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Allison Frost

China's Orwellian Internet | The Heritage Foundation - 0 views

  • However, for China's 79 million Web surfers-the most educated and prosperous segment of the country's popula­tion-the Internet is now a tool of police surveil­lance and official disinformation.
  • Democratic reform in China is highly unlikely to come from the top down, that is, from the Chi­nese Communist Party. It will have to emerge from the grass roots. If the Internet is to be a medium of that reform, ways will need to be found to counter China's official censorship and manipulation of digital communications. The cultivation of demo­cratic ideals in China therefore requires that the U.S. adopt policies that promote freedom of infor­mation and communication by funding the devel­opment of anti-censorship technologies and restricting the export of Internet censoring and monitoring technologies to police states.[
  • As the central propaganda organs and police agencies maintain and tighten their grips on information flow and private digital communications, the average Chinese citizen now realizes that political speech on the Internet is no longer shrouded in anonymity: Private contacts with like-minded citizens in chat rooms, or even via e-mail text messaging, are not likely to escape police notice.
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  • On July 31, 2004, hundreds of villagers of Shiji­ahecun hamlet in rural Henan province demon­strated against local corruption. Provincial police from the capital at Zhengzhou dispatched a large anti-riot unit to the village, which attacked the crowd with rubber bullets, tear gas, and electric prods.[12] Propaganda officials immediately banned media coverage of the incident, and the outside world might not have learned of the clash if an intrepid local "netizen" had not posted news of it on the Internet. The Web correspondent was quickly identified by Chinese cybercops and arrested during a telephone interview with the Voice of America on August 2. While the infor­mant was on the phone with VOA interviewers in Washington, D.C., he was suddenly cut short, and the voice of a relative could be heard in the back­ground shouting that authorities from the Internet office of the Zhengzhou public security bureau (Shi Gonganju Wangluchu) had come to arrest the interviewee. After several seconds of noisy strug­gle, the telephone connection went dead
  • In January 2004, Amnesty International documented 54 cases of individuals arrested for "cyberdissent," but concluded that the 54 cases were probably just "a fraction" of the actual number detained.[
  • In April 2004, The Washington Post described a typical cyberdissidence case involving a group of students who were arrested for participating in an informal discussion forum at Beijing University. It was a chilling report that covered the surveillance, arrest, trial, and conviction of the dissidents and police intimidation of witnesses. Yang Zili, the group's coordinator, and other young idealists in his Beijing University circle were influenced by the writings of Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek, and Samuel P. Huntington. Yang questioned the abuses of human rights permitted in the "New China." His popular Web site was monitored by police, and after letting him attract a substantial number of like-minded others, China's cyberpolice swept up the entire group. Relentlessly interrogated, beaten, and pressured to sign confessions implicat­ing each other, the core members nevertheless with­stood the pressure. The case demonstrated that stamping out cyberdissent had become a priority state function. According to the Post, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin considered "the investigation as one of the most important in the nation." In March 2003, the arrestees were each sentenced to prison terms of between eight and ten years-all for exchanging opinions on the Internet.[9] Then there is the case of Liu Di, a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who posted Internet essays under the screen name of Stainless Steel Mouse. She is an exception among cyberdis­sidents-after a year behind bars, she is now out of jail. The then 23-year-old Liu was influenced by George Orwell's 1984 and became well known for her satirical writing and musings on dissidents in the former Soviet Union. She defended other cyberdissidents, supported intellectuals arrested for organizing reading groups, attacked Chinese chauvinists, and, in a spoof, called for a new polit­ical party in which anyone could join and every­one could be "chairman." Arrested in November 2002 and held for nearly one year without a trial, she became a cause célèbre for human rights and press freedom groups overseas and apparently gained some notoriety within China as well. Although she had been held without trial and was never formally charged, she was imprisoned in a Beijing jail cell with three criminals. In December 2003, she was released in anticipation of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to the U.S. Yet nine months after returning to the Beijing apartment that she shares with her grandmother, Liu still finds police secu­rity officers posted at her home. She has found it impossible to find a regular job, and police moni­tors block her screen name Stainless Steel Mouse from Web sites
  • Although President Hu's anti-porn crusade has superficially lofty goals, the nationwide crackdown conveniently tightens state control over the spread of digital information. In fact, more than 90 per­cent of the articles in China's legal regime govern­ing Internet sites is "news and information," and less than 5 percent is "other inappropriate con­tent."[
  • In February 2003, a mysterious virus swept through the southern Chinese province of Guang­dong, decimating the staffs of hospitals and clinics. According to The Washington Post, "there were 900 people sick with SARS [sudden acute respiratory syndrome] in Guangzhou and 45 percent of them were health care professionals." The Chinese media suppressed news of the disease, apparently in the belief that the public would panic, but: [News] reached the Chinese public in Guangdong through a short-text message, sent to mobile phones in Guangzhou around noon on Feb. 8. "There is a fatal flu in Guangzhou," it read. This same message was resent 40 million times that day, 41 million times the next day and 45 million times on Feb. 10.[36] The SARS epidemic taught the Chinese security services that mobile phone text messages are a powerful weapon against censorship and state control of the media. The Chinese government announced in 2003 new plans to censor text mes­sages distributed by mobile telephone.
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    written in 2004, a bit outdated, but gives great background into China's stance on internet censorship and individual accounts of citizens arrested and held (sometimes years without trail) for crimes committed online
Derrick Clements

