On BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin writes about Internet use among Tibetan refugees, based on Hacking the Himalayas, a report she did for NPR:
Even though two full generations of Tibetans have grown up outside their native land, the Tibetan community is still very close-knit, and many still harbor dreams of returning to a country free of Chinese domination — something unlikely to happen any time soon.
But with the help of some technology experts from the West, the Tibetan community in India hopes to get the word out about their cause via the viral grapevine that is the Internet. It’s an enormous challenge. Electricity, phones and Internet access are expensive and hard to come by. Phone lines can go down for days at a time, leaving the region cut off from the world. But there’s an effort under way to change that, and to teach young Tibetan refugees about computers and the Web. [Full text]
See Xeni Jardin’s blog notes of her trip through China and Tibet. Read also a related story on the closure of a blog by a Tibetan author.
