You think internet censorship is just something that happens in authoritarian regimes? Think again (welcome to the potential Australian future.)
Showing all posts tagged internet
A challenge to our dictators
Famed Saudi Arabian blogger Fouad Al Farhan – who features in my book, The Blogging Revolution, and with whom I spent time in 2007 before his brief stint in prison – offers a challenge to authoritarian states: If they did not want us to dream and speak and express our ideas and aspirations in dialogues…
Censorship is good business
What are the reasons that Google’s YouTube removes videos from the video-sharing service?
Shame about that censorship side
The behemoth grows: In just 10 years, it has spawned a verb, revolutionised the media and made billionaires of its founders. Now Google has broken into the definitive list of the 10 most valuable global brands. What would the Chinese think, suffering under Google-assited web filtering?
How much power should Google have over the web?
Influential enough to ban certain kinds of advertising?
Our democracy isn’t the cure-all
Prominent UK blogger Norman Geras, both pro Iraq war and Tony Blair, is a little confused about the non-Western world. He wrote the following a few days ago (in relation to my book The Blogging Revolution): If there’s a half-baked notion out there somewhere about the West’s comparative disadvantage relative to some other places, you…
The Chinese lynch mob
Welcome to China, the world’s biggest internet market: Wang Fei’s infidelity deeply upset his wife. She wrote of her distress in a diary, and then jumped from their 24th-floor balcony. Her family posted details of Wang Fei’s affair on the Internet, angrily blaming him for his wife’s suicide. Soon, tens of thousands of Chinese Web…
Palin, Wahhabist
American Bedu is an American woman who married a Saudi Arabian man and they both live in the Kingdom (she features in my book The Blogging Revolution). Here she offers a unique perspective on Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin: I think there are likely Saudi women who would be much better qualified as a Vice…
SBS Radio Arabic on blogging
I was interviewed last week on SBS Radio Arabic program about The Blogging Revolution and the ways in which the Middle East in particular is shifting radically due to the internet.
Beating the western drum
My following essay appears in the Guardian today: During the recent war between Georgia and Russia, bloggers on both sides of the conflict provided searing accounts of atrocities and manoeuvres unseen by western journalists. In a country such as Russia the space for alternative and critical views are rare. The war showed an authoritarian regime’s…