Speaking for themselves - the culture of blogging

Blogs offered a window into mainly middle-class segments of societies rarely examined in the West. What does a Saudi Arabian male think about his country's adherence to Wahhabism? How does the average China web user cope with multinational-assisted filtering? What is Cuba's likely future after Fidel Castro?

These are just a few of the issues that blogs have helped to elucidate.

My on-the-ground investigation of the blogging revolution and its influence on the relationship between the West and the rest took me to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. In these countries I met writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians and journalists.

The subjects we discussed included the role of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft in helping repressive regimes censor the internet.

The results were surprising. As one blogger told me in Tehran: "Most of the people (I know are) in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution." I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.

Vocal activism was the exception, not the norm. Take China. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the vast majority of China's web users - who number more than 250 million, the largest online community in the world - expressed support for Beijing managing or controlling the internet. A book editor in Shanghai explained to me that online filtering didn't bother many Chinese, given that 99 per cent of blogs discussed food and daily life. He thought that most citizens questioned the sincerity of leaders who talked about "democracy with Chinese characteristics". "Is China ready for free elections?" he asked sceptically.

Despite these realities, during the past decade there has been a steady increase in awareness about political rights, principally because of satellite television and the internet.

China's leading video-sharing site, Tudou (which means couch potato), is reportedly bigger than YouTube, with more than one petabyte of daily data transfers. Tudou founder Gary Wang explains that officials phone in several times a week to demand the removal from the site of films they consider suspect. Wang is philosophical. Change is coming but it will take time. Political reform isn't a priority for most citizens. Even though he spent years living in France and the US, Wang resents questions about "oppressive censorship" from Western reporters. "They seem to pity us," he says.

Earlier this year, most Chinese bloggers reacted with outrage at what they perceived to be anti-Beijing coverage in the Western media of the pro-Tibet protests in Lhasa and the troubled Olympic torch relay. "For a long time now," one of them wrote, "certain Western media, best represented by CNN and BBC, in the name of press freedom, have been unscrupulously slandering and defaming developing nations".

I heard repeatedly during my visit to China, usually after a tirade against foreign journalists who rarely travel beyond Beijing, that satisfaction with the Communist Party regime is strong and growing. This doesn't mean the Chinese endorse authoritarian methods. Rather, it means incremental change and battles against corruption are considered preferable to Western-style capitalism.

A separate global Pew Research Centre study conducted this year found 86 per cent of Chinese were happy with their country's direction, double the 2002 figure. In comparison, only 23 per cent of Americans surveyed thought their nation was heading the right way.

Blogger Mica Yushu told me in Shanghai that most of her middle-class friends didn't crave political change. "We use the internet mostly for entertainment, sharing information, earning money or other fun," she said. The sight of darkened internet cafes across the country was something to behold, with thousands of users gaming, watching downloaded films and soft-core pornography, blogging and instant messaging. Politics seemed the furthest thing from these monitored minds.