Yet, like a journalist, I risk over-simplifying, confounding, and systematically misinterpreting the stories I choose to cover. I read blogs and news services in search of big stories, and as a result I focus on monumental events-- wars, deaths, elections, protests, and the whole scope of official government acts-- that seem to demand demographically-obvious reporting techniques. Death of a ruler? Email former subjects and opponents. Religious festival? Find pictures of people in silly hats. Election? "Hi, there, Citizen. Whoyavotinfor?" People in the streets? "What's the fuss? Whose head on platter, today?"

The demonstrations in Nepal sparkled in the focus of international news media and blog aggregators, and covering them couldn't have seemed more straightforward. Yet I realized as I set out that I was faced with twin impediments: I hardly know anything about Nepal, and I couldn't make sense of the actual story. Who wants what? Who are these people in the street? All of these blogs calling for democracy: what are their agendas, and what are the sources of their anger, anxiety, and fervor for political change?

Among the few Americans who could point in the general direction of Nepal on a world map, the nation is murky (at best) in their imagination, a whirl of mountains, mandalas, and Buddhist temples. And while it may be some of those things, it clearly is neither Bhutan, which seems legitimately cordoned off from modernization, nor Tibet, which is probably a fantasy of its current state. So it was a significant undertaking to get a simple picture of a more real Nepal. The terrain is varied, the regime is Hindu and monarchical, the rebels are Maoists (but is finding more sympathy in rural Indian than in Beijing), and, at least on paper, India acts as its benevolent foreign affairs coordinator, a relic of its early post-colonial past. It was gratifying to receive this elementary education, but I was doubly skeptical that I had a basis for understanding the events that were unfolding there.

In my search for bloggers who were writing about the general strikes, I found a handful of people and organizations, some based in Nepal and most spread across the diaspora. They all seemed steadfastedly pro-democracy. They clothed themselves in the familiar revolutionary language that I know well from Jacobins and flower revolutionaries in former Soviet states and regime changers in Washington and the Green Zone.

That pretty much reflects what I ended up publishing in Striking for Democracy in Nepal. Despite my reservations, the story was an adequate answer to the question, "what are bloggers in Nepal (and those who are invested in it around the world) saying about the events occurring there?" which is the question that Open Source expects me to answer. Yet to distill down to a few lines of contextual writing and quotes from bloggers, I had to masquerade as an informed moderator. I also margiinalized some of the issues and comments I came across in order to fit my report into the form that I routinely use. What remains is a handful of characters on a familiar stage, dolls with interchanging outfits. Despot. Military Police. Jailed Dissidents. Rural Rebels. People From Every Level of Society Demonstrating. Universal Calls for Rule by the People.

Have I done violence to you, people of Nepal? I think so. I know so little about you.

You made me wonder how much I know about any place I visit on my laptop.

The crescendo of images and rhetoric coming out of France-- from the barricades around the Sorbonne to the jostling between Chirac, Villepin, and Sarkozy-- were a clear prompt to investigate. Why were French youth, many of them from universities, shutting down cities, roads, and igniting cars, over a proposed labor law?

The bloggers and Flickr photographers I corresponded with wrote about universal opposition to the CPE, as the law was known, and about rising tension between both young and marginalized people and their government. They reflected on the November 2005 riots in the suburban immigrant communities, noting simmilarities and differences.

I came away from the story impressed by the journalistic practices, as well as the sophistocation of analysis, in the French (and especially Parisian) blogosphere. Bloggers were posting pictures and videos from the middle of the demostrations, from the sidelines, on quiet side streets, on abandoned university campuses, and in packed halls of students debating their future. And they were doing all of this reporting for readers to freely consume and pass on to others. I wonder, is there a relation between the (sometimes inspiring, sometimes frustrating) culture of activism in France and the volume and quality of its blogs? Do young Americans participate in and deliberate on their collective future in the same way?

