Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The Information Society 39
effects that it can have on individual polities. 22 The clampdown on
newspapers and broadcast media in neighbouring Indonesia during
1996 drove political activism in that country on to the web. While
there were only about 20,000 web users in Indonesia at the time,
they tended to be middle-class and politically informed with an
influence that ran far beyond the immediate group. According to
Human Rights Watch/Asia the government was routinely intercepting
email by 1996 although they had no intention, at that time, of
formally regulating the Internet.
Other examples of effective cross-border interventions are legion:
the use of the web by the Zapatistas in the Chiapas uprising against
the North American Free Trade Area agreement in Mexico in the
mid-1990s or the publication of features ‘whited out’ from the
heavily censored press of Egypt on newspaper websites based outside
the country. The Middle East Times’ server, for instance, is located in
Cyprus. There are many other examples of the web being used by
journalists opposed to repressive regimes. In 1996 the Zambian
government seized an edition of the daily The Post to keep secret the
plan to hold a referendum on a draft constitution. The suppressed
edition was posted on the web for several days, giving at least some
citizens the chance to consider the implications of the referendum
and publicise it before it was held. Of course, such an intervention
assumes that citizens have access, however restricted, to the Internet.
Most countries in the Middle East allow their citizens unrestricted
Internet access; however Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia are less sanguine
about its social and political effects. Saudi Arabia has developed a
system through which thousands of sites are blacklisted and blocked.
This form of censorship is technically difficult, if not impossible, to
enforce and, of course, the blacklist is, of necessity, growing as fast
as the Internet itself. Iran’s users, some of whom are monitored by
their ISPs, promise that they ‘will not contact stations against Islamic
regulations’. 23
While the Internet throws the regimes of many political hues on
the defensive it is, of course, a mistake to link such democratising
influences to the technology itself. It can just as easily be used to
disseminate the oppositional propaganda of racist 24 or fundamentalist
extremisms such as Al Gamaa Al Islamiyya, Egypt’s most violent
Islamic group. The website Al Murabeton 25 (A Glittering Hope Facing
Darkness) is published from a US ISP in Denmark. As is evidenced by