Ah yes, that great cuddly Panda we all know and love has once again taken aim at the evil interweb.  More specifically, a number of rapidly updateable sites including the ubiquitous Twitter.

What’s the reasoning?

Well, we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre.  It is thought that there may be additional demonstrations, remembrances or other gatherings that the Chinese government does not want to see get out of hand.

The official line on 20 years ago….. nothing.  There is no mention of the deaths in any Chinese approved media, including the internet.  To make sure this continues to  be the case the government is blocking access to social networking sites such as Twitter, hotmail, wordpress, blogger, Flickr, etc.

So why does this warrant mentioning in a web design blog?

It speaks to the nature of the new web as represented by sites like Twitter and Facebook.  The internet today is no longer a passive medium where we separate the passive viewer from the active presenter.  The web is now an interactive place where the user creates and shares their own content with other users.  We are all producers of media content as well as consumers.

This shift has happened quickly and the effects have become profound.  More and more users are receiving live content on their laptops, notebooks, blackberrys and Iphones.  They are constantly in touch with and contributing to a continually increasing vault of knowledge, opinion and marketing.

The same thing that makes the new web (please don’t make me say web 2.0) such a powerful force for social networking (and let’s face it, advertising) in our society makes it a scary, scary thing for a tightly controlled country like China.  Strict controls over traditional media are impossible to pull off in an environment where participants in a live event can send out updates instantaneously as to what is happening for the good or the bad.

Imagine yourself as a iron-fisted government that controls what is considered newsworthy and decides for itself what the citizens are allowed to learn about one another. The last thing you need to be dealing with is teeming masses of people with mobile devices telling each other, live, about the huge number of people who are out with you remembering something the goverment refuses to admit even happened. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people updating each other about what is happening on the ground, violence… civic disobedience…

While this banning of new media in China is a sad event, it should remind us of just how powerful sites like Twitter can be to our own media and marketing efforts here. The fact that the Chinese government is so scared of the power on instantaneous social networking may just end up being the best advertisement Twitter has had in months.

Update:  deja vu all over?