AP reports that China is tightening controls on news agencies (China tightens controls on foreign news ). This isn’t only about censorship – there is a big business in news distribution like Bloomberg and Reuters services. And China has a lot of monitoring to do. Not just news agencies, but since 2003, authorities announced that they planned to monitor text messages too, adding them to a list that already includes email, Web sites and Internet chatrooms. Can they keep up? In the 11 years that internet has been available in China, subscribers have grown to 111 million people, second only to the U.S. As the Chinese impose stricter controls on traditional sources of news, information flows to other channels that are much more difficult to control. In spite of lists of sensitive words that are blocked by the “Great Fire Wall” from e-media (my personal favorites: Buy corpses, Cat abuse, Fuzhou pig case, Hire a killer to murder one’s wife), the words people use change continually in response to the censorship. And there are other ways to access restricted information online: proxy servers, email forwarding systems, peer-to-peer technology, and IP addresses that access outside the China servers. And then there’s text messaging, which has broken the story on several politically sensitive issues in China, much to the government’s chagrin. Despite the power and sophistication of China’s censors, and the diligence of the 30,000 people whose job it is to scour the internet, my bet is on the energy and creativity of the Chinese people to take advantage of new media, like podcasts and vlogs that are harder to monitor, to stay a step ahead of the censors and find their way out.
Sep
10
Dr. Pamela Rutledge is available to reporters for comments on the psychological and social impact of media and technology on individuals, society, organizations and brands.