Since the elections took place and the atmosphere of the 1930s in the USSR was brought back to Belarus most of us were in the state of shock close to stupor. The first thing that came to mind about “what to do now” has been – spread the information about what happened and is happening, because if things are not documented they are soon forgotten by the society and the traumas are left only with those directly affected, even though there are hundreds of them.
Therefore, Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook have been quite active to share the real time information about what is going on and what really happened at the square.
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Internet traffic often resembles the traffic on the roads. At least that is exactly what happened in Belarus on January 10th. That day there were traffic jams both in the streets and in the Internet. The streets in Minsk where blocked by protesting small businesses owners and employees. And at the same time somebody blocked the “roads” to a number of most popular information resources in the Internet, namely www.charter97.org, www.belaruspartisan.org and web-site of the Belarusian Service of Radio Liberty www.svaboda.org. Belarusian users also could not access blog-platform Livejournal.com during several hours on that day.
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In Belarus there exists a strong blog-culture. One of the reasons for that is basically absolute absence of any possibility for young people to express themselves outside the Internet. In the environment where independent students and youth organizations are banned and NGOs are gradually dying out every year while their activists are all the time prosecuted, and in the streets even street artists get arrested many young people rely on blogs as the space of self expression. They use them to discuss topics from daily life to politics and international development. At the moment Belarus is on the 13th place in the rating of Livejournal users in the world with more than 20000 registered users. Trying to follow the trend Generation.bY is encouraging the development of this sphere in so called BY-Net and we are regularly making announcements about events connected to Blogs as well as soon starting our own project directed on support of Belarusian bloggers. Continue reading…
