2007 has been an entertaining year, for sure. We’ve seen the launch of many a site of many a stripe. Some have flourished. Others have seen lady luck spurn their advances – occasionally to their demise. All in all, however, things have progressed quite extraordinarily.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Yet it has been the case that a good number of benefactors of this global advancement have met peculiar resistance along the way. (Well, okay, peculiar isn’t the best term to use, really. Moronic is a more fitting label.)
So, in the tradition of the year in review, I aim now to recount several poignant, backward-thinking moments of the past twelve months in which individuals the world over have had to juggle the existence of Internet blocks; be they government-enforced or leveraged by corporations.
First, the biggie: China. The biggie of biggies, if we’re to be brutally honest about it. However you look at it, the Great Firewall is a massive hindrance. Sure, the guys in charge of things within the PRC claim that they’ve got some seriously nefarious folk to contend with, and thus need strong and mighty. But it’s obviously an economically unfriendly hurdle. It’s an evolution of authoritarian controls from the tangible to the virtual far too generic to be of any benefit to anyone – even those in control of the locks. Business can’t grow as much as it ideally could as a result of the institution of the GF. Neither can consumption. It’s almost as if the all-powerful few chose to hand the un-powerful masses a luscious bucket of candy and decided that they’d smack away any hands that reached too deep – down to where the best of the Net indeed resides. Huge mistake.
Speaking of the best, we’ve got little message for Hu: Wikipedia’s got its problems, but it’s not bursting with subversive revolutionaries. It’s just a place us lunatics for freedom go when Britannica doesn’t look up to snuff. (Which is…all the time.)
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]The most popular of online encyclopedias wasn’t the only website to irk the Chinese authorities. The land of the Great Firewall also gave YouTube and MySpace the cold shoulder this year. On the one hand you’ve got a place made for experiments like LonelyGirl15. On the other you’ve got tons of wannabe rock and pop stars – and a good dose of (mostly) anonymous “lonely girls” as well. What terrible harm could they cause, we must ask? (Apart from a loss of worker productivity, of course.)
Oh, right, no harm, no foul. They just reek of freedom. Crazy, unpredictable freedom.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Of course China wasn’t the only nation to put a stop to rampant video sharing. Others weren’t so privy to allow complete 24/7 access to YouTube, either. Turkey closed its door temporarily. As did Morocco. Brazil, too.
Yep, Brazil. The place where cars chug corn all the livelong day like uber-liberal, free-wheelin’ rollers, and female-specific beach-born fabrics are produced and worn with quite astonishing efficiency and conservancy (literally). It chose to cut the video viewing just shy of a year ago. Which we found to be horribly unfair. I mean, to which video host would the girls of Rio proudly “present” themselves, if not YouTube? Outrageous!
