Freedom of information

The satellite box in my house, which was out of service for about half a year, was fixed the other day. We now have some good English channels that are broadcast in many Asian and European countries, such as CNN International, the BBC, and Sky Sports, and some American stations like ESPN, HBO, Discovery, and National Geographic. Satellite TV outside of hotels and other specially designated places is illegal in China, but anyone can easily get set up with satellite service from the Philippines, so we get several Filipino channels also. It’s way better than Chinese TV, which is a lot of unwatcheable Chinese programs and news (soap operas, old war movies, and 10 minute cycles of news on endless repeat), and one English channel (cooking shows and cheery news clips on repeat), and some of the movies are highly censored for sex and violence and worse, some of the news is censored for anything that is anti-China.

So it’s not hard for a Chinese person to get free access to movies and news on television but its mostly in English, in addition to a few channels in other Asian languages, and one each in French and German. It’s the same for the internet; a good number of Chinese websites are blocked, but it seems that 99% of English websites are accessible, so I rarely have a problem surfing online.

The social networking tools on Facebook are facilitating a youth political movement in Egypt. The U.S. State Department is following social networking sites and learning how they can play a role in democratization.

I thought how young people are using Facebook and the internet to organize and create a political movement in Egypt was pretty cool. Facebook played a role in last year’s elections in the U.S. as every candidate had a profile in addition to online fundraising and organization. Obama’s website, myBarack.com, was a full featured social networking site and certainly helped get his younger supporters more involved and organized.

Facebook is catching on among young people here, and there is a Chinese site, xiaonei.com, for high school and university students, and it is almost exactly like Facebook. I don’t know how much political organizing or discussion happens on social networking sites like Facebook in China, but blogs and chat rooms have been used for free expression for years and are probably more effective because they're anonymous, unlike social networking sites where the point is to explicitly identify yourself in your profile. Social networking sites are not only less private but also less fluid than blogs, forums, and chatrooms, which are easy to recreate or relocate if blocked, whereas networking sites are a fixed website and only are useful if they have a critical number of users.

It seems that a lot of good things will come out of the growing access to communication tools like cell phones and the internet in the struggles to expand wealth, knowledge, and democratic and transparent governance.