There’s a lot of overlap between this blog and my Facebook page. Some of the posts here are notes on my Facebook profile, and some of the links on the side are shared items there, too.

When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking about how I was going to share the pictures and the stories I was collecting, I knew that how I presented the information would hinge on where I presented it. It was all very neat in my head: barring the occasional image that had minimal backstory, I would put nothing on Flickr, runltw would be where I put up the more personal/literary, less overtly political pieces; Facebook albums would be where I put up the “casual” collections of pictures; and I was going to create a minisite for a more formal showcase. Lethargy and time’s passing have made each of those projects a little more difficult to carry out separately from each other, but for the most part I intend to stick to that plan.

Some of the articles I’ve written recently have garnered responses so different in their respective spaces that it’s underscored the value of thinking about how different specific spaces on the Internet are from each other. The first example of this is the article Noaman and I wrote, “The War in Sri Lanka and the Left in Toronto.” I can’t speak for Noaman, but I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the response to that article would be — both from Tamil youth and non-Tamil activists. If we’d restricted ourselves to just our blogs, it wouldn’t have reached many people all. And if we’d restricted ourselves to getting it published in The Bullet, it wouldn’t have reached people outside academia. What was key was that we posted it on Facebook. Suddenly we were getting responses from young people, primarily young Tamil people, who were frustrated by the reductiveness of both the pro-Tiger groups and the uncritical mainstream leftists who had conflated resistance against Sri Lankan state violence government with support for the LTTE. Though I’d had many conversations with people prior to publishing that article that had made clear to me that my anxieties about the conflict weren’t unique or radical, it was still important to me that I had those politics confirmed by others invested in the conflict, especially those I didn’t know. I needed the validation, however self-absorbed it might be of me to admit that weakness.

Given the value of Facebook, then, from a strategic perspective, posting on the blog seems almost redundant. But what’s interesting is that the post I wrote about my parents, “Muslim Career Women (And Their Husbands),” attracted even more readers than the article on the war in Sri Lanka did. Continue reading this entry »