The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has built mass organisations of workers and communities that have erratically challenged class and market relations—verifying that taking political power is difficult but essential to fundamental social change and that capitalist cultural practices complicate the revolutionary process.
The new Venezuela social network, called Plaxed, which allows streams of short posts (200 characters), as well as event invitations, polls, and questions, was created as an alternative site so that files or personal details found on the network “aren’t blocked, erased, or followed” by U.S laws, said its creator, Cesar Cotiz, a systems engineer student.
According to a recent study on internet usage in Latin America, the Venezuelan people stand third in the region when it comes to use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter.
According to BBC Mundo, there is no evidence of Internet censorship in Venezuela. Other countries with no evidence of Internet censorship include Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, Chile and Paraguay. However, in the United States, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Argentina some type of censorship was detected.
On Wednesday Venezuelan Foundation Infocentros was awarded the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize in recognition of its work providing everyone with access to information and communication technologies to traditionally excluded sectors.
Cuba and Venezuela will jointly install a fibre-optic submarine cable between the two nations, a move which will “revolutionise telecommunications” according to Cuban Information and Communications Minster Ramiro Valdez yesterday.
In Venezuela, a nation with a population of about 27 million people,there are currently 9.7 million Internet users and 28.2 million mobile phone lines. In the last year, Venezuelans have also outranked nations worldwide in the use of social network sonline, such as Twitter.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the launch of his new interactive blog www.chavez.org.ve today, as part of a broader campaign to take the “media war” to the internet.
