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April 25, 2005

Internet As Public Sphere

The New York Times has an interesting article today on another aspect of the Internet: as that of an underground public sphere, an illicit community of political dissension. Following the China-Japan uproar over the content of Japanese school textbooks, China's government is apparently starting to get worried about the rapid spread of information and nationalist sentiment over the Internet and cellphones. An excerpt:

"Yet many analysts agree that screening the Internet and cellphones is far more difficult than the practice of simply ordering state-controlled newspapers or television stations to censor a subject.

One reason is that a growing number of young Chinese have multiple e-mail accounts, including some with providers based outside China that are not filtered.

In an informal test last week, the words "anti-Japanese protest" were typed into an online messaging service. The response was: "Your message contains sensitive or uncivilized words. It cannot be sent. We are sorry." Similar problems arose with Chinese e-mail accounts. Yet the same phrase went uninterrupted via cellphone text messaging.

About 27 percent of China's 1.3 billion people own a cellphone, a rate that is far higher in big cities, particularly among the young. Indeed, for upwardly mobile young urbanites, cellphones and the Internet are the primary means of communication.

'If people can mobilize in cyberspace in such a short time on this subject,' said Wenran Jiang, a scholar with a specialty in China-Japan relations, 'what prevents them from being mobilized on another topic, any topic, in the near future?'"

Posted by chan at April 25, 2005 08:20 PM