Citizen journalism in China


People find ways to work around the "system" using the internet, and they are getting results
Now this is what I like to see.


In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press.

"The phenomenon of 'citizen journalism' suddenly arrived several years ago," said Beijing-based dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.

"Since the appearance of blogs in particular, every blog is a new platform for the spread of information."

Can't stop the signal.

Freedom will be heard and seen.

The absolutely beautiful part is that cybernetic theory predicts this. As you increase the bandwidth, you can't decrease the "noise" (unsanctioned information) without decreasing the "signal" (sanctioned information). There is always going to be ways to get the "noise" through, and those ways will just multiply as the system's total capacity grows. That is a real problem in a rigidly hierarchal structure, but in a decentralized web it means that redundancies and alternative data flows that are faster and more accurate will naturally develop. No one node is capable of dominating the system, and the channel diversity works around information constriction.

The very thing that makes the internet useful to the Chinese government makes it even more useful to the "citizen journalist" and therefore a threat to the Chinese government.

I love the irony!

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - June 25, 2007 at 11:29 AM  Tag


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