Travel Light

I find this one not just funny but true. Maybe Hallmark should have these satirical lines on their cardboard displays.

Here’s the question to ordinary techie Juan: Just how powerful have you become these days that you can even unseat a president with just a tweet?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, certainly knew about this so he tried both diplomatic and torturous ways. He put up his own blog five to six years ago where he recounted his sad life to the public. While it was an obvious publicity stunt to endear him to people, he couldn’t simply fool them. What he did in public contradicted the kind of show he was putting up. He had cyberdogs snooping around for anti-Mahmoud sentiments on the Internet.

To date, there are around 700,000 Persian bloggers in Iran. They have become the third largest blogging community after the United States and China. A vast majority of them are kept under the careful watch of the Iranian government. Persian journalists and bloggers whose unfavorable views towards the government have been hunted down and sent to prison. Those who luckily survived the crackdown managed to escape to other countries and continued to chronicle their horrible experiences in their blogs that earned them public sympathy and their government outrage.

China’s situation is no different. The government has been censoring search results in Google that have something to do with the Tiananmen Square massacre photos; news networks like BBC and New York Times; Facebook and Twitter access; and keywords “Tiananmen”, “democracy” and “human rights”. On the page result, you’ll find this: “According to local laws, regulations and policies, part of the searching result is not shown.”

Indeed, the battle for freedom these days no longer necessarily means sending in troops and nuking people. It has taken itself into a different level with the use of the social media allowing people to connect in a viral fashion, render damage to an aggressor with just a click and finally secure justice.