I am in Lebanon grabbing a beer with Salam Pax.

But the scary thing: I don’t remember anything from his book, his blog, his life. I still remember the sensation of feeling impressed by the rawness and honesty of his words, but I don’t remember the words themselves. And I wonder, how many books have I read since that afternoon? How many blog posts? How many articles and research papers? How many words? And where did all those words go if not to my memory?

The gang at All Songs Considered have attempted the impossible: to define the last decade in music. Reaching for grandiosity, Robin Hilton suggests that we have reached the “end of nostalgia,” at least when it comes to listening to music. No longer will we yearn for the songs of our youth, because they will always live along side each year’s new crop of music and sneak into shuffle mode. We don’t replace old songs with new ones; we simply purchase larger iPods.

This concern about our inability to forget, the increasing impossibility of re-inventing our past through the trickery of collective nostalgia, has been popping up again and again. Front and center is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s recent publication of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.

(A tangent here, but can we all agree that it is super super lame to refer to yourself in the third person on your personal blog?)

While Mayer-Schönberger was working on his book, computer scientists at the University of Washington were developing Vanish, a technology which destroys any type of digital message (including Facebook, Twitter, and blog posts) after a designated amount of time. Then there are lesser-known causes like this Argentine group encouraging their fellow netizens to delete more and hang onto less. (Hat tip Evgeny whose post “Social Media and Social Memory” is worth checking out.)

I guess I feel a little out of place. All these people worried about their ability to forget, and here I am worried about my inability to remember. I was happy to find the post I had published just a few minutes after reading Salam Pax’s book. Sure, I could have kept those notes in my journal without sharing them, but I’m also happy to re-read the comments on the post. And it certainly doesn’t put an end to nostalgia. If anything, easy access to our uncorrupted past provokes us to dig deeper. I ended up clicking on the links to all of the bloggers who used to comment regularly here. Half of them now no longer write, at least not where I can see it.

Over lunch I told Salam how strange it was to look back on what I had written about him so many years ago, and how I wrote it. My writing style has changed. Growing up was inevitable. Salam concurred. He said he no longer likes to look back at the book because he hardly recognizes the person who wrote it.

Salam is still blogging, but as he predicted back in 2003, the rest of the world has moved on. Americans can now point our Iraq on a map, but their attention is now on the economy, health care, and Afghanistan. During the first year of the war in Iraq his blog used to regularly attract two to three hundred comments per post. Now, working in media development with the UNDP, the majority of his posts have just two or three comments.

Salam is still able to succumb to nostalgia. In March of this year he began a fascinating series of posts to mark the sixth anniversary of the fall/invasion/liberation of Baghdad by looking back at the journal he kept when the bombs first fell. Here is how he introduces the series, “Looking back, one last time“:

In three weeks time it’s the 6th anniversary for the fall/liberation of Baghdad.

Baghdad Falls / Baghdad is liberated.. all semantics. What is fact is our life in Iraq as we knew it ended at that day.

Since the start of the war in 2003 we had to move house three times for various reasons. A lot was given away or lost in those moves including a notebook I used as a diary during the days when we had no electricity or internet access, it also contained flyers and other things from those days.

When the bombing stopped a couple of weeks later and the first place with internet access opened I sent all the notes to my blog friend Diana Moon and she posted them for me on my blog. The blog posts from that time are still online, you can go check them out.

While looking through the boxes of our belongings I found the notebook, with newspapers, photos and the flyers I had kept. As five years have passed and we’re entering the our seventh year of our post-war/post-Saddam lives I thought it would be good to look over these notes and share what I have from that time with you. I will upload it all online and throw the pieces of paper I have away. Hanging on to all of this for six years is enough.

His recollections and reflections of the oil fields being set on fire, the leaflets that were dropped by coalition airplanes, the hacking of every Iraqi email address, and the bombing of the Ma’amun telephone exchange are all worthwhile reads.

Also, check out Leslie Plommer’s feature piece about Salam in The Guardian from January and Salam’s own thoughts about moving back to Baghdad this year after living two years abroad.

It’s probably not what they’re looking for, but whenever anyone tells me that they are headed to Santorini, my one and only recommendation is that they head to Lucky’s for the world’s best souvlaki. Call it what you will – souvlaki, shawarma, kebab, gyro, döner – it is the Mediterranean version of the burrito which has had tremendous success in its culinary colonization of Western and Northern Europe. And nobody does it better than Lucky. So it warms my heart to see a comment from one “jammin83″ on Serious Eats which confirms that Lucky is still alive and well.

Every time I’m in Europe I have fantasies of returning to California to start up a kebab shop …

… whoa, whoa, whoa, I just did some looking around, and sunuvabitch, some local San Diegan stole my idea and put up a “European style” kebab shop on 9th avenue – hipster haven – in downtown San Diego. Well, good for him. But an authentic kebab shop is more than just perfectly spiced lamb and chicken. It’s also the atmosphere, the staff flirting with the girls, the calling out to all the passerby, the constant joking around. So I made a quick little video to try and get a bit of the atmosphere:

Actually, I made the video because for the past three days Bektour and I have been leading a training workshop here in Istanbul to show journalists and media trainers from around Eurasia how to use digital media. We had them each produce at least one short video using FlipShare or Windows Movie Maker, and I figured it was only fair if I made a quick video as well. You can look at the movies they ended up producing – in English and in Russian – at the Eurasian Stories website.

