I had the honor of speaking on PBS’ new online program, called 5Across. It’s a program hosted and produced by PBS MediaShift’s Mark Glaser. This conversation was taped in San Francisco on July 6, 2009.
In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images to Flickr, video to YouTube, and running commentaries on blogs and Twitter. While the Iranian government would prefer to operate under a cloud, the Interent has proven to be a key distribution medium for spreading news to the rest of the world.
This month’s 5Across video roundtable focused on free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya — and even a mention of the U.S. government’s attempts at curtailing speech online over the years. The discussion gave context to Iranian Internet use, its demographics and the way people there get information via satellite TV from Persian-language foreign news sources such as BBC Persian and Voice of America. Plus, we talked about how China uses psychology in making its millions of Internet users believe they are all being monitored.
