China has blocked several popular services that let citizens skirt state censorship systems. Three providers of Virtual Private Network (VPN) systems reported that updates to China’s firewall had hindered people using their services.

Living in China last year, my VPN was the only way to get through the Great Firewall and find out what was happening in the outside world. Information flow is strictly controlled in China and even more so whenever there is an ‘event’ e.g. the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. On days like this even instagram and wechat suddenly experience ‘technical’ problems. Seeing this and reflecting on the following from Hand’s ‘Hardware to Everywhere’ reminded me that even though information travels fluidly today, it unfortunately only does so in part of the world.

‘Texts, images and sounds now travel at the speed of electrons and my be altered at any point along their course. They are as fluid as water and simultaneously present everywhere’ (Poster 2006:24).

‘In the context of informational globalization, culture, in terms of shared symbolic and material resources and relations, increasingly circulates as information, detached from national institutional structures, modes of representation and traditional understandings and operations of power’ (Lash 2002; Lury 2000; Poster 2006).

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42. 

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Since Fritz Lang gave us ‘false Maria’ in 1927’s landmark sci-fi film Metropolis, robots have terrified and fascinated moviegoers in equal measure.

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