One great thing about the seminar is that the majority of the participants are very intelligent, open-minded, and present some very interesting points that pick your brain and make you think about a lot of issues related to media, journalism, liberty, economics, and civic engagement from so many different angles. I also love the balance between the intellectual academic stuff and the practical journalism dicussions. I definitely want to write some more about that later on, but for now, some points I thought I’d jot down…
I’ve had people come up to me and say, “to be honest, I don’t know anything about Jordan. Tell me about Jordan.”
What do I say about Jordan in a nutshell?? It’s been very interesting for me to obeserve myself and the pattern of my answers. Sometimes I talk about history, sometimes about all the changes taking place.. sometimes I talk about it within a regional context, and sometimes I just talk about social aspects of things. Of course I can just ask “what do you want to know?” and that makes it slightly easier… but then people come and ask me “so, is there free press in Jordan?”, “so, we hear that Jordan is one of the more liberal countries in the region, how’s that like?”
{Sigh}… there just aren’t clear-cut answers, are there? I mean, I could talk about how there’s a lot more freedom these days than there used to be before… we have privately-owned newspapers, private TV stations, and with the exception of a few clearly defined red lines, it’s not the law that stops you from addressing different issues, is it? I can talk about how most censorahip is self-censorship, remnant of the 1950’s mindset probably. But what about the Press and Publication Law and the whole bunch of laws that are vague enough to turn almost any case against a writer, journalist, or someone plainly expressing an opinion?? Or may be I’m just repeating a line we all use without really researching the governing laws and regulations that we have. If there’s one thing I want to do when I go back home, it’s to better learn the different set of laws, and dig up so-called contradictions or ambiguities. It’s not enough to roughly know that there are many fluid terms in there “you’re free to express your opinion as long as…”
We just had a very rich discussion over lunch with one of the speakers, Professor Ben Berger, who is specialized in areas of political theory, and civic engagement. His sessions tackled some great intellectual questions related to media, television and its role in strengthening or weakening civic engagement. I respect the IHS, because while they are committed to promoting the libertarian line of thought, they do practice what they say, which is to encourage people to think for themselves and engage in constructive debate; they’ve brought speakers with very different political leanings… from the very conservative, to the social democrat, to the hard-core libertarian. I personally believe in principles of social libertarianism (in a country like Jordan though you have an extremely powerful informal institution, which is social norms, that governs such issues and that is much stronger than any possible laws or government intervention related to issues of social liberty)… but when it comes to my feelings about economic libertarianism, I’m not so sure! On paper, it’s a very nice ideology… in practice, existing inequalities are too powerful to ignore.
So, tell me about Jordan…
I personally think it’s an exciting time to be living in Amman, and in Jordan as a whole… and an exciting time to be a journalist there. In many ways, I can’t wait to be back!
