Interesting article in the Washington Post about bloggers in Israel and Lebanon communicating with each other during the recent war -- often communicating for the first time ever with someone in the other country:
The Lebanese government forbids its citizens contact with Israelis. But keeping a lid on the Internet is a bit like trying to shovel sand with a sieve. And in the midst of war, scouring online for views from the other side has been one way for Lebanese and Israelis to alleviate the terrible sense of the impotence of standing by as their countries bled. Thousands of people, often posting in English, seem compelled to try to make some sense of the chaos -- or, through personal narratives, to help debunk stereotypes and misperceptions.Blogging seemed to helped some citizens in both countries understand that there were actually human beings on the other side.
"Bloggers from both sides of the border . . . have been providing live updates, commenting on one another's blogs and sometimes linking to posts by bloggers on the other side of the border," wrote Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli blogger and journalist, on her site On the Face six days into the war. "Will this turn out to be the first time that residents of 'enemy' countries engaged in an ongoing conversation while missiles were falling?"
The war, paradoxically, provided the common ground, and blogging -- a roughly three-year-old medium unavailable in previous conflicts -- offered the space for it.
