I am considering writing a paper on the Danish cartoons, and I was curious how many people were talking about it in the blogosphere. Looking at the graph, it isn’t hard to figure out when the incident took place.

I am interested in how incidents over taboos like the Danish cartoons do not just make social and cultural boundaries more rigid (I mean, yes, the Muslims and non-Muslims could barely see eye to eye on this matter), but at the same time, it also offers us an opportunity to renegotiate these very boundaries. Especially with the advent of the internet, it is now possible for citizens to directly talk and engage with each other, adding a much richer picture to the otherwise more simplistic picture the mainstream media provides us with, suggesting we are perhaps on our way to a truly global dialogue. Am I naive? I prefer idealistic.

Starting points for exploration:
Global Voices posts on the Danish cartoons and Bridge the Gap in Blogspace – a blog dedicated to cultivating a cross-cultural (trans-cultural?) dialogue.

I see this kind of initiative as a great way to countering some of the less democratizing aspects of the web: first, the ‘Daily Me’ as suggested by Prof. Cass Sunstein: the idea that we end up only reading those websites that conform to our worldview, because the internet is so customizable, and second, the power law distribution as suggested by Prof. Clay Shirky: the idea that we end up only reading those websites that everybody else keeps linking to, or in terms of blogs, the so-called A-list bloggers.

In short: there are so many interesting blogs out there! Why keep reading the same ones over and over again?

PS: I was listed as one of her five blogs for BlogDay last year, by Qadira.