Undead Astronauts

the great firewall prevents chinese citizens from “splitting the nation” and other trumped up petty bullshit. but most chinese don’t skirt the controls even though it’s not very difficult to do so. they just don’t care.

but once in awhile, ppl are motivated to give authority the finger, as many chinese did recently w/ regards to the firewall. what might have moved them to do so? political discontent? economic instability? extreme social injustice?

(more…)

this pic was from a live twitter feed around mobile and caused the suspension of the station’s general manager and news director.

I came across this article on internet use in China. There are a lot of interesting points made by the article, but one that stood out to me was how and why Twitter – and the inevitable Twitter-like clones in China – is not allowed by the Chinese government. This might seem obvious, since China censors so much already on the internet… but Twitter is different from say Blogger or YouTube because it’s so akin to instant messaging, in my mind at least, which everyone and their mother uses in China. Anyways, the link to the article is here.

(sorry, link fixed now hopefully)

An insightful article on the demographics of twitter.