Peace Order and Good Government reports that an Iranian blogger just got 14 years in jail for bloging.
Meanwhile in the USA home of the bloggers, a CNN Poll says most Americans are unfamiliar with blogs. "More than three-quarters of Americans -- 76 percent -- said they use the Internet, but only 26 percent said they were "very familiar" or "somewhat familiar" with blogs.Just 7 percent of adults said they read blogs at least a few times per week, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Forty-eight percent said they never do."
From the blogs online the predominance is from the right, with a minority of left wing sites. This is a specifically American phenomena, a strong libertarian republican right wing that are nerds and geeks. Ayn Rand always did appeal to the geek engineer crowd. But they are still a minority just a vocal and visible one.
And when it comes to freedom of speech even in blogs , what Americans take for granted, the rest of us have to fight for.
But is blogging anything more than a flash in the pan. In the world of the Internet this is the 15 minutes of fame.
As Michael Geist writes in yesterdays Toronto Star Say no to Big Brother plan for Internet
"Notwithstanding the Internet's remarkable potential, there are dark clouds on the horizon. There are some who see a very different Internet. Theirs is an Internet with ubiquitous surveillance featuring real-time capabilities to monitor online activities. It is an Internet that views third party applications such as Vonage's Voice-over-IP service as parasitic. It is an Internet in which virtually all content should come at a price, even when that content has been made freely available. It is an Internet that would seek to cut off subscriber access based on mere allegations of wrongdoing, without due process or oversight from a judge or jury." Michael Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.
And who are these villans, that would create a commercial surrveliance state on the WWW? Well both corporations like Nortel and the State.
The State, whether it is Iranian, American, Turkish, Canadian, the EU or Britain, China, or Russia, is clearly opposed to real free speech that the Internet represents. It will continue to try and restrict the WWW and drive it into commercial only access and intelligence monitoring.
But the web is resilient if nothing else, as the success of WYSIWYG proves. For it is the ability to use java coding and WYSIWYG that eliminates the cumbersome use of HTML for webpages that has given life to blogging. Instant web pages.
And the web has created a cyber dialectic with its own brand of counter intelligence, hacks and hackers. As well as the counter corporate campaigns like those against Nike or in support of stirkes half a world away.
But increased use of the judiciary, laws, and the legislative power of the State
can still restrict access and control to the web.
The increasing commercialization of the web is a serious threat to free speech in its own right. The ability to link to news stories which is a key element in blogging, is being limited as more and more News sites go to subscriber only e commerce. A link like the one above may disappear soon, within seconds, minutes or a day.
Which will simply force more and more blogs to actually archive and keep the stories they comment on rather than relying on links. This is why you wil find actual stories on my blogs rather than just links.
The blog is the revival of what H.P. Lovercraft called the Amatuer Press, and what is now known as the Age of Pulp Fiction 1920-1940. It also coincided with the Surrealist movement in art and literature. As A. J. Leibling said at the time : "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one"
And today with computers and the WWW, bloging and webpages are the Free Press of the cyber age. It is our responbisiblity as (cyber) citizens to keep it so. There is a cyber war going on between Military Intelligence, the State and the Corporations against the citizens on the web, the new Civil Society.
