The Chinese Firewall blocked Foursquare because a large amount of users check into Tian'anmen Square on the 21 anniversary of the crackdown. I wonder whether this is an example of how demonstrations can work in the digital age, especially in dictatorships that are crazy about controlling attention.
My observation is that by shutting down access to a service, its users wonder what happened and asks questions: attention is drawn to the event the shutdown was supposed to suppress. I noticed this clearly last year, when on the 20th anniversary of Tian'anmen all major forums and Web 2.0 sites in China were down for maintenance. When I asked one of my students about this, he said he nearly forgot about that event, but the shutdown made him remember.
Now to Foursquare. Because a few users checked into Tian'anmen Square, all users in China could suddenly no longer access it, and I suspect that quite a few became aware again of the crackdown. Exactly what a demonstration should result in: a few people take action, a lot are affected and some of those start to think about the issue.
So, let's see whether we will see a similar game next year. Ideally, like this year, another newly popular service gets selected, people check-in, upload, share, or whatever is done on that service. It gets blocked, people pay attention. Targeting a Chinese service would create more attention, of course, but might be more difficult since content creation is often already controlled. But taking down more and more Western services creates attention, too.
