Monday 7 June 2004

Blogging

In the monthly magazine that comes with my daily newspaper, I read this weekend about the blog of Salam Pax who writes about the life in Iraq before and after the invasion of the American troops. Nowadays he is a kind of celebrity with his blog published in book form and with his own vlog for the BBC. The idea of becoming a celebrity just by writing in your blog is appealing and opens a world of possibilities. Who doesn't want to become a celebrity himself or herself? Guess everyone would sometimes love to be one, but as usual you are confronted with the reality that you will never be one. The same chances apply to winning the lottery or be spotted as the new top-model. The circumstances are quite different though: Salam has the oportunity to tell and show the world how it is to live one day under a dictator and the next under an occupying force. To witness all what happens in Iraq and share that with the world. Although he is not like the average Iraqi, as he was educated in Austria, gay and has Western views of the world. These are things that make his articles so recognizable for us Western people and why we started to love him so much. At the peaks of his popularity he had around 50,000 visitors per day, although it only started to communicate with a friend in Jordania. Now he is too busy with other projects that he rarely writes on his blog anymore and he hasn't seen one of his friends, with whom he started the blog, for months. He might be a celebrity now with nice contracts with f.e. the BBC, but he still lives in occupied territory and has to fear for his life every day as well. Should I envy him?

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