Last night, Open Source recorded Neo-Conservatism: The Last Throes? with Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama. The show gave these two prominent public intellectuals a chance to reflect in the state of American foreign policy ideology on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I highly recommend listening to the show, which is available at the same link.

Hubris and Nemesis are terms that Ferguson proposes to describe the greatest challenges to American Empire. In the first case, the United States vastly miscalculated the situation in Iraq and the ramifications of occupation. The Iraqi debacle has not only been extremely costly, but it has kept the United States from addressing the real mounting threat, Iran. Ferguson says that one of his major faults was not recognizing how much Iran would benefit from instability across the border. For some, apparently, the winds of war are always blowing.

Each in his own way, Fukuyama and Ferguson agree that the failure in Iraq show that the United States cannot sustain its aggressive behavior. Fukuyama urges a return to internation norms and cooperation. Ferguson insists that realism should not be abandoned because decisive military force and 'nation building' was mis-applied by an inept regime.

[pattiea/flickr]

Fitting, then, that today's piece by Justin Webb, Republicans begin long road to 2008, introduces the world to the Long March that is the pursuit of the Presidential nomination in the United States. He describes the party meeting he sat in on outside Des Moines, Iowa, as one part school board, one part national convention, with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney playing the part of the humble and gracious suitor, sitting on the living room sofa and peppered with questions before he is allowed to take Jane to the movies.

He did not, of course, mention the presidency.

That would have been a ghastly blunder, akin to jumping into bed before even flirting, which in Iowa is something only farm animals do...

It was all very warm and gentle and wholesome: a fitting way to begin the selection of a presidential candidate in a nation which, for all its meretricious airs, has a simple homespun gentility at its core.

For the majority of Americans, who, like my friend quoted in this post's title, have yet to be introduced to Mr. Romney, the next two years will be a mix (if they happen to live in a swing state) of folksiness and big money theatrics (if they live anywhere else). It is gratifying to see that at least one international service is taking a closer look at a process that is often covered as if it were a political soap opera acted out only in the corridors of power.

This blog is the realization of my passion for seeing the connections between the seemingly disparate aspects of my life, work and studies. Rather than compartmentalize my interests and knowledge, I use my whole appetite and all of my experiences, whether I am reading the Odyssey or writing about the War in Iraq or debating the obligation to obey political authority.

It is appropriate that my high school's last words on me were "there are no short conversations with you, for ideas do not exist in isolation... Connections suffuse all you do."

This may be why I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to study-- and how I want to study it-- over the next two years at Brown. The great theoretical works cannot be carved up and sorted by discipline without much of their complexity being stripped away. In a similar way, one cannot treat these works as if they are made of different stuff from the comments and observations that reverberate in the popular common sphere. So I'm grappling with Brown's curriculum-- and its Independent Concentration policy-- and designing a program in "Social, Ethical, and Political Thought." I've compiled a complete list of courses that interest me, and I'm working on a table of courses that is modeled on Harvard's Social Studies.

My work on Milosevic last week was as exhilirating as anything I've done in months, perhaps since Boing Boing linked to Tri Repetae, a UN worker who is blogging from Liberia (Open Source story).

What has made this new medium so exciting is that it is more radically open to participants than any of its recent predecessors. Within 12 hours of my deciding to survey reaction to Milosevic's death across the Balkans, I received a half dozen letters and posted them here and on Open Source. My readership quadrupled, with visitors coming from across the world in droves (from Serbia And Montenegro, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Ukraine, Croatia, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, and the United Kingdom in the past four days).

