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Citizen Journalism Combating Chinese Censorship
teh_commodore writes to tell us that Breitbart has a look at how Citizen Journalism is shining a whole new light on China. "Recognizing the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be 'purified', and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns. [...] 'One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content,' Pain said."
As far as I can tell, two things control content. First, what the advertisers think, because they're paying for it. Second, whether it will offend anyone who is not socially recognized as marginalized. It would be a great hubris-laden error for us to assume we don't labor under a different set of the same rules that Chinese must follow.
technical writing / development
What would Al Gore do?
Surely the inventor of the internet would have some solution to the communist censorship.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
There is a lot more freedom there than you would think from reading the western press. Sure, they have censorship, but it's bypassable. China is experiencing unimaginable economic growth, and with that will eventually come some degree of increased personal freedom. I have a hard time explaining it to people who have never been there, but there there is much more "general freedom" in countries like china than in the US. Perhaps someone who understands can explain it better than me.
Just how free is the US anyway? Freedom to assemble is regulated, and freedom of speech, although certainly much greater than in china, is not absolute. We can criticize the president and our other government officials all we want, but nothing changes. Let's think about our own country (and change it, if you like) before we go on bitching about something that's not ours.
Okay so this has nothing to do with the US but it made me realise that the whole 'freedom' thing that the conservative Right prides itself on defending and hicks get so worked up over; they care or know jack squat about the actual issues within the country affecting *their* freedom. They've become some sort of buzzwords, then you get to compare the US democracy to dictatorships and call it the bastion of freedom. That's like the average kid looking at the class idiot and thinking himself to be a genius in comparison. Dude, democracies are there all over the place, compare yourself to one of them next time you want to say how cool it is to have it.
Kinda funny, between the malicious Right and the cowardly Left there's not much of a choice...okay getting way too off-topic here.
Between all this talk about China preparing for hacker wars and US getting ready to respond in kind it's too bad the hackers on both sides don't just join forces and target the tracking and censorship stuff. Everybody wins, except the bad guys of course.
When will any U.S. resident file a criminal complaint in U.S. Federal Court against
the world's largest crime syndicate?
Thank you for your help.
Pax,
Kilgore Trout