What exactly is the purpose of the Blogma?
I'm sure everyone has a different answer to that question, but go take a look at what what Ahmed T. has to say and see what you think.
"Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, I don’t see the blogma as an integrated force of opinion."
My response:
I don't know about that, Ahmed, it might just be your impression. Has anyone in the Blogma or anywhere else made such a claim?
The beginnings of the Blogma started out about four years ago with a handful of people visiting each other's blogs back and forth pretty much having fun socializing, discussing various issues of daily life, and thanks to Adel's Blogma aggregator it soon became of sort like a network. The way I see it today is that it hasn't changed much since then, except for a few individuals here and there standing out more as social activists.
Why make it out to be as anything but a social network? Socializing as a basic human need requires freedom of expression. To my knowledge the only times the Blogma came together as a unit (more or less in self-defense) is when that basic human need became endangered. If I remember correctly, the first time that happened was in January last year with the Nichane case, when the editor of Nichane got slapped with a jail sentence for making jokes about religion. The second time it happened was when Morocco blocked YouTube in may last year and then the Fouad Mourtada case recently and now Mohamed Erraji's case.
The value of the Blogma in my view, lies within each individual as a member of the world community with a touch of that famous Moroccan pluralism along with an outgoing personality.....and that includes non-Moroccans as well.
I think for the most part your observations are correct, but I don't agree with the fear factor you bring into the equation. The blogma will never be a unified front on politics, so there is nothing to fear because Moroccans generally prefer minding their own business unless their own personal basic human needs are threatened.