Notes from a distance - Presidential bloggers

While I'm listening to the audio webcast, I post some of my comments here:

Candidate should blog him/herself?

I guess so. Blogs can help them show their human side as a normal person in differenet social roles: husband, father, son, brother, friend, etc. TV can't show these roles or if they do, they look like more of a show-off than a genuine thing.

Blogs vs. Cable TV

Blog are words and TV is image. As an outsider, I see that many people in America can easily be driven by images than words, like most other people in the modern world. Dean didn't have an image, he had lots of words. This is exactly why Al-Jazeera is really frightening: it's using image agianst image.

Political effect of blogs in other countries

Blogs in Iran, I think, are not directly affecting the society, because only 10% of people have Internet access. But it affects some influential refference groups such as journalists, students, and even politicians.

Bloggers running for office

I tried to use my blog as a basis for a kind of symbolic nomination for the parliament's election this year. But the whole election crisis changed the whole game. My goal was to initiate a sort of debate around some very important topics which have never been discusses or even existed in candidate's platforms to show the Iranian politicians and the world what people really want from them.

Some friends and I had plans to launch a website in which ordinary Iranian could announce candidacy and talk about their plans and platforms so we could affect the election days debates and atmosphere by injecting new ideas and plan to the political sphere. But then everything was destroyed by the Gaurdian Council which disqualified almost all reformist candidates and lowered the debate to very basic questions of democracy. We wanted to show the reformists "this is what people care, not your conservative nonsense". But the very reformists were thrown out of the game.

Anyway, I think blogs in Iran, despite the low number of Internet users, are wide-spread and well-known and a popular blogger can enter the politics on the basis of his/her blogosphere credibility and polpularity. Not as the main campagining tool, but as an organizing and networking tool and also as a basis to convinve political groups to put his/her name in their shortlist.