Burma

We're surrounded by big corporate news agencies who tell us that they 'cover the world', but the events in Burma at the moment suggest otherwise.

Perhaps no country reminds us more than Burma that the 'global communications network' is a fiction of the rich and developed world.

Out of a population of almost fifty million, only 25,000 have access to an internet connection. Government control of servers means that flows of information can be regulated and download speeds monitored. Blogs are scrutinised and shut down, emails are read, web sites are checked, TV and radio are heavily censored by the state, phone lines are routinely cut and suspicious-looking cameras get confiscated.

Hardly any of the big news companies have reporters in Rangoon so they rely on people there to make the news for them and get it out through digital holes in the the nets of censorship.

'News' is made in makeshift ways, minus the journalist or reporter, who, far from the scene, becomes a distant collator of emails, text messages, blog entries and mobile phone footage sent by 'witnesses'.

In the absence of an authoritative 'story', news becomes a patchwork of citations and images.

Meanwhile, on You Tube videos from Burma sometimes appear independently, by-passing the news organisations who nevertheless cite them and re-use them.

Images like the one above - cinnamon-robed Buddhist monks protesting in a city where all gatherings of five or more people are banned - emerge by a perilous route.

Shot by someone on a mobile phone, sent from an internet cafe by email to a London-based blogger, and then uploaded to the internet - and all within a few hours - images like these give the world a glimpse of what is happening in one of the world's most closed countries. They become the story.

Even more risky and evocative, a single grainy mobile phone image of Aung San Suu Kyi praying at the gate of her compound, where she is effectively a prisoner, ringed by riot police.

It's fashionable to say that we live in the age of fast communications and that we are all networked. But the events in Burma remind us how patchy and precarious that network really is, and how some acts of communication - taking a photograph, sending a message, saying something aloud - are first and foremost acts of courage.
As of today Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained for a total of 11 years and 338 days.