Aung San Suu Kyi. Image: Newagedentists.
It's been all over the news that the famous Burmese democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was just released from house arrest on November 13. She was imprisoned during the early-to-mid 1990s after being elected, and has been almost continuously imprisoned since 2000. In her first big interview with the BBC (you can see the video here and below the break), she mentioned her first encounter with cell phones this past Saturday night when she met the crowds: "In the long years she has been under house arrest, the world has changed. The internet and the mobile phone have revolutionised the lives of billions around the world - including in Burma. Ms Suu Kyi was allowed to use neither gadget while she was a prisoner. When she made her first appearance on Saturday and saw the thousands of mobiles held up towards her by her supporters who wanted to take her photograph, she was taken aback. She was surprised when she first handled the mobile which someone gave her to phone her son Kim in Bangkok. She had seen them in photographs, but this one seemed so small and inadequate, and she found it hard to know how to listen to it and talk into it."
See my earlier post on Retro Telephones.
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The left-right paradigm of the west, outdated and wrong as it is, pales before stuff like this, and considering the horrors that go on in some countries, she was treated relatively lightly.
ReplyDeleteAs for cell phones, I still don't have one.
Looking at this story, I felt it was a graphic example where political repression, which is in some ways temporally regressive, was confronting the push of technology. Part of political repression can literally involve taking a person 'out of time' and putting them in a time capsule. I can't imagine what it must be like for Aung San Suu Kyi to deal with the internet, going from the world of not having it, to the level we are at now, overnight.
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