The fight for free speech in weblogistan and beyond

Mullahs versus the bloggers

Iran, under the repressive rule of the ultraconservatives, is silencing the sound of Western pop, in another area of its culture, a wild cacophony of voices has erupted. The blogosphere is exploding. In Iran there are now more than 100,000 active blogs or weblogs, individual online diaries covering every conceivable subject, from pets to politics. Farsi is the 28th most spoken language in the world, but it now ties with French as the second most used language in the blogosphere. This is the place Iranians call ?Weblogistan?: a land of noisy and irreverent free speech.

The collision between these two sides of Iran ? hardline versus online ? represents the latest, and most important, battle over freedom of speech. The outcome will dictate not only the shape of Iran, but also the future of the internet as a political tool, heralding a new species of protest that is entirely irrepressible.

Our belief is that government, businesses and their brands in the 21st Century have to give up control to gain control. That empowered communities will change forever the orthodoxies of any government within the next 10 years.

As Kevin Kelly argued in Wired Magazine , Peer-to-peer flows of information and communications, unleash involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. We have gone from spectator art to full blown participatory democracy.

and you only have to look at Pop Idol in China to see the dramatic potential of connected communities.

But it is not the social power of an unconventional tomboy, nor her challenge to China’s gender orthodoxies, that have some in China in a frenzy. It is that she (the winner) was popularly elected in a process that attracted the masses and made them feel included. Viewers could vote up to 15 times by text message. Millions did, and in the show’s final weeks, fans hit the streets to lobby for their favourite.While the method was commercial, it was none the less mass selection, and it is difficult to avoid noticing that Li Yuchun is the most popularly elected person in modern China – more people having shown their individual support for her than for President Hu Jintao.

Or we could cite the fall of the Phillipines Government of Joseph Estrada brought down by nothing other than a smart mob organised by the mobile phone. and Jeff Jarvis wrote eleoquently at the pathetic attempts by the French Government to control the news and information to a wider audience as Paris and then the rest of France erupted in violent demonstrations by a rightly disaffected immigrant population denied their true place in their adopted country. The unfortunate consequence of colonialism living in the 21st Century.

News anchor men , politicians and businesses have all suffered from the supremacy of the community.

So back to Iran

With almost all Iran?s reformist newspapers closed down and many editors imprisoned, blogs offer an opportunity for dissent, discussion and dissemination of ideas that is not available in any other forum. There is wistful yearning in many Iranian blogs, and a persistent vein of anger: ?I keep a weblog so that I can breath in this suffocating air,? writes one blogger. ?I write so as not be lost in despair.? Blogs by Muslim women are particularly moving in their bitter portrayal of life behind the veil.

The Iranian Government are so fearful of their loss of control that they are even considering creating a walled garden internet for Iran only.

A few years ago I met a very influential person called Peter Schwartz who ran a company callled Global Business Network . Peter said that the next big battle would be one fought over a liberal/democratic view of the world and a more fundamnetal one. I asked him if this was a war of East vs. West. And he said no it was bigger than that. It was truly a battle fought by people that one the one hand want a more freer individualistic life, that is more flexible and on the other by people with a more fundamental view of the world, whose desire is to control life for all within a rigid ideological framework, in both the East and the West.

I think the blogosphere and what we are witnessing are part of that seismic battle.

Peter also said that in the end the fundamentalists would not win as civil free society has always progressed. And as I say, once you have stormed the Bastill you don’t go back to your day job.

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