I wrote about Ashton Kutcher’s online duel with old media giant CNN. He won their close race to be the first Twitterer with one million followers, followed through on his pledge to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets, and inspired Oprah to sign up for an account—which produced a show devoted entirely to Twitter and, in turn, boosted Twitter’s membership by 40 percent. Old media big names still have a lot of fire power, sure, but there’s no denying the force @aplusk wielded in his favor. This was what I had in mind when news about the Great Book Blockade broke out, albeit silently, buried under scandals like Hayden Kho’s sex videos.
I first heard about the Great Book Blockade through an old college friend’s blog. Now a lawyer, he expressed his informed opinion about how the Great Book Blockade—which was to tax imported books either 1 or 5 percent, depending on whether Customs deemed said books “educational”—violated the 1950 Florence Agreement on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials, which our country ratified in 1979. You can find a copy of the Florence Agreement online, and you will find that, contrary to what the Bureau of Customs was trying to do, it guaranteed tax-free importation of books, educational or otherwise.
As I read through the comments section of my friend’s blog, I found “ground zero” of the growing online outrage: the article “The Great Book Blockade of 2009” by Robin Hemley on www.mcsweeneys.net. It was disturbing, to say the least, that I—who fancy myself relatively well-informed about anything related to literature—had to hear about this outrageous piece of news from a visiting scholar from the University of Iowa. In other words, a foreigner.
Then again, that’s the power of new media for you. Local book-lovers (lovers and haters of the Twilight series alike) banded together and released scattered, and yet concerted efforts, to stop Customs from taxing imported books. A Facebook protest group was created (membership easily jumped to 10,000), social networking and micro-blogging sites were filled with anti-Book Blockade updates, emails were forwarded, old media picked up the news… and now, Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ordered Customs to stop this inanity. That’s rare good news for our embattled country!
Already stressed from too many things, I purposely monitored the development of this seriously upsetting “book blockade scandal” from a distance. I merely scanned blogs and newspaper articles for progress updates, reposted some links, wrote some Facebook status updates, joined the Facebook group, and forwarded some emails.
I didn’t think I was doing enough—there were people discussing lawsuits and the like—but, based on everything that happened, apparently, expressing my outrage and spreading the information was already sufficient. It was tantamount to speaking up against a powerful evil that wielded its own convoluted interpretation of the law against an erstwhile uniformed public that quickly began to inform itself.
Technology has given us a voice. We had better use it wisely.
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