The internet looks different in different places. We think of it as this universal resource, but it’s not. Its ethereal contents change depending on where you are physically and politically.
I’ve been experiencing this a lot on my last few international trips. In Dubai I couldn’t get to a British comedy site I like to go to… probably because it sometimes has pictures of scantily clad women. There’s nothing that you wouldn’t see on an American television show about Hollywood celebrities, but it is probably too risqué for some Muslim sensibilities. I survived a couple weeks by finding comedy elsewhere. But I must say the Arabic words and a picture of a police officer with a large hand was rather startling. I did begin to worry that I wasn’t just watching the internet; it was watching me as well.
In China there were a few things missing that I was used to. Facebook was generally inaccessible. The Chinese government is fully conscious of the political power that those wielding Facebook have generated in the United States, let alone the Arab world. Of course it’s hard to completely control the internet. One hostel I stayed at was very popular with young travelers from the Western world and its computer lab had a pre-loaded link to a proxy site that circumvents the Chinese prohibition of Facebook.
Skype has become increasingly important to me because of these travels. Friends and family back home want more than e-mail confirmation that I’m still in one piece and haven’t broken my legs on indoor ski slopes. I was a bit worried before I went to Dubai. Supposedly Skype doesn’t work in most places there because the government doesn’t want to lose money on its telecom business. We had no problems at the Academy, however.
In China I also got Skype to work, but I ran into an interesting quirk. I was having a Skype chat with a friend and we couldn’t figure out why we were getting confused. After a bit of backtracking we realized that a message had been deleted. We suspected it was because it included the F word. So I tried it again… sure enough I typed in the word, hit enter, and the whole entry just disappeared like it never happened. So, of course, we tested out a number of other slang terms. They all went through without a problem. I even tried the French versions of the word I knew. Those worked just fine, but not the good old English version of everyone’s favorite word. It would be several days before I headed home, so I decided not to enter “Tiananmen Square massacre,” “democracy,” or “the June Fourth Incident.”
The internet has not proven to be the greatest hope for democracy that many predicted in the early days. It is shaped by governments and corporations that limit its power and the access of certain people. While my short experience with the Chinese internet may have few repercussions, the same cannot be said for the Chinese people. In China my tour guides occasionally justified their government’s limitations on the internet without even being asked. One of them argued that the government was in the right in its dispute with Google because Google allows access to pornography. I didn’t have time to test as many sites as I would have liked, in part because I was worried about being watched and wanted my travel through the country to be as smooth as possible – a reminder that self-censorship may be as debilitating as actual censorship. But when I noticed that something as seemingly mundane as weather.com was blocked I became convinced that the Chinese people are missing much more than pornography.
About the Author: Jameson Wetmore is an assistant professor with CSPO and CNS-ASU, and ASU’s School of Human Evolution & Social Change.
I’ve been experiencing this a lot on my last few international trips. In Dubai I couldn’t get to a British comedy site I like to go to… probably because it sometimes has pictures of scantily clad women. There’s nothing that you wouldn’t see on an American television show about Hollywood celebrities, but it is probably too risqué for some Muslim sensibilities. I survived a couple weeks by finding comedy elsewhere. But I must say the Arabic words and a picture of a police officer with a large hand was rather startling. I did begin to worry that I wasn’t just watching the internet; it was watching me as well.
In China there were a few things missing that I was used to. Facebook was generally inaccessible. The Chinese government is fully conscious of the political power that those wielding Facebook have generated in the United States, let alone the Arab world. Of course it’s hard to completely control the internet. One hostel I stayed at was very popular with young travelers from the Western world and its computer lab had a pre-loaded link to a proxy site that circumvents the Chinese prohibition of Facebook.
Skype has become increasingly important to me because of these travels. Friends and family back home want more than e-mail confirmation that I’m still in one piece and haven’t broken my legs on indoor ski slopes. I was a bit worried before I went to Dubai. Supposedly Skype doesn’t work in most places there because the government doesn’t want to lose money on its telecom business. We had no problems at the Academy, however.
In China I also got Skype to work, but I ran into an interesting quirk. I was having a Skype chat with a friend and we couldn’t figure out why we were getting confused. After a bit of backtracking we realized that a message had been deleted. We suspected it was because it included the F word. So I tried it again… sure enough I typed in the word, hit enter, and the whole entry just disappeared like it never happened. So, of course, we tested out a number of other slang terms. They all went through without a problem. I even tried the French versions of the word I knew. Those worked just fine, but not the good old English version of everyone’s favorite word. It would be several days before I headed home, so I decided not to enter “Tiananmen Square massacre,” “democracy,” or “the June Fourth Incident.”
The internet has not proven to be the greatest hope for democracy that many predicted in the early days. It is shaped by governments and corporations that limit its power and the access of certain people. While my short experience with the Chinese internet may have few repercussions, the same cannot be said for the Chinese people. In China my tour guides occasionally justified their government’s limitations on the internet without even being asked. One of them argued that the government was in the right in its dispute with Google because Google allows access to pornography. I didn’t have time to test as many sites as I would have liked, in part because I was worried about being watched and wanted my travel through the country to be as smooth as possible – a reminder that self-censorship may be as debilitating as actual censorship. But when I noticed that something as seemingly mundane as weather.com was blocked I became convinced that the Chinese people are missing much more than pornography.
About the Author: Jameson Wetmore is an assistant professor with CSPO and CNS-ASU, and ASU’s School of Human Evolution & Social Change.
I'm the visiting scholar now working in CSPO-DC office. I'm an associate professor in a university situated in Beijing, China. After I came to the U.S., I realized that I could not log in my unviersity library database any more, which makes me frustrated when I try to learn the home researchers' opinions about particular topic.