China's economic boom has mostly silenced the internal critics and agitators who do speak up pay a high price for challenging Beijing's unelected clique.
Online culture is thriving in almost every country I visited. The exception is Cuba, although the elevation of Raul Castro to the presidency is slowly leading to economic and social perestroika, despite some politically tinged websites being blocked.
Most bloggers prefer to protest privately, anonymously or not at all. The fight against repression takes many forms, from drinking contraband vodka in Tehran to appropriating American hip-hop culture in Havana. The price of protesting in Egypt, one of the highest annual recipients of US aid, is likely to be imprisonment and torture.
Advertisement
Despite their relatively small numbers and the penalties they attract, dissenting bloggers are playing havoc with the established order. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Elijah Zarwan, "bloggers have succeeded in doing something that years of standing on the street corner and shouting 'No to torture' or 'No to the interior ministry' has never managed to accomplish": putting these issues on the public agenda.
The small size of online communities in Syria and Saudi Arabia has not stopped bloggers from challenging authoritarian rule.
Neither country employs harsh online filtering, but users learn quickly there are lines that cannot be crossed.
Saudi Arabian actor Mohammad al-Qass explains that in a fundamentalist nation such as his, internal reform - for women's rights and broader legal and social rights - needs space to develop. "Fifty years ago, Saudi Bedouins were riding around on camels. Now they're using mobile phones and the best technology," Qass says. "It will take time for society to catch up with this technology."
Meanwhile, for the first time a more nuanced view of the West is being offered via the web, and it allows a woman in Damascus the freedom to admire Brad Pitt as well as pray five times a day at the local mosque. Cross-cultural pollination is occurring, no matter what the religiously pious may think about it.
The issue of online representation is central to this debate. I recently presented a paper in Budapest at the Harvard University and Google sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit. While we heard countless tales of bloggers across the world using online tools to highlight police torture and corruption, many participants wondered about the voices we weren't hearing online: such as those of minorities, the poor and Luddites uncomfortable with technology.
Advertisement
US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that "communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring". In other words, it's only now becoming possible to come across online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.
Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. The culture of blogging is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are deliberately vague. While many want the right to be critical in the media, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.
Discuss in our Forums
See what other readers are saying about this article!
Click here to read & post comments.
2 posts so far.