Friday 28 September 2007

Benefiting the Burmese protesters

When the first protests in Burma began I joined a group on Facebook, ‘Support the monks’ protest in Burma.’ It’s a worthy cause and a noble attempt to generate support. The group has contact details for charity groups, contacting your local elected representative etc but I feel they’re missing a trick.
We talked about Burma the other day and how most of the information was getting outside the country thanks to proxy-sites, forums, blogs, mobiles etc. Setting up petitions and protests outside the borders of Burma is important but I can’t help that think a more direct way of helping the Burmese protesters (which is made up of ordinary citizens as well) is to try and boost the avenues by which their message can get out.

On mass we could be setting up blogs, submitting our mobile numbers and email addresses to known protester visited forums and much more besides on the digital front. This seems like a more direct approach to supporting the protestors than by simply joining a group or signing a petition (both are still important) after all, those of us outside the borders of Burma, needn’t fear the reprisals of our own governments.

2 comments:

DANIELBLOOM said...

WE also need to push the media to stop referring to the country as MYANMAR and use the proper name of BURMA.......CNN needs to be corected, as do most main media outlets....it is not Myanmar, it is BURMA and the people are Burmese, good post Ben!

Bjam said...

Thanks Dan and I agree. Also the media should stop referring to this land as Great Britain and return to calling it Albion.