The Keyboard Warriors

I have a daily ritual these days. I tend to log onto two forums whenever I can and read what people are posting. These two forums are bahrainforums.com and fajrbh.com, and they represent two opposite views of what is happening in Bahrain. Sometimes it’s very informative and sometimes it just makes me want to punch the screen of my laptop. I do talk about both of them, as I'm neither with this nor with that one. I try to be a neutral in a time when there is no such thing. In this post I would like to convey what I have noticed and observed from months of closely watching the cyber space battles take place for the hearts and minds of confused Bahrainis.

They say that the Egyptian revolution started out with a facebook event invitation or something like that, and it grew to cover the millions of accounts of Egyptians until. It wasn’t so far ago that we saw the first signs of using facebook and twitter to fuel a revolution as what had happened earlier in Iran. All of this brings to my memory the old song by the late Gil Scott-Heron "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Of course the song's name should not fool you as it speaks about changing what is in your skull before you think of making your life better, but nevertheless even after more than 40 years since that song came along, and with so much technological advances in the field of communication we still can see that there is no such thing as a "fashionable revolution", and that a revolution that is not involving everyone is not a revolution at all. The use of social media is a must part in our daily life these days; I don’t think there are many here in Bahrain who do not have a facebook and/or twitter account. Ok now that we have settled that point we can safely go to the other more interesting one, which is how people have been fighting on those social media networks. I was blown out of the water reading some of the comments that people are so happy to write with their own fingers aiming at another human being. Sometimes I feel that the internet is a sort of a channel to let some steam off, but this is beyond steam, because if half of the comments on facebook and twitter were true then I would not be surprised to see fighting on every street in Bahrain. But funny enough it's a lot more quieter on the real world. When did people get so scared of saying what they have in their minds? Why do people lie so much on the internet? Why are people so violent on the internet? I do not expect a direct and clear answer to these questions, but they are nowadays considered to be facts of life. Do you know what is the major efforts people are doing on the internet to help heal this country? By "liking" and "disliking" a page on facebook, oh and they actually call these concentrated efforts "battles" where one side would celebrate all night long over closing a facebook page that belongs to the opposite side. "Reporting" someone's twitter account is another weapon in the glorious arsenal of those who are so brave to fight for their cause.

How hard is it to use the internet to a more noble cause. How stupid it is to research on the internet how to rebuild a shattered community. On the other hand God will reward you if you send a message to all your contacts urging them to report a page or twitter account and show the world that we are right and the other is always wrong or that there is no other in the first place. Arabs sure do know how to abuse technology.

One thing should be said about something I have noticed on my daily scanning of the internet is that this is an Apache  

 And this is an Apache

And we got neither here in Bahrain.