Burma's Altered Reality--The Sound of Silence in the Communicating Age

As with any and every navigable river, everyone with access to it will use it or benefit from its presence.  That axiom applies to Burma as well as it does anywhere else, and it applies to the information river that is the Internet as well as to watery ones.  In Burma, the military junta, in the first of its most recent efforts to keep its head, elected instead to cut off a few toes by draining the Internet portion of the country's information supply and social (read: business) communicating ability.

From the few pictures I've seen, the country looks modern enough with its built cities, wide streets, industrial sites--all the means of production.  Without the Internet, however, it will have turned its gains backward by about 30 years.

By way of comparison, look no further than the American Civil War and the deep south's faith in plantation-like self-sufficiency and stubborness.

Then check out Seth Mydans' piece in The New York Times on Burma's crackdown on Internet and similar electronic, boundary-busting communicating technologies and their users.

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1. Mydans, Seth.  "Monks are silenced, and, for now, Internet is too."  The New York Times, October 3, 2007.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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