点击下载PDF全文Rebecca Mackinnor brought an interesting talk at the Berkman Center on China’s Internet culture. See the video here, and see the notes by Ethan Zuckerman here, and notes by David Weinberger here.
In her presentation, Rebecca figures out the Back-Dorm Boys (后舍男孩), Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2-plus hour net chatting, rivercrab(河蟹), "alpaca sheep(草泥马)", blocked blogs and so on. These are very familar to Chinese netizens, at least those Chinese netizens who are working on the social development of the cyberspace and the cyberlaw. While what the most important observation of Rebecca, in my view, appears at the Q&A session. She said that for many people living on the mainland China, they just not noticed the censorship.
Why? Becuse they just have many other concerns about their life, and
(1) for Chinese mainlander students, there are so much interesting stuffs IN the Chinese Cyberspace, including "alpaca sheep";
今天看CBS的“六十分钟杂志”，说美国科学家们有关温室效应的研究报告在提交国会前，会受到白宫官员的审查和修改，以使报告中所说明的温室效应现象显得不那么严重。甚至在平常的学术发言中，也要避免用一些词汇，比如“danger”。一位科学家说起自己提交的报告被修改的遭遇时，再三地说：But, he is a lawyer, a politician. He is a lawyer!