One of the things I stress about digital storytelling is that a good script and a strong start are always more important than having fancy equipment and powerful editing software. On the other hand, when you want to create real high quality work there is no use denying that a quality camera can make a big difference. I’ve been shooting photos with the same old 2004 Nikon D70 for years now. And video I’ve been doing with an old Sanyo Xacti HD1. Both have done the job for me over the years, but it’s time for an upgrade. For the past couple months I’ve been wavering between the Canon 5D Mark II, the new 7D, or the Nikon D300S. It is a big investment, but I’ve finally decided on the 5D Mark II.

For an example of what it is capable of, I just saw this Post Secret video (via Zadi) which was made with a Mark II:

I’m excited to get my hands on one.

I’m in Istanbul this week with my new partner in crime from Kyrgyzstan, Bektour Iskender. Together we’re holding a three-day workshop on digital media production and distribution for affiliates from Internews’ Eurasia program. Bektour was recently in the United States where he took some excellent photos of a protest rally in Los Angeles, New York at dawn, and Old Town in San Diego. While he was in Boston he met up with Ethan, who published a nice post about Bektour’s work.

We shot this video a few hours ago as an example of how quick and easy it is to make a decent video with a $100 camera and free editing software. I’ll try to record another video of Bektour later in the week in order to learn more about Kyrgyzstan.

I’m not a religious person. I’m probably too individualistic, skeptical, rebellious, and contrarian for any kind of dogma, hierarchy, or groupthink. Also, I spend more time each month thinking about how I want my burger cooked than if god exists. On the other hand, there is something about the ritual, charity, and moral bravery of many faiths that I reluctantly find appealing. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I’m frequently disappointed that there is not more of a spirit of charity and volunteerism outside of the church. That is, I am disappointed that the Enlightenment seemed to lead us less toward humanism and more toward consumerism.

Over at Goodreads I published a review of my latest read, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. The book is essentially a history of the spread of Christianity across Europe from the division of the Roman Empire in 330 to the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099. It’s fascinating to see just how much Europe changed to adapt to Christianity and how much Christianity changed to adapt to all of Europe. But there is one thing I forgot to include in my review: the irony that Europe is now the least religious region in the world. In fact, you could even make the argument that, while Christianity became dominant in the 10th and 11th centuries in Europe, it has only survived because of its impressive colonial export during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today throughout Europe churches continue to close due to falling attendance and a lack of priests. Back in 2001 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, claimed that Christianity is nearly vanquished in Britain.

In one of the strangest twists of history, it is now up to African priests to save the souls of non-believers in Europe and North America. Trust me, if you would have told this to a priest in 15th century Italy he would have shit himself.

A couple weeks ago John Tierney of the New York Times penned an interesting blog post about the evolution of religion after having read Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. (This topic has been in the media a lot this past year thanks to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Christopher Hitchen’s God is not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.)

Wade argues “that people have a genetically based urge to worship, engraved by natural selection in the mind’s neural circuits because of the tremendous advantage religion conferred on early societies.”

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

Tierney, noting that pious churches installed pews to discourage dancing during service, wonders if nonbelievers could develop new godless institutions that confer the evolutionary benefits of religion. He even suggests environmentalism as a possible secular, 21st century replacement to religion:

One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage. A Church of Green could provide some of the same moral lessons and communal values as traditional religions, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that green fervor is especially prevalent in European countries where traditional religion is on the decline.

Meanwhile, in an interesting discussion on Bloggingheads.tv, Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus wonder if the transparent nature of the networked age is leading to a new omnipotent moral force. In other words, do we behave decently these days not because we’re afraid of the wrath of god or the afterlife, but rather because we’re concerned about how we will be perceived on Facebook and Twitter?

From the latest Rising Voices newsletter.

Did you know that the Canadian coal mining company Teck Resources is planning on increasing its production from 1.5 million to 8 million tons every year at he Ovoot Tolgoi mine, an open-pit coal mine in southern Mongolia? The huge increase in production is sure to have a large environmental impact in Mongolia, but until recently residents of southern Mongolia had no way to make their voices heard. The Mongolian environmental citizen news project Nomad Green is trying to change that by organizing workshops to teach environmental activists how to publish news about changes and threats to their environment. Learn more in Rezwan’s latest feature post, and by visiting Nomad Green itself.

There are also plenty of environmental threats in Madagascar. Patrick from Foko Madagascar tells us about the illegal logging of rosewood trees in eastern Madagascar which are exported to make guitars, billiard cues, furniture and luxury flooring. He tells us that the coup and political crisis that took place earlier this year has created an environment where people are able to evade the legal system. His own hometown of North Mananara has suffered as a result. This is something to think about the next time we buy furniture made out of rosewood. See photos from Patrick’s post, and read the latest from more Malagasy bloggers in Joan’s latest wrap-up.

“Every month when I do my roundups of what happened on the Ceasefire blog that month I think to myself, ‘It can’t get much better than this!’ And it always does.” So writes Ruthie Ackerman in her introduction to a recap of blog posts from Liberians living in Staten Island, New York and Monrovia, Liberia who are part of the Ceasefire Liberia project. Sticking to the environmental theme, make sure not to miss Saki G’s coverage of a Liberian youth group which organized an event to fight against climate change as part of the Road to Copenhagen campaign.