Rebecca MacKinnon

internet - The divided blogosphere

Rebecca MacKinnon went to Beijing after the Chinese Webloggers Conference and reports about the deep divisions between different sections webloggers, something she did not yet see a few weeks ago.

When speaking at the Shanghai Bloggers conference, Kevin Wen, who now works for Bokee, China’s largest blog-hosting company with ambitions to list on NASDAQ, didn’t even mention his company’s name because most of the attendees have a strong dislike for Bokee. The Shanghai attendees are part of a group of Chinese bloggers who I’ve begun to call the “open source-open access group.” Centered around the group blog CNblog and the Social Brain Fund, their emphasis is on the importance of free software and community tool development which, they believe, will empower individuals to communicate, network, and realize their full social potential – whether it be in education, high tech, or running a charity.

While still speculating about a regime change (a typical US-induced habit), she does not longer see the internet as the tool that is going to trigger off that kind of change.

Too many people have too much to lose, and many tech entrepreneurs who have benefitted from the Party’s economic reforms over the past quarter-century are working actively to help prevent that critical mass from ever forming.

That is the real dilemma: the people who have the tools to change the regime, have no interest in that change, since they will lose too much. And poor, land-less farmers are not having the leverage to trigger off change.