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The Blogging Revolution.

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THE BLOGGING REVOLUTION

by Antony Loewenstein

(Melbourne University Press)

Paperback: 304 pages

Rec. price: $32.95

Occasionally on local television there appears a trailer for that grunge-laden reality show, America's Worst Jobs. Canning pineapples in Hawaii; gutting salmon in Alaska; monitoring sewage plants in New Jersey: that sort of thing. But for sheer nastiness it would be hard to top the job that Sydney author Antony Loewenstein has set himself: reading blogs on a full-time research basis. Mr Loewenstein has not only read them; he has plunged head-first into the blogosphere, while--amid this planet's illiteracies and misrepresentations--keeping his temper for long enough to provide sober reports on what he finds. The result (extraordinarily well annotated) manages to contain a greater amount of valuable information than any other Australian book that this reviewer has read in years.

It is simple to acquire a basic knowledge of the most famous blogs in America, Australia, and England. In terms of intellectual interest, they rarely need detain us long; and even when the bloggers themselves display conspicuous cerebral calibre (as in various blogs affiliated with London's Times and Daily Telegraph), their comments boxes are seldom more than magnets for mental cases hitherto confined to psychiatry textbooks and park benches.

Mr Loewenstein is concerned with rather less deranged manifestations of the cyberspatial urge. He has made it his business to visit countries where few realise that blogging exists at all: specifically, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. Readers of his account will find it hard to suppress some respect for these lands' more talented bloggers, who are taking serious risks. Blog comments that reprehend the authorities will often be deleted without warning. At times a sarcastic blog reference to the government will ensure the blogger's interrogation by decidedly unpleasant secret police, few of whom will be noticeably squeamish about how to extract incriminating evidence, and fewer still of whom will share the blogger's frequent advantage of a Western education in human rights principles. Now and then, a blogger will be sentenced to gaol. This all gives urgency to Mr Loewenstein's theme. He is blessed with a clear, unpretentious prose style, and even more blessed with an exceptional interest in his surroundings. Of the Nipponese reportage by the late Anglo-Hungarian journalist George Mikes, it was once said: "Everyone writes about the tea ceremony in Japan, but who, except George Mikes, notices the way the rubbish is thrown out?". Mr Loewenstein has a similar eye for detail.

Happily, and unlike most who dabble in techno-prophesying, Mr Loewenstein eschews overestimating the internet's power. He admits that "investigative journalism [is] something most bloggers are simply incapable of" (p.7), and quotes, two pages afterwards, an...

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