The Manicou Report

Written on February 15, 2007 – 11:43 am | by Mani |

The following is the story about blogging in T&T written by Kayode James that ran in the Sunday Guardian (Sunday Vibe, to be exact) on February 11th, 2007 on pages 55 & 57. In some parts the formatting may be a little messed up because it was e-mailed, so bear with me.

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As crime-driven tension hits an all-time high…

T&T expresses itself online

KAYODE JAMES

In one of his most recent posts, Mani, the webmaster of The Manicou Report, questioned the motives of those responsible for the brutal murder of Clive and Denise Commissiong.

“Who can look a feeble, wrinkled old couple in their
eyes and then strike them down with a crowbar?
Do I eat next to them in the fast food outlet? Do I
sit next to them in a maxi? How do I know it’s them?”

Driven by the news, The Manicou Report (www.themanicoureport.com) delivers regular commentary on T&T current affairs, and is one of the most popular examples of the country’s ever-expanding blogosphere.

Personal Web sites run by Trinbagonians both at home and abroad are nothing new, but the explosion in violent crime of recent years has had a significant influence on the tone of content posted by T&T’s online community. More and more Trinbagonians are expressing their hopes and fears online, creating a Web-based voice that informs international opinion of this country.

The Sunday Guardian interviewed several bloggers and active members of the online community to get their words on the subject.

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A sure-fire way of making your voice heard Mani, the 30-year-old student who runs The Manicou Report, described his site as “a calming release.”

“I think my family was growing tired of listening to me whenever I had something to say about the state of T&T, so I guess my blog was a way for me to find a new audience,” he joked. “Honestly, I started blogging because I wanted an avenue to voice my opinions on happenings in T&T. It’s fine to write a letter to a newspaper editor or call in to a radio programme, but then you have to compete with clogged phone lines and scores of equally well-written and equally important letters vying for a space in the paper. So blogging is a sure-fire way of saying what I wanted and doing it on my terms.”

Mani has been heartened by the feedback he regularly receives on the site.

“Every blogger starts off feeling like he’s talking to himself, but eventually the (readers) comments and the readership grows into a little community of its own,” he said. “The best part of writing a post is getting feedback and e-mail. It’s just as great a reward to see that scores of people will come back every day to see if you have written something.”

He admitted, however, that blogging had become more than just an enjoyable hobby for him.

“Although it’s been rewarding, it’s also been very demanding in that I have to at least try to be
entertaining every time I write. I also have to blog regularly. No one likes coming to a blog that hasn’t been updated in a week,” he said.

Mani initially left his personal life out of the blog, but modified his format after he saw positive
responses to personal viewpoints.

“A blogger in the true sense of the word doesn’t necessarily have to represent anyone save himself. There is no one else who can say for you what you can say for yourself. By representing himself or herself, however, the blogger inadvertently represents any number of people who may share the same likes, dislikes, hobbies, views, or interests,” he said.

More Bloggers
In emphasising the importance of T&T bloggers, Mani said that there has never been a better time for bloggers to exist.

“Bloggers all over the world have been capable of some very remarkable things and it should be no different here,” he said.

Web developer Nigel Mahabir, who catalogues and categorises locally run Web sites on
TTWebdirectory.com, is no stranger to the insights offered by T&T’s online community.

“The (T&T) blog is the voice of the unheard man or woman. The blogger is usually intelligent and
articulate, and thinks against the flow of the general public. Bloggers tend to respond to other points of view without the censorship or direction of the mainstream media,” he said.

Mahabir, who also records demographic statistics of bloggers, said that most T&T bloggers fall into the 18-35 age group and middle income bracket.

“The rich don’t have an opinion or they don’t care. The poor don’t have such consistent or regular access to the Internet, and wouldn’t dedicate their time to a blog,” he said.

Mahabir said, however, that most sites are short-term endeavours.

“Blogging requires great dedication, and then after you put out all that time and energy, the amount of people who read your work is so small,” he said. “As quickly as sites go up, they go back down. Most sites don’t last a year, and forum memberships dissipate.”

A Grim List
“Maribunta,” an advertising employee who runs TT Murders (ttmurders.blogspot.com), revealed in an interview with the Sunday Guardian that his blog is a frustrated response to the country’s murder rate.

Each post in the frequently updated site contains basic information (and pictures, when available) about the country’s latest murder victims, as well as links to relevant online news stories.

The blog is not the first of its kind. Other short-lived sites attempted to highlight the country’s out-of-hand social ills, but often utilised overtly political and widely offensive viewpoints to convey their messages. TTMurders is generally devoid of opinions or commentary, but still stands clearly as a scathing indictment on the authorities and a constant, haunting reminder of the wages of an unchecked crime rate.

“I’m as fearful and fed up as the next person is with crime, and becoming more and more angry with the government’s blasé hopeless response to it,” he said. He maintains the blog in an effort “to keep our murders in a more visible light both locally and internationally.”