You Should Spend 4-6 Hours Writing a Blog Post - 1 views

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    Interesting take from an awesome blogger.  He talks about how really time-consuming posts have brought him lots of visitors.
Bri Zabriskie

Determined « Bri Colorful - 1 views

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    Since blogger is struggling a wee bit today, I thought I'd do my post for this class over here at my regular blog. I put quite a bit of work into this post so check it out. :) 
Gideon Burton

Academic Evolution: Scholarly Communications will Transform via Cybermetrics - 3 views

    • Gideon Burton
       
      Note the features of this online writing: -situates itself relative to ongoing discussion (via explicit reference and links) -contains an explicit thesis statement early in the post -includes headings to make subsections easier to navigate and the longer post easier to read -includes appropriate images to draw interest, break up the text, and illustrate the argument -includes mild use of formatting options for emphasis (highlighting in this case) -includes hyperlinks to references -quotes and cites both traditional and online sources (uses the blockquote formatting for a longer quote) -links not only to sources for quotations, but to relevant entities or organizations, or to discussions of the issue (maybe less scholarly, but timely and relevant) -rhetorically, it lays out a story about the past, situates a phenomenon in the present, and discusses the impact for the future of these ideas within our more mediated digital environment -includes relevant tags -has received comments from others (due in part to the author "pinging" or announcing that he'd published a post on his blog via Twitter or other social media
Amy Whitaker

Lawrence Lessig on the Free Access Movement-blog - 0 views

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    This is a great blog post on Lawrence Lessig's take on the free access movment (Lessig is the author of the digital culture book, Remix). This is relevant to anyone reading anything regarding digital collaboration and copyright laws.
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    Thanks for posting this it really adds to what Dr. Burton was just talking about with opening up the Library database, Definitely going to try and watch the whole video at some point.
Ben M

Feminist Mormon Housewives » The Bloggernacle Scares Me - 0 views

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    post about what type of community the bloggernacle is and what kind of "rhetorical space" it is
Gideon Burton

My Arabic Mission: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" - 0 views

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    An interesting example of a photo essay post from a student abroad. Note the thematic continuity across the pictures and in relation to the interspersed poem.
Aly Rutter

Contact me | eBookAnoid - 2 views

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    An idea of where we could get our ebook posted, or at least a link. Maybe we could find other eBook-obsessed bloggers who would like to share our class's story
Bri Zabriskie

Make your own book. Make it great. - 2 views

shared by Bri Zabriskie on 27 May 11 - Cached
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    a friends idea for creating an ebbok. It looks more like a scrapbooking site. I don't know how legitimate we'd be using something like this or if it even fits our project, Just one of my friends suggestions.. .  See my post about ebook formating concerns
Ashley Nelson

