It's been a long time, been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time. What have you been up to, anyway? Look, It'd be real easy to say that the beautifully temperate seasonal change from arid Spring to bright sun and mid-eighties (F) had us feeling too damn irie at the seaside to bother with the 'net, yo.
Man, I just realized how cool I'd seem if that was what I went with... but that's not the reality, and I still intend to seem super cool by the time this is done being read. The truth is that my internal reporter (read: whiner) always gets the better of my internal desire to seem like the coolest person in any room.
So, I'll give you the straight butter: We were shut down!
I mean that it is well known that there is a high level of information control throughout China and it just so happens that I admire the effort. It is hard enough to control the spread of rumors and gossip in a small circle of friends or coworkers. Imagine controlling the news that reaches one and a half billion ears.
Truth bomb! Now imagine trying to maintain that control in an age when people are able to use the internet to gossip. Ham radios become small potatoes by comparison, and I become hungry by writing that.
If you're asking what all this yakkity-yak is building toward or how a person could be so utterly filled with self important delusions of grandeur as to believe that their insignificant opinions (opinions in a foreign language that are insignificant, no less!) could possibly warrant the attention of government censors, well, get a load of this, pal:
You may have heard about the 20th anniversary of that Chinese guy who stood up to a tank in Tiananmen Square. Yeah, that just happened, and you may have heard about it. Well, there are a good many people in China (even people who have lived in Beijing for the past 20 years) who never got that story. The heavy hand of state control: you just can't knock their hustle!
So yeah, "mysteriously" I guess, two or three weeks before that 20 year anniversary, several websites were shut down all over China. Well, at least in Beijing. Kasha and I did an informal survey of people we knew and all of them concurred. I mean, there was swine flu and global economic trouble continuing, but my money's on the 20th anniversary! OK, so which awful, anti-social, treasonous, dangerous, and incendiary websites were shut down?
Maybe you've heard of Youtube, Wikipedia, and Blogger. The point is that there is nothing wrong with these sites, just like there is nothing wrong with an active press. But the internet, even time-wasting sites like Youtube, allow people a platform for self-publication. A soapbox with untold millions of users. Users that are enabled by search-engines and in-box-spamming coworkers, and endless chain-lettering parishioners. And that's threatening to people who seek to maintain that tight control.
So, even if you're using a self-publishing website to upload video of a goofy, British, middle-aged, rural hick lady singing a ditty from Les Miz, or if you're using wikipedia to be the first person to write an article about DeLaSoul's 1996 release, 'Stakes is High', or EVEN if you're using Blogger to write about pregnancy... any use of any website that enables widespread publication of material outside of the strictures of state control and censorship... IS a huge threat.
Anyways, now we've got a better internet connection and a proxy server and (if you don't mind the annoyance of pop-ups which come along with the proxy service) the 'net surfing has never been better! Life is a Beach-Ball!
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