A semi-recurrent theme on these pages has been, and I use this word very broadly, censorship in blogging. On one level we can see this as considering what is acceptable on a particular blog (eg no swearing, no bullying), which is agreed by the regular users and readers. At the other extreme, it could be on the level of governments not allowing citizens access to certain material, such as in Saudi Arabia and China. People are being locked up for blogging. According to Reporters Without Borders, Syria, for example, has at least five bloggers and cyber-dissidents in detention http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=27685
One interesting ‘solution’ to stopping unwanted material appearing has been adopted by some governments. By re-classifying new media so that it comes under various regulations and laws that apply to ‘old media’ such as newspapers, censorship laws can be applied to, for example, blogs. (For another day, it would be interesting to open up the discussion on the regulation of new media, and how, it is inevitably a lagging concept, due to technology development and the way regulatory mechanisms work). For example, Uzbekistan now regards all websites as ‘mass media’ and in Brazil bloggers come under the same rules and restrictions as applied to other media at the time of elections (The Economist 28.06.08). Control can also be ‘at source’: Belarus requires owners of internet cafes to keep a log of all websites that customers visit (there is a low penetration of home internet access there and so many people use public access terminals).
What happens in these cases is that people find a way around it. For example, blogs critical of a ruling regime appear on servers outside the country. In Tunisia last year, an attempt to stop material about political prisoners on the net was ‘defeated’ when activists and their friends linked videos about civil liberties to the image of the presidential palace in Google Earth. Naturally a number of organisations have grown up such as http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ which lobby for free speech on the internet and campaign to get imprisoned bloggers released and, indeed, discuss how to get round various restrictions and rules.
While here in Denmark and at home in the UK, we can (more or less!) say what we like, there are still issues to consider for us as citizens with regard to privacy on the internet. For example, Phorm, which tracks our internet browsing habits and then targets advertising at us, has raised issues about privacy in the UK, with some protestors planning to picket the annual shareholder meeting of BT, the former monopoly telecoms provider who is going to launch Phorm on some of its broadband services. You can read more about that here for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/internet.privacy. Monitoring our behaviour for commercial purposes raises different ethical and moral issues, but issues nonetheless.
These discussions, as we have also said elsewhere on this blog, are set to run and run. Governments will continue to censor content on the web, commercial interests will continue to try to sell us more stuff, and users will find ways around it. The attempts to block can be successful or unsuccessful, sometimes achieving more fame than if they had left well alone, as in the case of Ms. B. Streisand (I cannot misspell my name…) who apparently objected to some pictures of her home in some publicly available photographs of the Malibu coast. She unsuccessfully sued and ended up getting more publicity for the pictures instead of less. This self-defeating behaviour is now known as ‘the Streisand effect’. While her case is trivial, the effect is interesting and one that many organisations and governments would be wise to consider.