For the Love of Blogging: How Jordan Built an Online Public Square
In the mid-2000s, a small circle of Jordanian bloggers created one of the Arab world's liveliest online communities, years before social media made such spaces commonplace.
Long before the Arab uprisings made "social media revolution" a cliché, Jordan was home to one of the region's most active blogging communities. In the mid-2000s, a few hundred Jordanian writers, most of them young, urban and bilingual, used blogs to argue about politics, culture, religion, traffic and the price of bread.
Jordan Planet
At the centre of the scene was Jordan Planet, an aggregator that collected posts from Jordanian blogs in one place. It turned scattered personal sites into something closer to a public square. Readers could follow debates across dozens of blogs, and writers could find an audience beyond their friends. The Jordanian press noticed. Newspaper articles about the phenomenon, with titles celebrating the love of blogging, introduced it to a wider public.
What they wrote about
Jordanian bloggers covered subjects the mainstream media often treated cautiously:
- Politics and reform, including elections, corruption and the limits of free expression;
- Identity, including relations between Jordanians of Palestinian and East Bank origin;
- Social issues, from women's rights and honour crimes to unemployment and emigration;
- Everyday life in Amman, with its humour, frustrations and cultural life.
Some of the community's founders went on to create lasting independent media projects. Bloggers also became a talent pool for journalism, advocacy and the start-up sector.
After the blogs
The blogging era faded as Facebook and Twitter took over, and as Jordan tightened laws on online speech. Registration requirements for news websites, followed by cybercrime legislation, made online criticism riskier.
The legacy remains. Jordan's early bloggers showed that there was demand in the Arab world for independent, argumentative, personal writing about public life. They also showed that governments would eventually move to regulate that space. Both lessons would become familiar across the region after 2011.