“I’m hoping that if someone comes upon the blog and scans it through, they’ll be concerned, angry, or frustrated enough to pressure authorities to take action,” he said.

Maribunta is also peeved with what he described as the media’s lack of follow up when reporting murder cases, and a similar lack of investigation into unidentified bodies.

He referred to his blog as an evolving project, and is currently developing plans for its expansion and promotion.

The response so far has been encouraging. He confessed, however, that maintaining the blog has affected him more than he expected it to. “Because I read and reread most of the articles, the victims become more tangible and more personal than a statistic,” he said.

Not All Positive
Not all Trinbagonian bloggers have been inspired to post constructive or insightful content in response to the crime situation.

“The ***** ******”(I refuse to mention or link to that site here on this blog. In the paper edition, Kayode didn’t give the URL either as he did with the other sites mentioned.), a disgruntled T&T expatriate who claims to “tell it like it is”, uses his site as a venomous, often disturbing public repository for generally racist commentary on local news stories.

The ****** is one of a growing number of overt racists who have infiltrated the network of blogs, forums, and websites that make up T&T’s own online community.

The individuals are often politically vocal, come from all sides of the ethnic divide, and revel in the anonymity that the Internet affords them.

Mahabir was unaware of the recently-launched site, but acknowledged the existence of racist sentiments among some T&T web users.

“Racism is always an issue online. The question is how far you can go without your website being taken down,” said Mahabir. He said that web journal providers like Blogger have strict hate speech rules, but can’t read between the lines to censor subtly racist commentary.

Online Racism
Still, Mahabir does not believe that online racism has become a significant issue on the T&T blogosphere.

“(But) I expect it to get worse during an election year,” he said.

Richard Jobity, a strategic planning analyst who heads the T&T Linux Users Group, noted that the online community, with all its positive and negative characteristics, is simply a microcosm of its offline counterpart.

“It’s just an expression of the racism that’s there and that has been there for generations. The only difference online is that it’s more visible and more crude,” he said.

“Too much racism can kill a community. It’s an extremely emotive topic and it can degrade a serious discussion into name-calling. Even though it has different sensitivities, the web is just a reflection of society.”

I don’t feel obligated to write about it all the time Georgia Popplewell’s “Caribbean Free Radio” website (www.caribbeanfreeradio.com) has become a premiere destination for T&T blog readers.

The site offers audio podcasts, a photo journal, and a blog. Popplewell, an established writer and cultural critic, said that she was excited by “citizen media” aspect of blogging.

“For me personally, it was also a way of adding to the information about the Caribbean region available on the Internet,” she said.

“I like to describe it as being ‘how I live and what I do’…providing a personal perspective on the Caribbean region.”

Popplewell is also one of the few Caribbean bloggers whose work has become more than just a hobby.

Through her work at Caribbean Free Radio, Popplewell became heavily involved in the region’s online professional network and was eventually hired as the co-managing editor, Caribbean regional editor, and podcast editor at Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonline.com, an online magazine that monitors and reports on world events through the perspectives of bloggers.

Unlike Mani, Popplewell believes that there’s less potential for blogs to play a large role in shaping public opinion, due mostly to a fairly low level of Internet penetration, and a generally trusting relationship between the mainstream media and the public.

As an editor with Global Voices, Popplewell said that she had not seen much of an increase in social commentary from more casual, personal bloggers.

The Caribbean Free Radio blog itself is not as focused on the crime situation as TTMurders or The Manicou Report, but Popplewell has commented on the crisis in the past.

She was disheartened when her posts on the Sean Luke murder generated depressed, disturbed responses from her readership, and has since tried to avoid the issue.

“I’ll talk about our social situation if I feel like it, but I don’t feel an obligation to talk about it all the time… or to talk about (any one thing) all the time.

That’s one of the luxuries that being a blogger affords me,” she said.

Most of my readers are outside the region. In describing the positive feedback that her blog has
received, Popplewell said that she suspected that most of her readers are from non-Caribbean countries.

Manicou noted a similarly large segment of foreign readers on his site, and the observation emphasized the prominence of foreign-based Trinbagonians on.

Mahabir described the foreign-based prominence as a manifestation of what many Trinidadians want. “They want to be overseas but enjoy the culture they grew up in. They escape the negatives of Trinidad while accessing the positives,” he said.

He said that although foreigners and expatriates generally use online newspapers as their primary source of information on T&T, blogs had become a major source for cultural insights and minute details not covered by the mainstream media.

“The coverage is definitely an emotional response as compared to the mainstream media’s straight facts. Bloggers will talk about news stories that affect them personally.”

Popplewell doubts, however, that the limited demographic of the blogging community prevents it from being truly representative of T&T.

“At the end of the day blogging is simply a way of delivering information, just one that’s accessible to many more people,” she said.

“It still depends on what you say and how you say it.”