September 27th, 2007
In Burma, the revolution is being YouTube-d
Some 33 years ago, author and poet Gil Scott-Heron uttered his famous words, “the revolution will not be televised.”
Well, here we are in 2007 and few if any “revolutions” are being televised.
But as for being streamed and distributed over broadband connections and video sharing sites, you betcha.
Most relevant current example is the growing collection of videos on YouTube showing the brave pro-democracy demonstrators on the streets of Yangun (Rangoon) Myanmar (Burma).
Today, it is said that the military dictatorship’s troops pumped lethal, evil lead into the bodies of several gentle, sacred and defenseless Buddhist monks.
I wonder what incidents like these- not to mention Darfur- says about the human race. As a species, we are so communicative, so social- but too many of the powerful among us prey on our weaker ones.
But in numbers, and thanks to the force-multipliers of modern technologies, the weak can accumulate and use the Internet to let freedom ring.
And that, at least to me, is the overarching social virtue of tech that I write about here- VoIP, messaging, video- and the networks to carry them.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
