Google in China - The Big Disconnect

wile_e_wonka writes "The NY Times (registration required) has an article about Google's history in China (beginning way before this whole censorship thing). The article, among other things, talks about of Google's head of operations in China, and his goals for the company there. From the article: 'Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'"

Comments

liberated

[joe 155]

I like the way he talks about the liberating power of technology... so long as you don't want to discuss anything that the government doesn't agree with... or want to find out what happened in Tianamen square, or if you want to have unrestricted access to other webpages. But appart from that it does makes people completely free, free as a (caged) bird

Re:liberated

[Tackhead]

> I like the way he talks about the liberating power of technology... so long as you don't want to discuss anything that the government doesn't agree with... or want to find out what happened in Tianamen square, or if you want to have unrestricted access to other webpages. But apart from that it does makes people completely free, free as a (caged) bird

Well sure, but liberation.google.com is still just at the invite-only beta stage.

Registration Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23googl e.html?ex=1303444800&en=972002761056363f&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland&emc=rss

How the Internet will REALLY be used in China

[skitheboat]

All lofty stuff in the article about getting "fully educated"... but in reality (as seen in the US and other places), I can envision one billion Chinese reading Slashdot, gambling online, surfing for porn, and watching paint dry

Yeah that's what'll happen.

[merlin_jim]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'

Cause, you know, just look at the US - Internet access for the past 10 years has turned the current crop of high schoolers into a bunch of geniuses, all just itching to discover antigravity or write a new sociopolitical theory that eliminates inflation and market swings...

lol of course on the other hand my little brother of 14 is writing better games than I was at 18...

Getting around Chinas Firewall

[bigwavejas]

Unfortunately I think a lot of what's seen in China is going to be censored, even if there are ways to get around their firewall (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4496163.s tm). I think most people aren't technically savvy enough or too lazy to bother searching for ways to beat the system, but there are those who will (even if its just a handful) and one can only hope the information will disseminate to the average person in China.

Hm, let's see...

[greenguy]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves

That sounds great... until you think it through. Besides connected villages, this would also requires students who have...

1. Advanced English, including technical vocabulary.
2. A high-school education. A *good* high-school education.
3. Reliable power and Internet connections.
4. Consistent and extensive access to a computer hooked up to the net. A printer might be nice, too.
5. Considerable time to study.
6. Exceptional levels of self-motivation.
7. No problems with the government, which will inevitably monitor their activities.
8. No problems with family, which might or might not think this is a good use of one's time.
9. Etc.

I'm all about the rural poor becoming educated in China and everywhere, but it's going to take more than access to Google to do it.

Google Freedom 2.0

[digitaldc]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.

But what good is an ivy-league education if you can't freely express your ideas?

"fully educate themselves."

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if those students in China will be able to fully educate themselves about the events of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. I don't mean that they'll only learn about the Communist Party's history of the event, which differs with almost every other account including the eyewitnesses there. But I wonder if they'll be permitted to learn about the thousands of unarmed people that were shot and killed, the Tank Man, and the executions and jailings of the protestors.

If not, then these students won't be fully educated at all.

Re: "fully educate themselves."

[sydneyfong]

Yes.

I am technically from China as well (Hong Kong) as well, although I have never grown up in any "communist state" (whatever that means).

Most people criticing China's "human rights" problems don't stick to facts, but to proganda by the western media that is almost twenty years old. They like to believe that "my country is better than yours", despite the fact that this is becoming more and more doubtful.

Let me say this: nobody cares about people in China. All they care about is that "American values are better than Chinese values (and you should adopt them at whatever cost, even if it means that you overthrow your own government)". I mean, if anyone really takes a serious look at what actually happens in China, I'm sure they'll suddenly find that their dicks weren't as long as they previously thought.

PS: Of course, there are those who really do care. But those people typically tackle the issue realistically instead of suggesting an overthrow of the CCP or something to that effect.

Pipe Dream

[Zebra_X]

The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves

"Fully Educate Themselves". Not likely. For one, the courses are in english. Two, almost all of the courses on M.I.T.'s Open Courseware site require the purchase of multiple $100+ text books. In addition there is no feedback when following the courses. Unless you understand *how* to learn its very difficult to use these courses effectively.

Those are issues though, that only come to pass when "all the villiages are connected" and by definition reliably powered (which they are not). Furthermore, access is great - however the very nature of learning, long periods of reading, problem solving require that those wishing to learn have a dedicated console, or computer to utilize.

I'm all for educating the masses, I just think that running around spouting this "vision" is disingenuous.

Corrupted Database Gives False Sense of Knowledge

[rewinn]

Deliberate data corruption, such as censorship, can give users the illusion that they are well informed when the data permitted through appears authoritative. Ponder, for example, the confidence one felt upon reading cherry-picked information about Iraq; Judy Miller may well have thought she was better informed when in fact she was less informed.

How, then, can the data corruption be exposed, and who is motivated to do it?

One approach is maximizing the number of links to censored pages, to alert the censored individual that their data is corrupt. However there must be more effective techniques.

Perhaps more important, there must be a way to motivate individuals to fix this data corruption; forgive me for being cynical, but if there were a way to profit from the repair, that would be a powerful motivator.

that's a ling distance . . .

[dweebzilla]

"students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T."

Will they also get other "ideas" from that coursework ... Shanghai is a long way to go to retrieve the Caltech Cannon.