Individual Weblog Assignment for 9 November

Your individual weblog assignment, due by 5 pm Friday 9 November, is to write a brief profile of one of the websites you identified as a possible example of online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan.

Your profile should look at a site we have not discussed in class, but rather one you found on your own.

Your profile should include basic information about the site as well as your analysis about whether the site is an example of participatory journalism, and why you say it is or is not. Be sure to link to the site you discuss in your entry.

Your entry should be about four paragraphs long. You may use the profile guidelines we used for our group profile assignment if you wish.

Internet Governance and OPJ in KZ

The term “Internet governance” refers to a broad range of decisions–by governments, the private sector, and civil society–that affect the character of the internet.

The assigned article, “Internet Governance in Kazakhstan,” (by Rachid Nougamanov) highlights some of the governance issues that might affect the opportunities that people have to carry out online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. The article includes:

• Internet usage: Who has access to the internet? According to the article, internet penetration in Kazakhstan (i.e. how many people have access) is only about 4 percent of the population. Even of that 4 percent, most people access the internet only occasionally at home. The high cost of the internet in the country presents an economic barrier for much of the population (as does the high cost of computer equipment).
• Internet legislation: All websites in Kazakhstan are legally classified as mass media. This means that potentially the government could make the same requirements of individual web users that it makes of broadcast and published media. Generally it has not enforced such requirements. (And doing so seems like it would be extremely difficult.) However, the government has sometimes acted on requirements, for example, that sites bearing the .kz domain be physically stored on computers located in Kazakhstan. The government has also made reference to forthcoming internet legislation intended to regulate internet content more directly, but no such legislation has yet appeared. The article does discuss an announced policy for increased government control of a “single information space,” which could affect internet publishers and users.
• Criminal Prosecution: In some cases, people who have published information on the internet has been subject to prosecution under laws such as those prohibiting insults to the president, or for threatening the security of the country.
• Blocking and Filtering: Internet sites can be blocked (the network is set so that a particular site or page is unable to load or loads very slowly) or filtered (the network is set to block access to pages that contains particular terms). The article suggests incidents of blocking in Kazakhstan. According to the OpenNet Initiative, there are suspicions of filtering in Kazakhstan, though not so dramatically as in some other countries.

Each of these areas highlights a governance mechanism that could potentially affect opportunities for online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. Although the ways we use the internet may sometimes make is seem like an unregulated arena, the potential for government intervention can have a real affect on how people actually use the internet.

The article concludes by pointing out some of the principles in the Declaration of the World Summit on the Information Society:

1. The technical architecture of the internet should not allow for censorship of news or editorial opinion, nor should “self-regulation” be used to regulate content;
2. The system should respect Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (i.e. Press Freedom);
3. “Ethics” should not be used to promote censorship;
4. There must be a separation recognized between legitimate and illegitimate communication online.