March 14, 2005
 Yesterday at SXSW: a presentation on blogging and censorship, with Hossain Derakhshan, prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger, and Benjamin Walker, radio host and Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow, who just got back from China last week. Hot on the heels of this March 4 New York Times article on censorship of blogs in China, he refuted what he defined as several misconceptions of the western media on how the Internet is being used there.
Misconception 1: We in the west assume that millions of Chinese are searching for information to aid their revolutionary struggles.
Truth: Most Internet users in China are looking for the same thing most Western users are looking for. Porn. Misconception 2: Information from the outside gets blocked at the national level, especially on oppressed movements such as Falun Gong.
Truth: Chinese get flooded with unwanted email about this and a lot of other things, and just like users in the west, they consider it spam.
Misconception 3: There are 30,000 to 50,000 "Internet police" who do nothing but monitor people's email, web surfing, etc.
Truth: This is a number invented by officials for official propaganda missives, aimed at the national media, not Western reporters, who nonetheless take up information ministry press releases as legitimate and use them as source material.
Misconception 4: Only the most tech-sophisticated kids know how to use proxies to get beyond the firewall and onto "banned sites."
Truth: Lots and lots of users regularly use proxies to not only get to more content, but to avoid extra pay-per-service charges. (Although, apparently even this does not manage to evade the highly effective national censoring of porn content.)
Misconception 5: Censorship is all happening at the government level.
Truth: Censorship is more prevalent at the personal level, with bloggers omitting or removing references to certain ideas or issues in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. Service providers in China also must cooperate with the authorities on screening for certain words and phrases and intervening with those who post them, but the active hand of the government with individuals is rare.
According to bloggers Walker interviewed, the Chinese blogosphere is evolving, with bloggers carefully testing the openness of the system. There are different levels of censorship--new tools might help users move towards freer use of blogs for more sensitive topics. For example, on Google China, blogs are starting to rank higher than official web sites on searches about "city reconstruction," a phrase that signifies development in the countryside. It's a significant shift in information resources, that points at the potential for bloggers to reveal more of the truth about life in China to each other.
All very interesting to me -- I've been reserved in my trust in the "blogosphere" to foment social revolution in places like China, where it seems like it was too easy to stop up the pipe -- a view definitely influenced by what I've read in papers like the Times. Walker's POV is that we need to look a lot deeper than what mainstream press is reporting about blogs, the Internet and China.
(Posted by Emily Gertz in Global Culture Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel at 04:11 PM)
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drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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