China's first blogger on his country's rapidly expanding blogsphere
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The number of bloggers in China has exploded in the past seven years to over 40 million and that number is continuing to grow, says the man who was there at the beginning when the scene was a nascent one in 2002.
Isaac Mao is the man credited with being one of the very first Chinese internet users to set foot in what has since become the country’s massive blogosphere. He’s a kind of godfather to the movement which is becoming increasingly self aware of its power to circumvent the Chinese government’s centralised efforts to control news and social media content.
Mao was in New Zealand for a week to talk to journalism students in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington and to meet with journalists and bloggers. In his presentations at AUT, Wintec and Whitireia, Mao illustrated the explosive growth of blogging and social media in China from 2002 when there were about 1000 bloggers, all of whom he says he knew personally, to the staggering number we see today.
The Shanghai-based Mao travels constantly. He is very much in demand as a speaker and commentator on the internet and social media trends. His visit to New Zealand was organised by Jim Tucker at the Whitireia Polytechnic Journalism School who had met Mao at a regional media forum in Jakarta last year. The Asia New Zealand Foundation provided funding to enable the visit to happen.
Mao says he chose his English name from two pioneering individuals who inspired him when he was growing up – the scientist Isaac Newton and the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He says it is impossible to prove if he and another person whom he met online were the first bloggers. “Mr Zheng and I were called the first bloggers in China. But it is very hard to track who is the first one.”
As an alumni of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts, he divides his time between researching social media trends and his work as a blogger, venture capitalist, educationalist and public speaker. The common denominator of all aspects of his work is being at the front of what is happening in China in social media networks.
He sees social media tools such as blogging, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as ways of connecting people across borders so that information can be spread easily and accessed by many. Mao believes empowering people by the sharing of information through the use of internet based technologies will incrementally raise the foundations of what he calls ‘media civilisation’.
An extension of this philosophy is to increase understanding in China and around the world of the power of the internet as a force for good that cannot be forced to bend to the will of any government.
In China, where Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are ostensibly blocked (although many Chinese internet users have become adept at circumventing the Great Firewall), internet users have to rely on pathways to proxy servers based outside China to gain access information that might otherwise trigger sensitive keyword censorship.
Mao also spoke about Charter 08 an online petition calling for increased democracy and openness in China that attracted 30,000 signatures. When it was launched last year, the petition collected ten thousand signatures in over a week. Government nervousness became immediately evident when Charter 08 became a sensitive keyword that could not be searched for on Chinese search engines.
But Mao reports that Chinese internet users continue to use different technological innovations to bypass the censorship such as TOR which is a global network that protects a person’s identity by making it impossible to track a user back to their physical address or to see what sites they view.
Certainly the growth of the blogosphere in China now represents a real challenge to the authorities in Beijing because new internet-based media with its social media applications make it impossible for government censors to exert tradition top-down one-way flows of information from the state to the public. Information now flows along multiple pathways and in all directions and is impossible to control.
As a blogger, observer and commentator of how the blogosphere in China has revolutionised popular discourse, Mao’s presentations to journalism students in New Zealand were brilliantly informative. He says one reason why so many bloggers are popular is because they are trusted.
“The power is that the country is becoming a social network and people are connecting to each other and they trust those people who have been blogging because they have higher social capital.”
He said people also wanted alternatives to the official party line as evidenced by the recent 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. “People who were twittering during the National Day parade were providing an alternative commentary to the official one.”
During his time in New Zealand he also spoke in depth about what he terms ‘sharism’, a philosophy that describes a strong ingrained human desire to share information in order to accumulate community respect and social capital.
It is a phenomenon that he says is very much in evidence in people’s behaviour in social media networks. Through sharing information, internet users add to their social capital while also contributing to the collective knowledge available. He says this tendency has the capacity to be a civilising and democratising influence on society.
He says many of China’s millions of bloggers often have multiple blogs. He estimates that there are about 200 million blogs in China because if a blog is shut down by the authorities, content can continue to be posted on another. Some blogs only survive a few days or weeks before being shut down.
Isaac Mao has witnessed the massive growth in blogging first hand and noted the rapid development of this space where internet activists can employ strategies to use anonymity and therefore have relative immunity from censure to raise issues that are not touched by the heavily controlled state media.
But in a country of 1.4 billion people, Mao says that 40 million bloggers are still a few years from being the tipping point that could force the government to abandon efforts to block access to information. But in the meantime, he is content with observing the Chinese blogosphere and contributing to its evolution.
