telophase | (no subject)

From

sub_divided, via Twitter: the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. Text of a talk given at Etech 2008, focusing on cute cats, porn, and political activists, and how they're all using Web 2.0.

What happens when governments begin taking Web2.0 activism seriously? A funny example comes from Belarus. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko noticed that YouTube was beginning to carry a wealth of anti-Lukashenko content, and suggested the Belarussian government might build it’s own YouTube competitor. Belarussian bloggers went one better and built LuNet, a set of parody sites designed to represent a Lukashenko-compliant read/write web. Perhaps the best of the sites was a Google parody - most searches resulted in a page telling you that the KGB was on lunch break and asking you to try again later when they could watch what you were doing. (See Global Voices Advocacy coverage of the story.)

(The text on the site links to LuNet.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for this, it was very interesting reading. ^_^

that was really interesting!

I really liked his underlying idea: that you can look for cats/porn as a sign that a system is easy to access, and you can look for activists as a sign that a system is good for organizing people IRL. Also interesting to see the countries with fewer on-the-ground protest channels making greater use of the internet.

And I liked the section on the Great Firewall! Makes you wonder whether China is just ahead of the rest of us, and whether we'll eventually all head down that road.