This past Friday, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. They discussed how many non-Western bloggers have been arrested and suppressed by government institutions of their respective countries just because they pose a threat to the status quo:
Many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda... Blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put. (Democracy Now!)
What is most troublesome, however, is that Google, Yahoo! and others have actually complied with these governments to achieve the goal of suppressing the coverage bloggers offer:
With the assistance of Western multinationals like Yahoo!, who have actually given information to the regime to assist these people being put in jail. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, other security firms, internet firms, have sadly and shamefully been involved in these kind of complicity acts. And... one of the things I discuss in the book is to actually have more transparency about how those guys actually operate in those kind of countries. (Democracy Now!)
Google, Microsoft, etc. may be multinational, but they're still US-based companies. One should expect them to uphold in their international dealings certain core rights and values that define the United States: the right to free speech, the right to dissent, and civil disobedience. The fact that Google and Microsoft's market extends to nations whose regimes currently ignore such values and violate such rights doesn't entail that we should tolerate Google and Microsoft's current "when in Rome" attitude. These values and rights aren't bound by time, place and circumstance. They are supposed to apply universally. Hence any compliance with regimes whose interest is to suppress civil disobedience and dissent should be treated for what it is: compromise. Of course, such compromise is unsurprising in a world where market values have come to trump or altogether displace democratic and moral values; where nations, communities, and the people who inhibit them are seen as a mere means to profit rather than invaluable ends in themselves.
UPDATE: Check out this BBC news story about two Burmese bloggers who were arrested within the past year and recently received the 'cyber-dissent award.' Also, check out the Committee to Protect Bloggers. They've got a lot of coverage dealing with bloggers who were arrested for speaking out.
The Suppression of Online Journalism by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
I had recently read about this. It's a genuine atrocity. It shows you the power of blogging. Even in this country I think blogs are the best way to get beyond the corporate run and funded media; it's an antidote to Rupert Murdoch.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course it's not surprise that greedy corporations assist tyrannical governments in imprisoning bloggers. But it is nonetheless very sad and disturbing.
At once we notice the power and freedom the internet promises and the greed and fascism of the corporate world and the state.
Yes, the internet is empowering. One would expect those with vested interest in an an analog market, built as it is on an analog world to be opposed to the widespread freedom that digital media presents. For all intents and purposes, digital media spells the deathknell for profit in analog markets. So the Rupert Murdoch's of the world do what they can to replicate old analog, one-way structures in the digital world by carrying over as many restrictions and rules as possible. Hence, DRM, largely pointless patent and copyright laws, closed-source file formats, etc. Microsoft is well known to be involved in pushing forth a proprietary agenda, and so it doesn't altogether surprise me to hear that they would assist in suppressing bloggers from other countries. But Yahoo!, and, most especially, Google? In a way, their compliance is like shooting themselves in the foot. Their business models are build on providing people with tools to communicate with others and broadcast those things they are passionate about. So they sell all their ideals up shore when they comply with these regimes. In the parlance of 2004, they become flip-floppers.
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