After a weeklong tour to Seoul, South Korea, I am happily back to Nepal. And, now I find time to share the experience of talking about blogging as a panelist in one of the many sessions during the Asia 21 Young Leaders Summit at the Shilla Hotel.
Along with me, Enda Nasution of Indonesia, Dr. Awab Ali of Pakistan, Scarlett Li of China and Lam Oi-Wan of Hong Kong were the panelists of the session – Citizen’s Media Revolution moderated by an Asia 21 Fellow Joshua Ramo.
As I was first to go, I talked about how I started blogging and how is the Nepali blogosphere right now before going into what a blogging and citizen’s media is all about. Ali told about his experience with the Donate the Dollar and the government blocking of blogspot.com while Oi-Wan went with the her experience in Hong Kong.
Li was critical about Chinese blogosphere much to dismay to me and Ali and said Chinese blogging holds very little value in China.
Ali was much optimistic about blogging and said that the quickness of the blogging would one day replace the newspapers. I disagreed with him and said that it may change the role of newspaper but not going to replace it. We had a brief talk about it after the session too, and I think he agreed with my idea (well, probably I was trying to be optimistic about my professional career as a journalist).
The final question was about the creditability of blogs and I answered that saying that readers have to understand that blogs are written by an individual subject of personal biases.
I always believed that objectivity is itself subjective (I will tell you why sometime soon in another post) and that there is nothing called absolute truth.
Meanwhile, here are the entries I wrote for the official Asia 21 Young Leaders Summit blog – First Impression in Last Impression (Day I), A Fish in A Bowl (Day II) and Yeah! Yeah!! Yeah!!! (Day III).
