ABSTRACT
There have been a number of highly illuminating studies of the effects of the Internet or the World Wide Web on Chinese society and politics – indeed there are many fascinating ones in this book. The clash between the cutting edge of technology and a relatively conservative society, or, seen from another angle, between an American, liberal and liberalising technology on a giant nation still trying to find its post-Marxian ideological bearings, is obviously interesting, not to say dramatic, and is one of the key arenas for ideological conflict in the twenty-first century.1 But social science, like any intellectual endeavour, must make simplifying assumptions, and one that is usually, if not always, made in this field is that the technology is exogenous, imposed from without, a black box with inputs and outputs, but which is not fundamentally changed by the interaction. This is, however, an untrue assumption; the Internet and the Web are defined by complex and well-planned sets of engineering protocols – human creations – and they can be changed, or broken, by anyone coming into contact with them.
