Censored Blogs

One of my Cuban-American friends sent me a Yahoo news story http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_bloggers_1 about a famous Cuban blogger who is now under the watchful eye of the Cuban government and will be unable to attend a blogger conference . Her blogs are considered subversive. Apparently, in Cuba, bloggers are monitored by the government. Cuban bloggers who get a little carried away by describing aspects of their daily lives that might not show the government in a favorable light could be on the blogger chopping/censorship block.

I think about our loose guidelines in this class concerning what we blog about and then I think about our freedom to have the opportunity to have these loose guidelines. Castro’s henchmen/women are not looking over our shoulders. Although, I guess we really don’t know who is taking a peek at us every now and then.

I always imagined that if I lived in a country like Cuba, I would either be in jail, asked to leave the country, or find myself mysteriously disappearing one day or night without anyone’s knowledge. This is no place for someone who has egalitarian tendencies and questions authoritarian characters.

I imagine there might be an authoritarian teacher out there who carefully regulates what students can and cannot say in their blogs (an extensive list of do’s and don’ts). Over each semester, this extensive list would grow and grow until it reached a bureaucratic level that students had great difficulty in understanding and following. Students would barely type a word without fearing that some blog rule had been violated and heavy repercussions were just around the corner. Some administrators and bureaucrats were so impressed with this teacher’s extensive list of do’s and don’ts that they immediately standardized these rules and developed standardized blogging tests. The rest is history.