Yahoo has been forced to apologise for helping the Chinese authorities clampdown on dissident bloggers. This interests Polis for three reasons.
1. We host a public debate to be broadcast on the BBC Chinese Service on Media Freedom on Monday November 26th: details from polis@lse.ac.uk
2. I have been serving on a China media freedom advisory group at the Foreign Office in the run up to the Beijing Olympics. It is a fascinating state of affairs as the Chinese authorities have relaxed restrictions on foreign media in the run-up to the Games. Unfortunately, it does not apply to domestic media and they still haven’t quite got the hang of this press freedom thing. So they arrested and threw in to jail a team of Channel 4 journalists who were making a film about…illegal Chinese prisons.
3. This is a real test of the Internet’s power to liberate. We shouldn’t over-react to big companies like Yahoo making compromises with nasty regimes. But it reminds us that there is nothing innately progressive about the Internet. Next year will be an interesting time to watch the news media and the new media in China and Polis will be there.
Get in touch if you are interested in China media issues at polis@lse.ac.uk
I’m not sure i’d agree that there’s *nothing* inately progressive about the Internet.
I’d argue that there is something in the underlying open and distributed architecture of the Internet which makes it hard to restrict freedom of expression while retaining all the other benefits of being connected to a gobal network of networks (commercial, educational etc.) To control the net is to damage it, at least architecturally.
Danny O’Brien has first hand evidence of the collatoral damage
http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2007/10/19#1192783860
I don’t think we disagree. What I meant by that is that all media that facilitate communication have a propensity to afford an opportunity for more dialogue and interaction, but that it is a moral choice or a political act that makes any media ‘progressive’. It’s not innate. All media is/are a two way street or a two-faced entity that can serve negative as well as progressive ideas. One mistake made by many Internet evangelicals in the States (mainly) was to assume an innate righteousness that allowed them to stop thinking ethically about what they were up to. Certainly I would agree that ‘to control the net risks damaging it’, but that applies to all forms of journalism.
cheers
Charlie
Nowadays there is a lot one can freely say or discuss in China than 20-30 years ago. Credit should be given for China’s gradual improvement on freedom of speech and to some degreeof the press.