Self expression within a censored culture

Blogging, social networking, myspace, facebook, flickr...

At their core, the attraction of these many websites to many youngsters and some older users - is the ability to express one's self online, through sharing thoughts, opinions, experiences and many many many photographs. This would be unsurprising to the many psychologists who explain the ego-centric selfishness of teenage angst as a functional introspective period of 'defining one's identity'.

However, how do you explain the attraction of self-expression in countries that are inherently sensored, highly vigilant and sensitive to 'controversial' editorial??

According to the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) there are between 10 and 30 miilion bloggers in China - almost constituting around a fifth of the world's blogging community, and this from a country that has a broadband penetration level of around 4%. According to CNNIC, the popularity of blogging is increasing three times faster that the overall rate of internet adoption.

So why is it so popular? Blogging has certainly hit some pretty hard walls since its inception in China. The 50,000 strong internet police has shut many blogs down, imprisoning some 'extreme' perpertrators of free speach. This has led many Chinese bloggers to speak out against this infringement of self-expression, and not just against the Chinese state. In an open letter to Google, famed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao berated the American giant for bowing to Chinese censorship laws in order to get their search engine into China.

It is possible that Chinese internet users are just excited by the internet, and want to express their excitement through their blogs. More interesting though, is the possibility that years of censorship in China has fostered a community of people desperate to express themselves freely, and are finding this carthartic outlet within the web's blogging craze.

Back in West, it seems we are all getting tired of Facebook - the social network giant has received another large wad of cash from Hong Kong, but has failed to grow new subscribers month-on-month for the first time this year, and has even got its own pantomime homage (see link below) on another web 2.0 site, youtube...oh the irony.

3rd most watched video this month...





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