I went to an interesting event featuring Xiao Qiang, a Chinese activist who is director of the China Internet Project at Berkeley’s journalism school. I’ve been following his work for a while now, and if you have an interest in how repressive regimes regulate the internet or how the internet promotes democracy, it’s worth checking out the site.
Xiao Qiang’s talk was about the ways that the government censors try to control what is said on the internet, and how bloggers, specifically, are adept at expressing themselves despite the tight conditions. He discussed how the blogosphere creates a kind of collective identity and a collective call to action for its participants. Earlier this year a provincial TV station in China hosted the “Super Girl” contest, which was essentially an American Idol-type singing extravaganza that developed into a national obsession. Like American Idol, viewers got to vote for their favorite contestants; the winners continued on to the next round.
As Xiao Qiang observed, people thought, “I probably won’t ever be able to vote for president, but at least I can vote for my favorite girl.” The online community was abuzz with the commentary of rabid fans. The fans formed fan clubs to support their favorite contestants; the clubs would trumpet their favorites while finding ways to malign the other contestants. Sound familiar? The internet took a decidedly apolitical singing contest and turned it into a campaign, complete with regular votes and citizen participation including competing camps, debate and mudslinging.
The Super Girl example fit perfectly with Xiao Qiang’s examination of how the blogosphere will provide increasingly developed opportunities for citizen participation in larger discourses. He identifies three steps in the process: 1) Information cascade: Citizens can participate in discussions about all kinds of things on the internet, and express opinions they might keep to themselves in public. And, as we saw with Super Girl, the discussions don’t have to be political in nature. 2) Agenda setting: The blogsphere begins to influence the media and popular perception of politics. Censorship is a problem, certainly, but the bloggers are adept at what’s called “zhenghua fanshou”– saying one thing but meaning the opposite. Readers know to read between the lines. The blogsphere also produces influence because of its sheer size– there are an estimated 123 million internet users in China and nearly 30 million blogs. THIRTY million. Most blogs aren’t strictly political and bloggers know have a good sense of what will be stricken, but a mention of politics here and there on millions of blogs limits the risk for everyone. 3) The third step he identifies is the “networked public sphere.” This is where he believes the blogosphere is heading– to a place with fully developed discourses, different camps and schools of opinion, and the presence of reason and debate. Finally, this process of developing a large public discourse helps to build popular resentment of media controls.
So no one accuses me of being overly hopeful about these changes, I’ll mention, as Xiao Qiang did, that government and self-censorship is a problem, and that the internet can also be used as a tool of surveillance. However, I would point again to Super Girl, and to the anti-Japanese riots of the spring of 2005, which were largely organized by, you guessed it, internet-savy students. Even thought the protests were nationalistic in nature, the Chinese police and security forces were shocked at the both the speed and the reach of the organizing power of the students online and over text messaging.
My experience in China says that there is very little information that you can’t get to on the internet if you know how to look. There are proxy servers with passwords that change daily to stay a step ahead of the censors, and if you can read English, you can read exponentially more. The issue is, of course, that most people don’t want to look that hard. I think Xiao Qiang’s work points to the idea that the blogosphere will in many ways put much more information in the paths of people who aren’t even looking for it, and more importantly, the act of participating in internet debate exposes large groups of people to an alternative community where once privately held thoughts can be now publicly expressed.
Published Date: September 22, 2006