Untitled - witz cultural

323THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTand banks and the sharp rise in regulatory efforts by governments. ("lnformationWarfare: From Propaganda Critique to Culture Jamming"' 309)China's decade-long efforts to censor the Internet, the U.S. government'stracking Internet users, and Microsoft's continuing attempts to control theconsumer and business market exemplify narrowing the possibilities ofInternet freedoms. As a 1996 afiicle inthe Wall Street Joumol explains, China,,is determined to do what conventional wisdom suggests is impossible: fointhe information age while restricting access to information" (Kahn, Chen,and Brauchli, A1), and its authorities hope to do so by cleating an electronicWall of China, a heavily filtered and censored "'intranet' or Internet-lite" (Aa)with a "monolithic Internet backbone, centrally administered, that minimizes the threat of the Internet's amoeba-like structure" and thereby controlthe "two things China's authoritarian government most dreads, political dissentand pornography" (A4). Eight years later, the struggle to control theInternet continues, with the government sending mixed signals. On the onehand, a court "recently announced that an Internet democtacy advocatecharged with subversion would get a suspended sentence instead of a longprison termJ' On the other, the government relies on Internet controls andsurveillance of users. According to Howard French's article in the New YorkTirnes, "lnternet caf6 users in China have long been subject to an exffaordinaryfange of controls. They include cameras placed discreetly throughoutthe establishments to monitor and identify users and Web masters, andInternet caf6 managers who keep an eye on user activity, whether electronicallyor by patrolling the premises." In addition, approximately thirty thousandInternet police play "a cat-and-mouse game with equally determinedWeb surfers, blocking access to sites that the government considers politicallyoffensive, monitodng users who visit other politically sensitive sites andkilling offdiscussion threads on Internet bulletin boardsl' Web users who tryto reach censored sites "receive messages announcing a page is no longeraccessible, or their computer screen may simply go blank, or they may beredirected to unrelated sites." Furthermore, to join a discussion on politicallysensitive topics, users must identify themselves by their real names, e-mailaddresses, and even phone numbers. The government appears alarmed bythe sudden popularity ofblogs, in large part because as Xiao Qiang, directorof the China Internet Project at Berkeley, explains, "'the volume of onlineinformation is increasing vastly, and there's nothing the government can doabout that. You can monitor hundreds of bulletin boards, but controllinghundreds of thousands of bloggers is very different."'