【10.03.30 英国卫报】Freedom is not found online

青蛙小王子

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/30/freedom-not-found-online-internet

There's something about the internet that can move even the most monosyllabic politician to flights of visionary rhetoric. "Imagine if the internet took hold in China," said George W Bush in 1999, sounding like a knock-off John Lennon. "Imagine how freedom would spread."

It turns out he was wrong on that one, too. After four years of running a search engine in China, Google last week relocated it to Hong Kong. On the Chinese mainland, Google had been self-censoring search results to keep on the right side of the Communist party; now that it has moved offshore the entire service will face interruptions from the Great Firewall – a massive, sophisticated system that monitors Chinese surfing of any websites outside the domestic internet. What you're seeing here is not just the humbling of the Don't-Be-Evil brigade; it's yet another defeat of the idea that to bring democracy to foreign dictatorships, you simply add the internet.

Bush isn't the only world leader who believed this. There was Bill Clinton, who famously argued that "trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall". And Gordon Brown, who told this paper last summer that Twitter, blogging and all the rest meant "you cannot have Rwanda again", because word would spread so quickly. And behind the prime ministers and presidents were enough new-media visionaries to fill a dozen wi-fi enabled Starbucks, all preaching the gospel of a borderless internet and free expression for all.

Cyber-utopians, Evgeny Morozov calls them – and the internet scholar admits he used to be one. A few years ago, he worked for a non-profit organisation that promoted web-based journalism in his home of Belarus and other authoritarian parts of the former Soviet bloc. "We wanted more young people in politics," he says. "They ended up going to prison instead." A cheap way of building a new civic society was no match for the old repressive structures of the state.
That has become the theme of Morozov's work. Now an academic in the US, he has plenty of examples of how Beijing, Tehran and Moscow are adapting the internet for their own purposes. He quotes the example of the "Fifty-cent" bloggers in China, so called not because of their fondness for over-muscled American rappers but because of the money they earn for each pro-government blog they post on internet forums. He describes how the clerics of Qom in Iran are now recruiting and training religious bloggers; while the secret police in Tehran find Twitter and Facebook very useful tools for keeping tabs on dissidents.
New means of communication usually excite heady talk about how they will bring about big social changes. As Tom Standage observes in his book The Victorian Internet, the fact that the telegraph allowed people in different continents to communicate almost instantaneously gave rise to predictions that there would never be another international conflict. There then followed two world wars.
Developed in California, the web is often seen as the repository of similarly sunny liberal values. This paper's coverage last week of the Google case ran under the logo "CHINA V THE WEB" – as if the internet were a sovereign state or a moral philosophy rather than a technology that people use to download porn, or watch videos of a cat playing the piano.
Like all mass technologies, the web is a force for change – primarily because it makes it cheaper and easier than ever before for people to communicate with each other. But there's nothing that says the change has to be good or bad, or how far it needs to go. The answers to those questions won't be found on Google.

yqh

回复 1# 青蛙小王子
截图对于保持ac新闻来源的真实性和可靠性非常重要，希望您的理解与配合！谢谢！