The Blogging Revolution

Nowadays, almost everyone knows what blog is and the numbers of bloggers are increasing from time to time. According to Werbach (2001), he states that people frequently updated news, headlines, diary entries and recommended links that are chronologically organised in their websites. Besides that, he also mentions that weblogs enable people to interact and share opinions with each other.
In this article entitle “The Blogging Revolution” that I have chosen and read, it reviews on how people gain freedom in speech and expression by expressing what they feel in blogs to share their thoughts and ideas about country issues. Apart from that, this article also talks about how the blogging phenomena affect countries like China, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. In some countries like Iran, the usage of the Internet was once before open to all. However, the government has made a decision to filter the Internet and block all free circulations ever since they became aware that their country system may be hacked as stated by Jadi (2009). “Iran applies one of the world’s strictest filtering policies, which have been tightened even more since June 2009”. ( Rahal, 2010).
According to Etling (2009), the government is being unreasonable because they restricted the usage of Internet among all its citizens as they want to control the freedom of speech in their countries. They do not want their citizens to reveal any issues about Iran to other countries. As a reason to fight against terrorism In Egypt, Facebook has been placed under surveillance. Moreover, many websites such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were in the filtering process in China whereas in Syria, the government targets censorship on social networks and blog platforms. Saudi Arabia on the other hand is still one of the most forbidding countries that has 38% of Internet penetration rate.
The government of these countries can do anything to filter the Internet but in the end, people’s freedom will eventually speak out despite all the restrictions taken. Blogging is just a place for people to express their ideas and opinion about certain issues. Different authors shares different thoughts of blogging due to different cultures and perceptions. Nevertheless, there will still be pros and cons of weblogs as some people might cause offense to the others especially when they touch about sensitive issues like politics.

References:

Branum, 2001, The Blogging Phenomenon, viewed 14 June 2010, http://www.ajy.net/jmb/blogphenomenon.htm.

Etling, B 2009, Iran Moves to Enforce Cyber Laws, online, viewed 14 June 2010, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/07/21/iran-moving-to-enforce-new-cyber-law/.

Jadi, 2009, Q/A of Blog Entry, viewed 18th November 2009, http://jadi.net/.

Rahal, 2010, Enermies of the Internet: KSA, Egypt, Iran, Syria, viewed 15 June 2010,
http://thenextweb.com/me/2010/03/13/enemies-internet-ksa-egypt-iran-syria/.