The power of the mobile
- 4 May 06, 09:56 AM
The conference has been opened up to the world, starting off with a focus on Asia and in particular China.
While much of the coverage in the Western media is about political dissidents using the web to spread their message, it sounds like most Chinese people are more interested in entertainment than politics.
David Schlesinger from Reuters said that those participating online are talking about the movies they like, their villages or their sex lives, rather than politics.
He said the political bloggers are individuals rather than a political movement. Blogs are a revolutionary change for China, he said, but not a political change.
Marcus Xiang of blogging service talked about how housewives were using their mobile phones to go online and record their children as they grow up. He talked about workers in remote regions without internet access using their mobiles to share their experiences online.
Xiang said that he tried to put some political views in some of his entries online, but found that most people were more interested in personal experiences.
The power of the mobile was one of the points mentioned in the discussions yesterday but not explored in detail. In China, when the internet via the PC reaches only a small fraction of the population, the mobile is filling the gap.
There are some 400 million mobiles in China and the number is constantlly growing, with the devices becoming more and more powerful every day.
UPDATE 10:30 We now hearing from the debate on about the session on China. One Chinese contributor berated the West for what he called its obsession with internet censorship. He made the point that it is very easy to get around controls on the internet and that the Western focus on censorship was having an adverse effect.
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