Hopefully, some of these new readers will hang around, comment, and contribute as I spring from story to story, all while I relate news from my own studies. In an ideal world, it will be like the international terminal at Heathrow, only with duty free conversations instead of duty free purchases.]]> tag:www.watsonblogs.org,2006:/hshepherd//54.882 2006-03-15T14:14:36Z 2006-03-18T21:07:14Z

Niall Ferguson's Telegraph Op-Ed, Watch out, this lame duck president has nothing to lose, is the most recent in a series of articles that foretells a preemptive strike against Iran or, barring that, World War III. The most alarming article, The origins of the Great War of 2007-- and how it could have been prevented, would have sent me into hysteria... if anyone else had seemed to match his concern. In short, he predicts that the United States' unwillingness to adhere to its preemption policy will precipitate a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. Certainly, nuclear Iran is on the top of a very short list of issues that is simmering on the international agenda, but despite Ferguson's bluster, the United States does not seem to be the frontrunner.

Of course, that may be changing, as Ferguson suggests, as the President toughens up his rhetoric and tries to refocus Americans on the threats they face. Is this what the first stages of manufactured consent feel like? Bush's greatest triumph may be that he has changed the terms of debate among many, if not most, Americans. Six years ago, who among us sat with friends and handicapped our chances of invading uncooperative states, or wrangled with troop deployment figures, imagining with a mix of wonder and disgust at the possibility of occupying still more of Southwest Asia. The real coup is the acceptance that these are reasonable topics of discussion.

There ought to be a special place for Dr. Ferguson as this drama unfolds. He should remain responsible for his public positions, whether the Iran situation subsides or explodes. I'll do my best to follow the arc of his alarm and condeming certainty.

Der Standard is running the transcript of Jürgen Habermas' Bruno Kreisky Prize acceptance speech to the Karl Renner Institute. Unfortunately, only a short segment is available in English (I've contacted the Institute for a full English version):

On the one hand, the communication shift from books and the printed press to the television and the Internet has brought about an unimagined broadening of the media sphere, and an unprecedented consolidation of communication networks. Intellectuals used to swim around in the public sphere like fish in water, but this environment has become ever more inclusive, while the exchange of ideas has become more intensive than ever. But on the other hand the intellectuals seem to be suffocating from the excess of this vitalising element, as if they were overdosing. The blessing seems to have become a curse. I see the reasons for that in the de-formalisation of the public sphere, and in the de-differentiation of the respective roles.

My work at Radio Open Source makes me think about the role of "experts," especially academics, journalists and policy-makers, in current affairs commentary. I talk a lot about how the show can seem to move down parallel tracks, because we use extremely well-placed sources who are accustomed to working with major media organizations and bloggers who have little or no "expert" status. Of course, Open Source has picked up on one of the big ideas with the Internet: oftentimes, the best source is the person who is living a major news story. When you replace a talking head with a dimensional, invested, on-the-ground participant-observer, you re-prioritize the authenticity and immediacy of the story. That's the hope, at least.

One fascinating byproduct of Open Source's access to high caliber public figures, whose views and expertise often add a great deal to discussion, and interest in voices from across the spectrum of the Internet is a dialogue that begins to bridge the gap between analysts and witnesses. The broad theorizing of a political scientist can be combined with the sentiments and observations of a person watching an event unfold in the square below her window. Our show may be a model for one way of adapting the role of well-worn experts to work hand-in-hand with the rising class of prime sources.

Other bits and pieces:

• I'm pursuing usage rights for pictures that may help illustrate another post about Empire, entitled "Our Turnus?" that will discuss the event that I feel has shown my generation the disconnect between America's infallible and glorious ideals, and the policies that it enacts with zealous abandon.
• Review my earlier post on Empire, now with comments by Marinos Pourgouris and Benjamin Stevens.
• I'm researching for a blog feature about international hip-hop for an upcoming OS show. I've been reading essays, like Planet Rock, by Robert Chrisgau in the Village Voice, and International Hip-Hop, on Global Village Idiot. I'm working up the courage to cold call MCs who tour the world to get their take on what they've seen and heard.
• Finally, I'm still not sure how I feel about this site's layout. I'm hoping to make comments visible on the front page, and I'd really like to figure out how the columns and alignment work. Please leave any aesthetic or structural advice, and please propose other ideas for discussion.