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From the Jordanian Blogosphere

Roba Al Assi · 16:31 · Middle East & North Africa

The Jordanian blogosphere reacts to the current disasters around the globe. Ahmad Humeid offers his condolences for Hurricane Katrina, criticizes the relief effort as being “miserable”, and notes that “what is really sad is that the affluent whites managed to escape while the poor blacks were left behind.” Jameed also emphasizes that human tragedy is human tragedy. Yazan Malakha reblogs a post on Via Roads to Iraq that remarks on the “signs of disregard for Arab life in the right-wing American press and the entire Israeli press are a small but unmistakable reminder that, for all the Western bluster about democracy and freedom, there doubtless remains a kind of global apartheid.”

Haitham of Sabbah's Blog notes how Muslims do not practice anti-semitism as the Westren media likes to advertise, and shares a bit of local news- “Bahrain Human Rights Society is now headed by Huda Azra Nono, a Jewish lady from the very tiny Bahraini Jewish community.”

Beisan, meanwhile, posts about how she had hoped that 2005 would be better than 2004 but that hope is proving to be futile with the Hariri assassination, the Iraqi Stampede, and Hurricane Katrina.

On the cultural front, Lina posts about the Arab Cultural Night that was held in Ireland as a part of a youth camp, and wonders “how long will this beautiful rich heritage endure and stand in the face of cultural erosion?” She also says that she is very pleased to find out that the 2nd International Cultural Forum is taking place in the Dead Sea. Lulu of CafeLulu discusses a TV show entitled “Pickles, Inc.”, whereas S.C. of Utopia mentions that this year will be the birth of Shashat's Women's Film Festival in Palestine, which aims to increase public awareness of women's creativity and the implications of representations of women. Madas contemplates a very interesting question- “When did we become Arabs?”, and says “the idea of an Arab identity is fresh of the over, it is that new.”

Meanwhile, two of the creative portion of the Jordanian blogosphere share some of their experiences. Amin Matalqa expresses his excitement for starting his first year at the American Film Institute and keeps us updated. Laith Majali, on the other hand, lets us in on how his career as an editor started and shares pictures of himself impersonating famous characters.

The 6th Jordan Planet blogger meet-up has also been announced for the 14th of September.

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Images from the Dominican Republic: Looking to the Future

David Sasaki · 05:29 · Dominican Republic

dominican kid

Fachtopia, who works with Linux in the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic has posted this photo with the title, “Looking to the Future” within the set, “Street Children.”

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What Chinese Bloggers Think of “Super Girls”

Frank Dai · 03:29 · East Asia

Super Girls, a contest for female singers, has been the major entertainment event in China this summer. It was even evaluated to high level of social and political meaning. Chinese Bloggers also actively participated in the hot discussion, giving much valuable thoughts on what Super Girls affect Chinese society, business and culture.

The program begun last year by Hunan TV, a provincial television network. According to the organizer and producer Xia Qing, this program was inspired by the similar “American Idol” of FOX TV. The main feature of it was that everyone can take part, with almost no requirement of age, academic background and professional training. Its theme song was titled “Sing Whenever You Want to Sing”. Another prominent feature was that every audience can send SMS by mobile phone supporting the girl he or she likes. The SMS that a contestant received would be a important standard of judging whether she can stay into next round.

The popularity of Super Girls is incredible: Near 150,000 girls have signed up for a contestant; Baidu related group mailing system (BBS) has more than 10 million posts merely concerning with the Top 3 singers; The profit earned in sending SMS was said to be at least 30 million Yuan, about 2.5 million US dollar. It was estimated that 1/10 of Chinese population have watched the final round which took on Aug 26th

Chinese Bloggers are beginning to express their attitudes as soon as the event happened. As you can imagine, many fans of those girl stars rushed to their blogs to express admiration and enthusiasm. Their number can not be totally calculated. Even some of the contestants have their blogs, which can be found on Bokee.com, though it was not very clear that whether those blogs are written themselves. Here we can only picked up some rational ideas and opinions by Chinese Bloggers focusing on what and how Super Girls changed the way of entertainment and its relation to Chinese unique society and mass culture.

Lian Yue, a famed columnist, posted an entry on his blog that satirize the jealous CCTV, the largest TV network and official media of China Communist Party. CCTV has criticized Super Girls for its philistinism in artistic taste and called for more science and technology program on television. They declared that “audience rating is the origin of sin destroying program quality”. Many bloggers and netizens were very angry with this, debuting that Super Girls was the program that they loved and CCTV just used this as excuse to strike Hunan TV, who has been a competent rivalry of CCTV in entertainment field. They have organized a signup boycotting CCTV.

Anti, a veteran journalist, is the first blogger who connected Super Girls with democratic reform of China. He pointed out that every girl, who has dreamed of becoming a star, can realize her dream by the program with individual effort. He also spotted that every audience can determine the destiny their beloved girl star by sending SMS, which means the preliminary training of participatory democracy. The conclusion he made was that the unbelievable popularity of Super Girls was attributed to the urgent need of participation and transparency in society.

Zheng carefully observed how the fans are organized online and offline to support the super girls. He noted that those fans used instant massage and bulletin system to organize in order. They went out on the streets to show their passion and urge passerby to send SMS to vote for their favorite star. Zheng praised the fans for activism while worried about that government could supervise those BBS and forums because they are too “centralized” for expression.

Zhang Rui, told the common grounds existing between Super Girls and Blog: desires to realize dream and express opinion. Both of them are providing average individuals with easy way to achieve success. Hopesome gave a similar analogy between Super Girls and Podcast, saying that podcast gave everyone a platform. Interestingly the comment following his post has rose to more than 300, showing how crazy the fans are.

Super Girls has ended with the winner LiYuchun, a boyish-style girl. We are very surprised to see that Chinese Bloggers did not only express their fancy toward their favorite star simply but also had some excellent thoughts on its impact on social motivation and internet participation. The program was not merely an entertainment event but a complex subject that need more insight and investigation and Chinese Bloggers are one of significant sources contributing to the discussion.

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