Blog martyrs and reflection

Stepping back for a moment to reflect, today's story, "Martyrs of the web: free the bloggers jailed for telling the truth," lists cases of four bloggers who have been imprisoned for writing about repression in their country, which is based on the new Amnesty International campaign to bring attention to this broad problem (and the abetting of oppressive government actions at times by Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft--at least in China). Next week there is an International Governance Forum regarding the Internet, and Amnesty is using the opportunity of the meeting to call attention to this issue.

This page, "Call to Bloggers" to stand up for freedom ahead of world meeting on future of Internet, is from the Amnesty International website.

Click here for more information on Amnesty’s campaign for internet freedom.

Granted I criticize all the time about (in no particular order):

-- bad government and/or corrupt or at the least very sleazy government officials and/or lobbyists
-- lack of a sense of urgency to do what's right
-- a failure to heed the lessons of what works (asset-based historic preservation) and what doesn't work (generally big projects, land clearance, urban renewal) in urban revitalization
-- undeliberative civic engagement
-- the world of sprawl
-- aggressive suburbanization of urban places
-- value engineering trumping beauty in design of new buildings
-- the modernist movement in architecture
etc.

But except for possibly libeling someone (which I assiduously work to avoid) those of us that use the web for civic engagement activities in the United States don't have to worry about being jailed, just whether or not anyone pays attention.

Ought we not step up and lend our voices to this campaign? The right to speak out should exist for all.

Index Keywords: civic-engagement