"This site is blocked because its content may be offensive to the political, moral, or religious values of the United Arab Emirates."

Last year, two talented young Americans left their home in Seattle for a one-year stint in Dubai at a TV startup. They were homesick and hurtling from the culture shock, both on the street and in the workplace. Hungry to reconnect and shivering from the need to blog, they feverishly typed myspace.com, and the above pop-up greeted them. Make your blood freeze? It should.

We all know about the power of the Internet and free information and community building yada yada yada… but try writing a blog about user generated content without stepping back to look at the monster. Look through my glasses.

Growing up in a third-world country under the rule of a military dictator who was in bed with Reagan, information was a relative term. I was blown away when we finally had more than one channel on TV, and it didn't go off-air at 11 pm with the national anthem. For the first part of college in the US, I combed the microfiche section at the library and did reference
searches manually. Having lived half my life like this, I still (and I hope I never stop) gape in awe at the Internet. And more than anything else, at user generated content.

Fresh-off-the-boat, I was wowed by the freedom of speech in the US. 12 years later, nothing scares me more than mainstream media and communications. It's scary that all our "diverse" mainstream newspapers, TV channels, and production companies are owned, at the end of the day, by two media moguls, and they're most likely cousins. It's scary that they tell you what they and their pimps (they call them sponsors) think is okay. But it's scariest to watch people accept FOX as gospel truth. Yes they do. And record labels have killed the music industry, and Hollywood is mind-numbing, and public school curricula is barely-disguised brainwashing.

Time to unplug from the machine: enter user generated content. Of course that's how the Internet started, and as is inevitable, it got appropriated so that "user generated content" is now a subset of the web as opposed to being the entity itself. But it's alive and kicking, and it gives users the ultimate alternative education. Music, art, indie films, independent voices,
debate, and a truly equal community free of race, gender, religion, bias. A pseudo-hippy's dream come true. I know it's not all good, but at least it's free and it challenges you to question. At least people are doing it for the love of the game, not for profit. (Which, according to our local hero, Mr. Gates, kills innovation and threatens the stability of our market economy.)

And most importantly, it's giving the mainstreamers a run for their money and making them raise their bar, which is critical in the environment we find ourselves in today.

Being a writer, painter, and general arts and info junkie, I find therapy in sites like Myspace (even as it morphs into Murdoch's minion), atomfilms, limewire, blogspot, and youtube, where you can connect with the up and coming Seattle hip-hop crew you just heard at Bumbershoot and let them guide you to other unpublished, label-free artists. Or post a short animated film you made with your neighbor and watch it gather eyeballs and commentary. Voice unfiltered, uncensored opinions, give reactions, and create an educated community of free-thinkers. Publish your blogs into a book. And the ultimate expression of user generated content: when it leaves cyberspace and turns into a performance art installation in subways and city streets, a collective cry against the establishment. Or enters people's living room in the form of a coffee-table book that lets people see that the very secrets they think make them abnormal are what they have in common with everyone else.

User generated content has raised the bar for information sharing, and keeps both the purveyors and the absorbers on their toes. For example, at the TV startup in Dubai (yes, I was one of the talented young Americans mentioned above; wasn't that obvious?), I had the pleasure of having dinner with three noted AP photojournalists, who had flown in from three different countries across Asia and Europe for an AP conference. The subject: how to preserve the integrity of photojournalism (i.e. their jobs) when camera cell phones were allowing the average Joe to submit amateur pictures faster than they could get to the scene. My dinner guests were enlightened enough to be horrified by the premise that photojournalism can be considered merely snapping a picture of the occasion, as if there's no difference between reportage and an op-ed, and that there wasn't an art to telling a story with pictures. But the rest of the industry is obviously concerned and pulling up its sleeves to make sure it does a better job. Good.

As for the absorbers, they treat user generated information with a healthy dose of skepticism, which should always be there anyway – why should CNN or Encyclopedia Britannica tell you what to think?

Reflecting on today's date, I have to say: In case someone missed it, the last 6 years have broken some records in how oppressive it's gotten. McCarthyesque fear-mongering and downright exclusion silenced the loudest voices in the mainstream. They're seeping into user generated spaces as well, but for every soapbox that gets hijacked, two new ones pop up like a benevolent virus. Napster dies, Limewire takes over, Google sells out, YouTube improves… I'm still waiting for someone to kick myspace's ass now that it has ads for hot singles all over the front page, and the "Featured Artists" section has more record-label artists than indies.

Bottom line: soldiers fall, army keeps marching, and it's not just in America, which is only expected at a time when every issue is a global issue. I was in Pakistan when the Mohammed cartoon controversy broke. Dodging the odd burning McDonald's and rioting student, I got off the streets to my computer to find that the government (peace be upon it) had blocked blogspot and blogger.com, because bloggers had posted the cartoons
on them – never mind the accompanying intelligent debate. Within hours, I had connected with a fellow blogger and found the temporarily displaced community reconnected at another blogsite, screaming bloody murder.

My perspective, take it or disregard as conspiracy theory: don't take it for granted that America is immune to downright blockages. National security versus individual rights is a sticky battle. As someone who ran to the land of the free from the land of the Officially and Absolutely NOT Free (also known as OANF), I've been alarmed at and betrayed by this country starting to eerily mimic the one I left. I can't have that, have nowhere else to run.
Gotta love user generated content, gotta keep it breathing.