Google in China - The Big Disconnect 148
wile_e_wonka writes "The NY Times (registration required) has an article about Google's history in China (beginning way before this whole censorship thing). The article, among other things, talks about of Google's head of operations in China, and his goals for the company there. From the article: 'Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'"
Re:liberated (Score:3, Interesting)
Since I am in China, there is no fucking way I can read your reply (according to your theory).
And since I am in China, I also can't discuss this issue with you here, also according to your theory.
The only thing that is certain is that I can't discuss this in Chinese here. But that is because of the incompetence of Slashdot, which doesn't allow for it.
Corrupted Database Gives False Sense of Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
Deliberate data corruption, such as censorship, can give users the illusion that they are well informed when the data permitted through appears authoritative. Ponder, for example, the confidence one felt upon reading cherry-picked information about Iraq; Judy Miller may well have thought she was better informed when in fact she was less informed.
How, then, can the data corruption be exposed, and who is motivated to do it?
One approach is maximizing the number of links to censored pages [wikipedia.org], to alert the censored individual that their data is corrupt. However there must be more effective techniques.
Perhaps more important, there must be a way to motivate individuals to fix this data corruption; forgive me for being cynical, but if there were a way to profit from the repair, that would be a powerful motivator.
They're not even close... (Score:1, Interesting)
In the 6th video, university students in China are shown the picture of the Tank Man. They have no idea of who he is or what he is doing. They are unable to put the picture in any kind of social context or even guess what is going on in the photograph. China has a long way to go.