Self-censorship & control

In an article in The Atlantic for March 2008, James Fallows outlines the ways the Golden Shield Project, or China's Great Firewall, can stop citizens from viewing certain Web sites. He also points out how easy it is to go around the blockages using virtual private networks and proxies. But he concludes that, even if the wall is easy to get around, it's still effective because it's just annoying enough to prevent most people from trying.

I guess that's one thing that frequently gets lost in discussions of how powerful the Internet makes individuals: it's empowering, but still requires people to take inconvenient actions. Galloway writes that Internet "protocols are the enemy of bureaucracy, of rigid hierarchy, and of centralization." The Golden Shield's fecklessness would seem to support that. But how many times have I chosen not to read an article simply because it was loading too slowly? How often can I bear to watch a video over 60 seconds long? Since the Internet's very nature makes it impossible to control, maybe we should worry less about government censorship and more about self-censorship.