I am currently finishing up a draft for an article about internet censorship in China. If you are interested in reading it and helping me revise it, leave me a comment so that I can contact you. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

The most used metaphor in describing and understanding internet censorship in China, is the one of the Great Firewall, often shortened to GFW. In this essay, I argue that our (ab)use of the Great Firewall metaphor leads to blind spots that obscure and limit our understanding of internet censorship in China. A metaphor is a way to understand one thing in terms of another ( Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). While metaphors are often useful for understanding new, complex and often contradictory situations, they do that by highlighting and focusing on one certain set of characteristics but not others. The reduction in complexity through the use of metaphors is at the same time useful for gaining understanding but also creates blind spots in other areas. What I call ‘the myth of the great firewall’ then, is a rhetorical tactic to point out the existence of these blind spots. In constructing our narrative about the internet in China, we focus on one set of characteristics, the Great Firewall, but ignore or neglect other facets of its incredibly complex situation that now already counts over more than 120 million users online. By calling the Great Firewall a ‘narrative we construct’ or a ‘myth’, however, does not mean I am denying the existence of internet censorship in China. There is no denying about the materiality of internet censorship in China, as extensive documentation has shown. By using the words ‘narrative’ and ‘myth’, however, I do want to highlight that our understanding of a complex situation, such as the internet in China, is constructed through a selective process of often powerful imagination. These acts of imagination and fantasies often reveal a lot about ourselves and the way we come to understand and make sense of the world. Therefore, it is more productive to think about myths as alive or dead, rather than true or false. In our case at hand, I argue that the myth of the Great Firewall is very much alive. This essay will discuss two questions: first, what is the Great Firewall metaphor telling us about internet censorship in China, and more importantly, what is it not telling us? Second, what does the myth of the Great Firewall tell us with regard to how the West attempts to understand internet in China and how does this affect policy making?