Experience in China #842: The Internet

Well, in hopes to preserve a way to record life here, via a blog, it looks like I'll have to move from one part of cyberspace to the other. Last week or so a company in China, with the help of the Myspace parent company, Newscorp (I think), officially launched a Myspace China version. Well, since that time I have been unable to access my American myspace account, where I left 50 or so posts from the past 8 months here:

www.myspace.com/ericjmcgraw

It's interesting dealing with the Internet censorship in China; at first I was a bit amused, and now I'm a bit annoyed. Things load slow and sometimes things simply don't load. I can't access BBC news, or Wikipedia, amongst other things. And now, it looks like I'm locked out from American Myspace. Now, there could simply be a problem with loading the page, but I'm guessing that the China version of myspace, after reading a bit on the site, that they will control what is filtered and thus allows them to leave the American version behind.

And who knows what will happen next. I was told that you can use blogger to do a blog in China but you can't view it. I guess we'll see how that works. As one can see, there are some aches and pains, from an American perspective, about living in a country that has comparitively more control over their inhabitants' lives, and in this case the dangerous, full-of-bad-ideas Information Superhighway.