MapLoco! - Hit counter tracker map - Map your visitors - 0 views

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    After reading Ashley Lewis's blog I noticed this really cool feature off to the side of her blog. It shows you where someone is at that is viewing your page. I thought it was pretty neat and so I followed her link and posted it to my blog page.
Ben Wagner

Infographic Of The Day: The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, Plotted | Co.Design - 1 views

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    This was posted by Peter Jackson's official "The Hobbit" Blog. It seems to correlate to a lot of the things we're talking about, its essentially someone remixing the LOTR films. I just find it amazing that it could get noticed by the film makers and then reposted to his several hundrad thousand followers.
Bri Zabriskie

Western canon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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    I found this very interesting after reading Sam's post (http://sammcgrathwritings.blogspot.com/2011/05/hp-lovecraft-forbidden-knowledge-and.html) for the day.  What "should" we read? really.
Weiye Loh

Your porn is not Canadian enough, CRTC warns erotica channels | National Post - 0 views

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    "For failing to broadcast sufficient levels of Canadian-made pornography - and failing to close-caption said pornography properly - a trio of Toronto-based erotica channels has earned a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission."
Katherine H

The Englewood Review of Books: Featured: The Sublime by Simon Morley - 0 views

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    "the full effect of the terror Burke stresses in the sublime hadn't taken shape for me until recently, watching over and over the first 30-second video clip of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. This is a frightful image in its murky greenness. And the scope of what this simple video loop suggests is nearly beyond the capacity to describe. It certainly follows several of Burke's qualifications of the sublime - the terror of the scope, the obscurity and privation of the bottom of the ocean, the suggestion of infinity - but it also raises even more questions in regard to what a particularly contemporary sublime might encompass. "
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    This post is reviewing a book, but includes a personal anecdote about finding the 'terror' aspect of the sublime in an internet video.
Chris Anderson

BBC News - Pakistan blocks access to YouTube in internet crackdown - 0 views

  • For Muslims, directly insulting the sacred is beyond petty 'freedom of speech' privileges we mortals have. In the West, people think arrogantly that they are free to say anything without limits whatsoever, no matter how ridiculous or insulting.
    • Chris Anderson
       
      It's interesting how (having the ability to freely post their opinions on the issue) people in these comments are showing how they have no concept of the purpose of free speech that we are used to.
Audrey B

Green Iran pic and blog post - 0 views

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    Blog report on iran elections and twitter.
Ben M

The Nameless Mormon Blogosphere | Times & Seasons - 1 views

  • Latter Day Blogs is pretty good, but the strength of St. Blog’s is that it suggests a place in which this online community exists.
  • They used to refer to on-line LDS posters as members of the virtual ward.
  • Some object on the grounds that a choir is a better analogy than a space. Note that the founding metaphor of the blog community is spacial–the blogosphere. Note also that a choir is rather more directed and harmonious than we expect to be, that admission to it is controlled by the choir whereas admission to the sacred precincts of a tabernacle is at least in conception controlled by God. While singing ought to be an act of praise, we tend to think of it as entertainment, whereas we are always aware of our presence before God in a tabernacle. Getting down to specifics, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a somewhat unhip public relations gesture. It serves to present an friendly face to an antipathetic world, and is thus at root defensive. The tabernacle, on the other hand, is the sacred space that conceptually contains the world; it is at root expansive.
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  • I thought about that, Jim. Here’s my response: first, if we were calling ourselves the Tabernacle I think I’d object. Bloggernacle tones down the sacred meaning enough, I think, while still keeping some of those overtones of acting before the eyes of God. Also, in Mormonism, the Tabernacle isn’t exactly a temple. It’s a holy building and holy space, true, but one in which musical concerts and Journal of Discourse talks on farming methods can still be appropriate. It’s almost the Mormon Public Square.
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    This is the blog post where the "bloggernacle" got its name back in 2004
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
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    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
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    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Ashley Nelson

Blogger! - 0 views

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    So I was searching for some blogs about James Joyce and I came across this man's blog, Mel. Talk about being a prolific reader and writer. He reads short stories all the time and posts about each one. I think it is interesting that he started his blog not really think many would read it and now he has almost 500 followers.
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