Fiction blogging!

I had no idea such blogs excited! Even though I am fairly new to having my own blog, I am not new to blog reading. I have been reading blogs, mostly weightloss blogs, for 7-8 years now.

I have a lab-mate who is originally from Syria. The few times that we have gone out to lunch as a group, I had an opportunity to talk to her. I was mostly interested on her take on the uprising in the Middle East and North Africa. 

I had a Iranian born coworker, whose parents emigrated to the US when she was a toddler. Even though she said she could not speak Farsi well, but she said she was still very interested in the future of Iran, and so followed Iranian politics. Couple of years ago there was an uprising in Iran too, and she told me what was happening there.

I found it fascinating to get informed about current situation in Syria from my lab-mate to compare it to what I knew from the Iranian uprising!

Almost all my lab-mate's information come from blogs she reads of bloggers living in Syria. I thought that was a major difference between the Iranian bloggers, I had heard about, and the Syrian bloggers, during their uprisings. In Iran as soon as the uprising found momentum, all bloggers had to stop posting, since the internet speed was brought down to almost a halt by the Iranian government. Most my former colleague could find about the happenings in Iran, at that point, was by reading tweets, even those from people inside Iran were sporadic. My former colleague told me that Iranian in Iran coded their information to Iranian outside and those from the outside did the posting.

I actually became very impressed when my lab-mate told me that an American born woman, Amina, who has dual citizenship of US and Syria, has included her sexual orientation in her blog's title, posts under her full name, from Damascus! I thought she is so brave. The horror stories that I read/hear about how women are treated in that part of the world is terrifying even just reading/hearing it. I thought here is this woman, admitting that she is a lesbian, in a country that probably does not tolerate these kind of openness, especially from a woman, and she posts from within the country, when there is an uprising going on, criticizing the oppressed government, and posts under her real name. I was an instant admirer!

Earlier this week, my lab-mate informed me that Amina was abducted in broad daylight. Since then I have been following her story closely. International media had the story on their webpage couple of days ago, but since yesterday, there are doubts about Amina. Neither State Department nor media investigation have been able to find information about someone with that name born in the US. Some have voiced that she is not who she says she is! Even her being in Syria has gone under the question! Earlier in the week there was a picture of her circulating websites, a picture she had sent privately to someone she emailed regularly, pretending it was a picture of her, however later in the week, it is determined that the picture belong to a Croatian woman living in UK!

Here are a few links on the story: CNN,  Guardian, Huffington Post, MSNBC.

My belief is that there is a woman, who has posted at A Gay Girl in Damascus, who is in Syria, where she was abducted on Monday. She might have not been able to post her posts directly, but I want to believe that she has written them all. And they are very much her honest thoughts.

To some extend I think it was smart of her not to give her real name. But then I have been thinking why didn't she just pick a name that would have been obvious it was an alias!

I have been wondering if she pretended that was her real name to make her blog more authentic! Would blog readers pay less attention to anonymous bloggers? Would blog readers pay less attention to bloggers who do not post a picture of themselves? Would blog readers pay less attention to bloggers who do not say where they live or what field they are in?

For me, as a reader, it has not mattered, if I think I know the real name of the blogger, or I know that the name they post under is an alias. It has not mattered if I know where they live, or if I know approximately where they are. It has not mattered if there was a face to go with their posts or not. And it has not mattered if I knew what they do exactly, or if I had guessed what they do.

For me, as a reader, as long as I was interested in the topic they write about, being it weight loss, surviving as a graduate student, entering industry after being in academia for a while, or vice versa, or running; I read their blogs regularly because of the contents of their posts. And as long as the blog I read provide suggestion, and motivational posts that I know I am learning from, I don't care what the bloggers' real names are.

Anyhow, one of the commenter at Amina's blog posted this link: http://bookmaniac.org/painful-doubts-about-amina/! That is where I learned the term fiction blogging!

I am kindof/sortof disturbed about this! I like to believe the little I know about the bloggers I read regularly is true. No one has twisted any blogger's arm to admit their real names, post a picture of themselves, disclose their whereabouts, or their job. Thus if the blogger does not want to say who she is, she is free to do so. Why pretend? As a blog reader I want to read an  honest post, that is all it matters to me!

I have been thinking we have enough deception in the world, I always felt that the world of blogging was truly honest since it was anonymous. But I guess there is anomaly here too!