[Air-l] some notes about 09.11 and the Internet

[aurelija dagilyte]

Hello,

I wanted to share some impressions about the well-known events and some
tendencies I've noticed in Russian and other post-soviet countries Internet.
As an anthropologist I was interested what do the ordinary people of these
countries really think about what happened, while their governments speak
nice phrases supporting the US and the war against the terrorism. The result
was interesting - while all TV channels, radio stations were speaking how
that was terrible and bad, on the Internet I've found very wide scale of
opinions and emotions. It seems so, that in post-soviet countries is a
difference between the Internet and other media. I had an impression that TV
channels and radio programs presented more or less censored view and on the
Internet almost all expressed opposite position to the official. These
tendencies had even more increased when US started to talk about the war in
the
Afghanistan. I think a lot of people still remember the Russian war in that
country and it's useless. Another interesting thing is the fact that politic
discussions still dominates in the chat rooms and web pages which usually
are
not interested in the politics. I'm not sure if the opinions presented on
the net had some influence on the other media, but after some time
more skeptic view started to appear on the Russian TV too. I'm very curios
what will be next.

Regards,

Aurelija Dagilyte