Jordan Watch : My Blogging Schizophrenia

Throught last year I was faced with a continuous internal struggle for identity and interests, and that was very evident in one platform, my blogging outlets.

I have an academic degree in environmental science holding an MsC from the University of Jordan since 1996. I am passionate about environmental issues and I guess I have crafted myself a good career and impact. I have workd with projects with the World Bank, UNDP, UNEP and IUCN in Jordan. Worked with NGOs, communities, research centers and many other activities. I have published 6 books on environment and more than 20 assessment and policy and technical reports and developed strategic plans for some national environmental NGOs.

In addition to that I have a profound interest in the common issues related to our society with emphasis on politics, media, economics, democracy, culture and development issues. This makes me really didvided between two realms of interest.

In order to provide good products in writings and in actual implementation I need to be updated and knowledgeable on every detail in my environmental career and to be able to follow the updates on political and economic issues to provide decent points of view in my newspaper and blog articles.

This has been exhausting to my mind and time. I thought about this schizophrenia maybe 5 nights a week for the past two months. I regret that I am not updating myself on environmenatl issues to the level I want due to time given to other issues and then I discover that some of my articles and posts are shallow due to the inappropriate research I have done.

I have created my own environmental blog one month after this one. It is Arabic in scope while Jordan Watch is specific to Jordan with some Arab views according to events. This is an indication of schizophrenia and it has been evident in the way of reactions I get from readers.

Environment is a principle that brings people together. My environmental blog is based on information and updates. Visited by 70,000 people this year my environmental blog has only 20 comments! It means that visitors come and read and mybe benefit and do not see a need to comment. In this blog the posts are more provocative and controversial and there are more than 2000 comments in the English and Arabic blogs.

Politics usually puts people on a colision course. My own political ideas are controversial and hard to sell and I get a lot of critical comments that sometimes caused a rift between me and my visitors which I do not like but have to do (I will write about this later as well).

I would rather love to integrate my two states of mind together and I think this can be done by reducing controversial political content and focusing on issues that link environment to other common interests like social development and economy and culture.

By the necessity of facing up my schizphrenia and making sure that my posts are of good quality there will be less politics in Jordan watch starting now. More to be ezplained in the next post.