Robert are you cheating?

Apparently Zimbabwe is having troubles counting up the votes for its general election...is this possibly because Mugabe is so far behind that he is making last ditch attempts to increase the levels of his skullduggery????

I've just read on the BBC website that he is due to stand down anyway...

But that isn't the point of this post.

Americans scoff at countries like Zimbabwe and China and (Iraq) for the lack of, what they band about daily in their classrooms - freedom.

Remind me, for a country with a population of 300 million people, how truly free are your decisions, when your president is a guy whos dad also did it, and another presidential hopeful is the wife of another guy who did it???

This year, even social networking is playing its part in deciding the presedential candidates - the music video below, produced by Black eyed Peas star Will.i.Am returns 39,700 entries in YouTube, a top video watched by more than 6 million viewers and user generated spin offs that have been viewed by many more. The success of the videos on Youtube, chronologically, has neatly reflected Obama's real-life surge - first in opinion polls, and now in democratic nominations.



How free is a country who's presedential options are narrowed down to those who can financially afford to campaign??

How intelligent, democratic, and free thinking is a country when its presidents are potentially chosen on the back of a music video??



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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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