Tuesday 4 August 2009

Banned: McDonalds and YouTube

Two things banned here in Tunisia, flip sides of a controlled state.

I can live without McDonalds. I think Tunisians can survive too. I want to congratulate them. Ostensible reason is failure to source ingredients locally but I bet its a simple whack of demagogy.

YouTube is harder. Not because I use it every day. But it means I am cut out of a main channel of expression. People do create useful things on that channel, and it takes away from the full set of applications I need for research. Harder also for people to be aware of what the lack of it means and to evaluate how much they are short-changed.

Would I ever employ, for a creative online task, a team based in Tunisia if they had no access to one of the web's major phenonmena ? No.