Communication in Burma

Communication in Burma

After viewing the video taken by some journalists in Burma, I was shocked to realize that all of the protests and uprisings were happening in our times. I don't remember specifically any news back in 2007 and 2008 of the uprisings and the killing of innocent protesters in the streets of Burma. I am glad that there are some brave people in Burma that risked their lives by video taping the events in their country and sharing those events with the world through social media and interconnectivity.

There was a big election in 1990, which was when a lot of the protest movements had started to gather. Their leader was a woman named Suu Kyi who actually won the Nobel peace price in 1991. She attended and was well educated at the university of London and the university of Oxford. Her experience that she received over seas helped fuel her motivation to help the country of Burma out of its repressive times. "Suu Kyi co-founded the National League for Democracy, which the human rights organization Amnesty International describes as "a pro-democracy political party that sought to counter the military junta that reigned over Myanmar" from 1962 to 1990. The party won elections in 1990 and Suu Kyi was denied appointment as Prime Minister by the military junta, which refused to hand over power. She and hundreds of other political activists were sentenced to unofficial detention, house arrest, and hard labor." I was shocked to figure out that she had spent seventy percent of the last twenty years under house arrest, not being able to leave and spread her insights of freedom and democracy to the people of Burma. She has been and still is in need of the world community to help her and the people fight for the cause of making their country a better place to live in.

The affect that social media and interconnectivity has had in Burma is priceless. The Internet became available to the world in the 1990's. The Internet started out small, for example an estimated one percent of all two-way telecommunication in the world was through the Internet in 1993. There was rapid growth and in 2000 that number grew to fifty one percent of information flowing through two-way communication. And in 2007, that number has jumped up to ninety seven percent according to Martin Hilbert on sciencemag.org. By 2007 when the big march was orchestrated, the Internet was widely available and social media helped the nation know as a whole what was going on. The protests started in response to a government-mandated rise in gasoline prices (500%), which hit the average citizen hard. (What would you do if gasoline rose to $20 dollars a gallon?) The price increases made daily life for the population more difficult, with the cost of public transportation increasing, and a subsequent rises in the prices of necessities such as rice and cooking oil. The people of Burma remembering the last major march in 1988, which ended up with nearly 3000 dead, set out again to protest. This time they were reliant on letting the world know of their situation through social media, especially if the government acted in the