I stumbled upon this story awhile ago, and was curious to see what my fellow Dopers thought of it.
It discusses recent changes in Burmese politics, and how the opening of Burma (also called Myanmar) after decades of military rule is changing life in the country. Part of what will be a yearlong series by the AP, this particular article’s topic is censorship. How do you go from having to self-censor every thought, every expression of dissent (or have it rather vehemently censored by the government) to having a far-greater freedom of speech?
One Burmese writer in particular has said, "With censorship gone, it’s harder to write." (Emphasis mine). Interesting topic.
It’s hard to leave your past mindset, especially if it underpinned everything you do. The company I work for used to be running deep in the red. As a result, everything was done at the lowest possible cost. This always limited any systems we deployed. We have since been bought by a company that has money to invest in the business. It took more than a year for me to stop making “ok, what’s the cheapest thing we can build” the first question of any project. Similarly, it took that long before I started to think of more ambitious projects that would be able to take advantage of our expanded budget.
I can understand the problem of the quoted writer. Before they had a limited set of subjects they could write about, and a limited set of things they could say about those subjects. Now, they could write about almost anything.
I heard a story on NPR recently in which it was reported that some diplomat from the US gave Myanmar’s leaders a copy of the series The West Wing as an example of functional leadership in a democracy.
I know a couple of people who are creating high-tech startups in Burma/Myanmar. They live in the Bay Area, but they go there for extended periods, like several months at a time. They say it’s like a new gold rush there, the country is opening up so fast, a lot of companies want in at the beginning.