Josef Assad

One evening as Chiara and I were on a Christmas shopping sprint in Udine, she got an SMS announcing a gathering of Friulano bloggers that evening for aperitivi (for you ignorant non-Italian louses, that's the name given as an excuse to drink wine before dinner). Just after seven, we met up with Il Furlanist and ordered a bottle of vino rosso corposo. The bloggers trickled in over the next half hour, and we ended up with nine persons (not counting the salami-happy canine entourage of one).

I was immediately comfortable with these people as was Chiara, people we had not met before. To my mind, the reason is clear: the Friulano bloggers are a community. I am used to communities arising around a shared interest and I thrive in them. My Linux User Group in Egypt is such a community, and the dynamics clearly map very well: bonhomie, egalitarianism, respect, informality, and the clarity of people who have set up outpost camps in the content-producing side of the media economy.

I think it is partially the result of the way citizen journalism has been pegged by mainstream media and the non-cognoscenti, but as blogging still does not command a very great deal of prestige (as a column in a major newspaper might), and as blogging does not associate of necessity with traditional notions of professionalism (write for a paycheck, have a journalism degree, etc.) it is my perception that the potential for and from blogging is under-appreciated.

Acknowledging that there is a form of value in under-organization which is not entirely appreciated, it is still my inclination to wonder where such a group as the Friulano bloggers would most exert positive change in their environment given a vision for the uniqueness of what they represent, and a collective drive to realize this vision.

This would not represent such an opportunity with other communities as with the Friulano blogging community. These people represent a minority at a time when the concentration of content and media generation is increasing and is increasingly incapable of diversity. Simply, the natural inclination of very large scale media is towards homogeneity which is antipathetic to the preservation of smaller constituencies and ideas which may lack the mass to impose themselves upon the homogeneous center which ends up being called mainstream.

In Italy, the unemployment rate was quoted to me as being seven percent. This is widely held to be a misleading as the rate of underemployment is far higher. This understatement would to my untrained eyes seem to hold also for the stats concerning Friulano speakers; figures published online claim 600,000 speakers but it seems likely that the general level of proficiency is below fluency in reading, writing, and spoken application. Even amongst the Friulano bloggers I have met, not all are proficient. If we hold fast the assertion that the preservation of minority languages is desirable, then the Friulano bloggers have almost incurred unwittingly upon themselves the burden and the privilege of carving a place for their language in a future which is overwhelmingly wired. They are now the primary conduit between their vulnerable culture and the citizen media revolution.