HW 11: Making Global Voices Heard

After reading the interview with Rebecca Mackinnon in "Making Global Voices Heard", I became more interested about the Chinese-language blogs that are controlled and monitored by Chinese companies. As I read that blogging has been increasing and becoming familiar and popular in China, I wanted to look farther into this. After looking up Isaac Mao's blog on http://isaacmao.com/meta, I was able to make many connections from MacKinnon's statements about the blog. The blog is pretty basic, providing no "eye-catching" designs or phrases. Yet as I browsed through each post, I found that Isaac Mao gives an easy understanding of what he is talking about. The topics he discuss deal mainly with issues in China, such as the World Economy Forum, P2P, and Flickr being banned. He also had posted about more general things such as when he spent a week at Kansas Lake, and problems he finds on the highly known web page, Google. As Rebecca Mackinnon had stated, his site had been previously blocked and temporarily shut down due to China's Internet Censoring system which triggered "objectionable content". Because blogging has its tendency to be known for your ability of free speech and to able to get your voice heard, bloggers now have to be cautious of what they say, or if they are saying too much. Mackinnon stated that you are not only reading about politics, and the vastly changing economy, you also come across posts about daily life, connecting to social and cultural life. I found this true in Isaac Mao's blog. While it is true that, Isaac Mao provides good insight on different happening in China, it does not necessarily follow that many will be prone to read his blog daily, due to his lack of enthusiasm in his great work.