Iran

Today, I visited the webpage "opennet" in order to get better informed about the situation of those countries where the goverments filter the web so that, as they say, they can "protect morals, national security, religion, ethnic minorities and even the spiritual, cultural and scientific potential of the country".

After reading a few articles I have realized that we are so focused on the fact that Iran is developing a nuclear plan (something that I understand after listening its president saying that "Iran is a nuclear state") that we forget the situation of censorship that iranian people (specially women) are suffering.

Opennet website says that "the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to expand and consolidate its technical filtering system, which is among the most extensive in the world". The English and Persian websites of the BBC have been blocket, independent sources of news such as Iranian.com, roozonline.com, and radiozamaneh.com were blocked, the popular Farsi social networking and independent news Web site, Balatarin.com, was blocked too... I could continue enumerating the different websites were censorship has been applied but it would take me too long to write them. And this number has grown after the last elections!

And you might wonder....Where the hell are the disidents? (something that is difficult to find if most of the people ideals and knowledge are controled by the goverment of Ahmadineyad). Well, if you have read the article that I enclosed before, you will see how this regimen suppresesses the disidence...

However, and fortunatly, there are still groups of disidents and campaigns that are trying to put an end to this situation.

Specially I would like to focus on the campaign"One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws," also called the "Change for Equality". This is a campaign initiated by Iranian women's rights activists in Iran which aims to collect one million signatures to demand changes to discriminatory laws against women in Iran.

The collection of a million signatures in support of changes to the law is only one of several aims of this campaign. The Campaign, in its own words, will also aim to achieve goals such as "the promotion of collaboration and cooperation for social change, the identification of women's needs and priorities, amplifying women's voices, increasing knowledge, promoting democratic action"...etc.

Actually, and thanks to the help of other democratic countries, a webpage has been created in order to spread out this movement.

Cause even though censorship exists, internet is still a weapon to fight against injusticies!


¡That´s how they are!


And meanwhile Ahmadineyad and Chavez together give speeches as this one....

"Step by step, please!"

In the first article of the declaration of principles of WSIS, which is an international event organized by the International Teleommunications Union (ITU) and focused on the study of the social aspects that affect the communication society the representatives declared “our common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

And I wonder....How can they be thinking on spreading the use of the internet around the world in order to improve their "quality of life" if in many countries of Africa and Asia almost all the human rights are violated?

These undeveloped countries have not even access to common water but developed countries want to bring them the internet....

But why do I wonder these kind of questions if this has always been like that?

Europe destroyed all these countries with colonization and then left them alone and forget them, and now and even thought the human rights are still violated and hungry is the first cause of mortality we want to bring them the internet and insert them in the era of communication.....come on, let´s solve our faults step by step!!

"Perfect day"

"Perfect day" is a song that was written by Lou reed. This song is a metaphor since in it, Lou reed talks about his addiction to heroine.

A few days ago, I was watching "Trainspotting", a movie that goes about a group of friends that are drug addicts. And suddenly,when the song of Lou reed started to sound (it is part of the b.s.o of the movie) I thought about social networks and how so many young people are addicted to it.

Attributes such as mutual aid, truthfulness and civility seem to form the base of virtual communities such as tuenti or facebook. In theory, these ethical commitments are the same whether we are talking about virtual communities or "traditional communities" but in fact, even thought most people say that social networks have made easier communication between us (nodes) without changing the basic rules of a community, the truth is that they have created a phenomena that has not strengthen relationships but deteriorated them and specially our capacity to interact face to face with society without using a keyboard.

Nowadays, we are not only facing the problem of drug addicts but the problem of social networks addicts. People, specially young people, needs to have their daily dose of connection to their profile, and even more, without their PC screen, in many cases they can not express what they want to say, they can not be themselves, they don´t know how to start talking with someone you have never talked before since in the "real life" you can´t send a friend request.

Maybe these people seem healthy, they don´t have black teeth or diarrea but they do have the same dependence and they do suffer withdrawal symptoms, like the main characters of "Trainspotting". Besides, both of them, legaly or ilegaly, are one of the biggest bussiness in the world.

Where are the old ways of flirting or just striking up a conversation in the "real life"?

I´m afraid many people that belong to the internet generation haven´t even learnt them.....


There is an article about this adicction to social networks that Enrique Dans showed in his blog and that I found interesting so I encourage you to read it!

The soup opera has ended

A few days ago I read on the newpapers that Google had ended its hostilities with China by leaving Google.cn: From now on, when a chinese citizen will look for something trough this browser, he or she will be lead to the one in Hong-Kong (chinese city that has an special autonomy and independence for having been a british colony and where thereare more liberties).

The communist regimen system that governs China had applied the censorship in order to limited the access of chinese citizens to determinated webpages such as "Tiananmen slaughter", the "religious movement of Falun Gong", the "human rights" or the Tibet .This had caused a big arguement that has lasted almost four years.

This decision aroused my surprise since Google had forgotten their economic revenues and given more importance to the freedom of speech.

However, even though this has showed an admirable action of principles taken by Google, things in China have not changed....THE CENSORSHIP IS STILL THERE!

Internet is a weapon that everybody has to fight against the violation of human rights (which includes freedom of speech).

Maybe the best solution was not leaving them where they are but continue fighting so that all that citizens, not only in China but in other countries where there is a big porcentage of people who can not have access to the internet, can get to know how to use a computer and the internet and have access to it so that the digital divide is broken and therefore the information and the claims against injustices spreaded.

Furthermore, and as Hilary Clinton expressed:

“This issue [Internet governance] isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit.”

(Hilary Clinton, US Secretary of State, 2010)

Welcome to the beggining...

I don´t really know the future aim of this blog yet and that´s why I´m calling it "Words on the air"...:

Blogs, as many songs, poetry or novels are created by words. Words that many times are abandoned or fogotten because of the lack of time, tiredness or just because they don´t fulfill us anymore...And they become part of all that rubbish that we keep forever in our attics or, in the case of blogs, it turns to be part of all that rubbish lost in the net.

For the moment this blog is going to talk about communication and citizenship in the net for at least one week...

What will come later? Will it continue treating the same topics? Or will it become part of all that rubbish that circulates around the net?

Who knows?.....







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