Israeli and Lebanese War Blogs during the 2006 Conflict

Milwaukee.
The next speakers in the blogging session at AoIR 2009 are Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Priscilla Ringrose, whose focus is on war blogging. Such blogging addresses the exceptional communication demands during war situations, and war bloggers in warzones can meet these needs speedily and with authority. This also reflects a continuing shift in the media overall. The focus of this paper is on the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, where western media profiled (English-language) Israeli and Lebanese blogs.

So, the bloggers here belonged to two oppossing, warring nations,and espoused different ideological positions; how were they chosen and what positions do they reflect? What demographics, structural features, thematic, regional, and political positioning do they exhibit? According to which parameters were they selected? The study analysed all posts from 40 blogs (20 Israeli, 20 Lebanese) during the 34-day war in June and August 2006, which were found using search engines, media outlets, and blogs. Blogs had to be based in Lebanon or Israel, had to have at least five posts during the 34 days, had to be in English, had to have at least one hit in the global media, and had to be single- or group-authored rather than blog fora.

This was examined using content analysis using computational linguistic analysis and computational linguistic tools (such as named entity recognisers). The linguistic analysis also distinguishes between grammatical formulations (such as active vs. passive speech), in fact.

Key findings were that the demographics were difficult to assess as many bloggers wanted to remain anonymous; age and gender were difficult to ascertain. Structural features were similar across Israeli and Lebanese blogs; Web 2.0 features such as RSS feeds were widespread. Israeli bloggers wrote lengthier posts, and the average length of posts across both groups was comparable to that of mainstream news reports. Comments were much more frequent in Lebanese than in Israeli posts, and Lebanese posts also tended to have more photos or videos. Certain words appeared more often in one group than in the other (Hezbollah, Iran, terror, media for the Israelis, Syria , children, civilians for the Lebanese). In terms of broader themes, Israelis talked more about infrastructure and security themes, Lebanese more about activism and human suffering, as well as personal themes.

Regional coverage of Israeli bloggers was broader (they talked about a wider range of countries and regions, including Israel, Lebanon, the Arab world, and others), while Lebanese bloggers talked mainly about Lebanon (51%) and Israel (22%). The majority of Israeli as well as Lebanese bloggers were anti-Hezbollah, where such allegiances could be identified); more Lebanese bloggers were also anti-war, while more Israeli bloggers were pro-war. Sentiment towards the Lebanese government could not be identified easily - perhaps a sign of the limited role actually played by the government in the conflict. Israeli blogs spoke frequently about terms such as terrorism, Syria, iran, and similar themes, which also provides an insight into their ideology.

Overall, then, media war blogs were rich in multimodal features, have a fast update range, and focus almost entirely on war-related themes. Out of these, the media favoured anti-Hezbollah blogs.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Israel, Lebanon, blogging, blogs, concept analysis, coverage, war, war blogs
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Israel, Lebanon, blogging, blogs, concept analysis, coverage, war, war blogs