Antony explains why he wrote the book:

Reading an advance copy, I was impressed with the deeply humanist underpinnings of his arguments about the vexed relationships between bloggers and the repressive regimes they live (and write) under in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Egypt, and China.

I met Antony at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest along with others active in the global blogging community; what all of the information activists I met there—many who blog anonymously or pseudonymously—share with the bloggers profiled in this new book is the sense that their thoughts, loves, fears, and concerns are valid and important to publish freely no matter whether the subject matter is politics or…Dire Straits (you’ll have to read the book).

Many, like Antony, are prolific bloggers. To follow the conversations, I like the Global Voices daily digest, an excellent way to find voices from all over the world.

Congratulations, Antony—

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About a week ago, I was sitting in a large room in Budapest’s Novotel Centrum, stunned.

Like the fireworks I watched Friday night from a rooftop at George Washington University in D.C. with my good friend and fabulous cook Laura Hertzfeld (display below; thanks, as always, L),

my understanding of global blogging conversations was being exploded as I listened to fiery bursts from the mouths of impassioned activists and advocates from around the world.

I was attending the 2008 Global Voices Summit, a project that my current employer, the Knight Foundation, funds through a contest called the News Challenge for new ideas in local news delivery.

Global Voices cofounder Ethan Zuckerman (find his thoughtful blog posts here) confirmed my sense that was a conference to be experienced in person (though you can watch the conference video archive and read the liveblogs), echoing what my friend David Sasaki, who leads a project called Rising Voices within Global Voices, had told me about the importance of showing up for this community gathering (click the image from David’s Flickr stream below for more of his wonderful photography).

A matrix of interlocking projects, Global Voices and its associated efforts aggregate blog entries, often with images and video, from networks of authors, some of whom are expatriate bloggers, many of whom are exclusive to Global Voices.

With my academic literary background, I used to associate ‘expatriate authors’ with moveable European feasts and endless mountains and rivers of the twentieth century. I now think of individuals like the Global Voices Summit speakers who chronicle events in areas other than where they reside—in some cases because they were imprisoned or their safety endangered in those regions.

What was once a label for American authors registering moral protests, usually of preference rather than imperative, ‘expatriate’ bloggers take on a very real cosmopolitan ownership of their grassroots reports that, as Ethan suggested at the summit referencing the Reverend Wright incident in the Obama campaign, target specific groups and spread beyond intended geographic and temporal audiences into texts referenced by transnational communities of practice.

To draw this down to a personal level, I’m thinking about the spidering effects of online interactions right now in my dissertation research on local networks of food, currency, and shelter.

Two months ago I moved to Miami, and I now happily build online community during the day for Knight Foundation and reside in a magic cottage.

What I didn’t realize when accepting the job was that my new locale is a ‘food desert’ as far as local produce.

Grown to be exported, sitting on docks and hangars beside imported organic vegetables from Mexico and South America (that the Whole Foods franchise near me stickers ‘local’), it seems sustenance of the vegetal varieties easily crosses borders and food miles pile up in a nonsensical mad tea party ride of whirling exchange (a model that needs to be discarded like the statues deposited in Budapest’s social Disneyland, Szoborpark, that I visited recently with author and blogger Antony Loewenstein):

Intended consumption for these foodstuffs remains far from production areas, and the creators, disenfranchised expatriate farmers, we might say, have little ties with the communities where their greens go.

With my beloved local food culture gone missing, a deep sense of longing has emerged for the farmers’ markets that brightened my weekend mornings for the past five or so years.

This past Saturday, I felt buoyant as I returned to the Charlottesville, Virginia farmers’ market, to sellers I know and farms I continue to support.

Freshly dug potatoes and berries I’d never seen before, wine berries, from Planet Diversified;

the first tomatoes from Radical Roots;

peaches and blackberries that wouldn’t last the day

(we shared them at an afternoon picnic)

all reminded me of the ephemeral nature of consumption, be it literal and from the soil or juicy words from those who work around tenuous low-bandwidth connections.

Like the charcoal grill Laura and I veered in and out of alleys in Mt. Pleasant to pick up from grillmaster Cameron this weekend,

we are all, perhaps, chasing down/modifying online tools upon which to set our prose, flip our marinated arguments beside other composed lines of thought.

As we walked back toward Laura’s apartment at the end of a long day of celebrating, I stopped to watch teenagers setting off sparklers between cars.

Far from the bombastic anthems and expensive fireworks we had gaped at earlier, this DIY model is the one I intend to explore—come back for more kthread on how community cred is quietly replacing trumpeted transactions and svelte intervention models are illuminating packets of change…

Leave a comment after the jump–

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