Cross-posted from Facebook
Back in the 1960s, people would practice kremlinology, where people would guess who was in and who's out in the USSR based on pictures. When someone important fell out with the regime, the leaders would literally white them out in official pictures, rewrote history, etc. This allowed the regime to maintain the illusion (at home at least) that the Politburo knew what it was doing and was only interested in advancing the USSR.
Nowadays, we have something called the "Streisand Effect." The Streisand Effect is when someone tries to take something "off the Internet" (ex: a picture of Barbara Streisand's house), and people respond by reposting it almost endlessly, ensuring that the picture/information/whatever is actually far easier to find than before.
Now that North Korea has wiped the Leader's uncle off of the country's official website, the 1984 strategy of controlling the past in an attempt to control the future is competing with the obstinate attitude of the Internet. Wonder what Orwell would have thought about this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/north-korea-attempts-to-purge-online-memory-of-executed-leader/
Back in the 1960s, people would practice kremlinology, where people would guess who was in and who's out in the USSR based on pictures. When someone important fell out with the regime, the leaders would literally white them out in official pictures, rewrote history, etc. This allowed the regime to maintain the illusion (at home at least) that the Politburo knew what it was doing and was only interested in advancing the USSR.
Nowadays, we have something called the "Streisand Effect." The Streisand Effect is when someone tries to take something "off the Internet" (ex: a picture of Barbara Streisand's house), and people respond by reposting it almost endlessly, ensuring that the picture/information/whatever is actually far easier to find than before.
Now that North Korea has wiped the Leader's uncle off of the country's official website, the 1984 strategy of controlling the past in an attempt to control the future is competing with the obstinate attitude of the Internet. Wonder what Orwell would have thought about this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/north-korea-attempts-to-purge-online-memory-of-executed-leader/
