Anya Schiffrin is an adjunct faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She worked in Hanoi from 1997 to 1999 as the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
A protester during Iran's 2009 Twitter revolution. (AP Photo)
Will the Internet foster democracy by disseminating information, frustrating censorship, and promoting citizen networking that circumvents and subverts repressive governments? The drama of the 2009 demonstrations in Iran (which ultimately failed to change the regime) has been used as evidence of the power of digital networking to defy repressive regimes. And WikiLeaks seems to prove that the genie of censorship cannot be bottled in the Internet Age.