I find Clark Boyd’s technology podcasts for the BBC/PRI coproduction The World are invariably worth a listen. An item in Technology Podcast number 85 (15 February 2006) about China Internet Censorship recently caught my attention.
The issues surrounding the compliance of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco with China’s specific information flow/restriction requirements are already well known and I don’t want to exercise arguments that have already been put eloquently (and sometime less eloquently) elsewhere but, in essence, the rationale being offered by these major commercial players can be summarized as “better to be on the inside being criticised from the outside, than being on the outside and not being criticised, but then having no opportunity to influence the inside at all.”
Time and history will tell whether there is any validity in the above argument or whether it was simply a comforting rationalization for corporations making the purely profit-oriented decision that the China market is just too important to ignore, no matter the temporary hiatus (they hope) on home turf.
Now it’s pretty easy to castigate the Googles, Yahoos, Microsofts, and Ciscos, but how many Western Higher Education Institutions also would like to, or are in the process of, ‘breaking into’ the China market? What challenges are going to confront the comfortable principles of academic freedom and the freedom to access what may be locally proscribed information or disseminate expressions of views which may be contrary to the regional norms.
And, on the learning technology front, what, and whose, technical infrastructure will we have to depend?
And, on the learner experience and teaching front, what adjustments will we, not China, be making? I don’t know and I think there’s an awful lot we all don’t know, in part, because we need to get close enough to find out. But yet, herein lies the dilemma. Getting close could mean doing a Google et al and that, currently, is going get you a public castigation. So unless you’ve got deep pockets and a thick skin …?
Nevertheless, on present trends, unless mitigated by events as yet undreamed of, China is set to be a major economic power (if not the major economic power) and, therefore, the same forces that drive Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco are going to be pulling in lots of other actors. I’ve got a feeling we are all going to hearing a lot more of “… better to be on the inside”.
Useful support information can also be gleaned from The World’s Technology Podcast show notes.
