You probably already know about this one…
A Chinese professor has sued a blog host for personal attacks against him.
Interesting questions about freedom of speech and cultural clashes. A question often discussed in cyberculture courses is whether technological determinism is a valid approach to analysing social impacts of technology. Do some technologies have inevitable social effects? In the early- to mid-1990s, it was frequently argued that the Internet has a ‘democratising’ effect, that free speech follows inevitably in its path. The Chinese government’s agreements with Yahoo! and Cisco and now Microsoft and Google show that censorship can happily live alongside the technology (physical bodies can still be put in jail and China has done this numerous times with regards to freedom-of-speech Internet offences).
I am very interested at the comments in the article that the blogger didn’t realise anyone outside their group would read the blog (how often do we learn that trick in the blogosphere and then establish private friend-groups or a secret blog-for-friends?) and that they immediately removed it (a cultural move to maintain community harmony rather than a challenging defense of individual rights).
Disclaimer: this is not a criticism of an imagined domineering Chinese government. This is just musing on my part. Nor is it extolling the virtues of the free West: I’ve never been convinced that free market capitalism is beneficial and I’ve been somewhat suspicious of ‘pure’ electoral democracy ever since I read Carole Pateman’s Participatory Democracy back in my undergrad days.