A Burmese Case Study: Far from Inherent – Democracy, and the Internet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inability of the Junta to stop information from leaking during the 2007 Burmese Saffron revolution has been used by many as evidence of the intrinsic democratic character of the Internet, and the power of citizen journalism to create dissent. However, the issue becomes increasingly complex when framed in a more comprehensive sociological context. How can we call the Internet inherently democratic when restricted access prevents the vast majority of voices in ‘developing’ nations from being heard and acknowledged? The socio-economic composition of bloggers from Burma is never scrutinized: who were these bloggers and were they the average Burmese citizen? Restrictions and filtration software complicate the discussion of the assumed and inherent democratic dream of the Internet and raise questions about the role of the state. While the Internet may provide a new medium for dissent and opposition, its impact is offset when bloggers represent only a small, particular cross-section of the Burmese population, and by the conscious efforts to censor, limit and monitor user activity through state control. The Burmese Saffron revolution acts as a reminder that the world is not on an equal playing field, and that restrictions, including socio-economic barriers and state intervention, impede democratic visions of the Internet.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".