Ada Lovelace and Huang Hung

25/03/10 posted by Liz Niland

Did you know yesterday, March 24, was Ada Lovelace Day? Don’t worry, we didn’t either. According to the official website, Ada Lovelace Day is an “international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science”. The day is named in honour of Lord Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, a maths whiz who, in the early part of the 19th Century, is said to have written what are now thought to be the world’s first computer programmes. Given we were too preoccupied with blogging about Australia’s internet censorship issues yesterday, today this female tech blogger offers a belated ode to Ada with a celebration of the writings of a Chinese woman, Huang Hung.

A social media maestro and columnist in her home ground, and a sought-after contributor to assorted Western publications, Hung offers an insightful opinion on online life from behind the Great Firewall. Although she says that China's internet users will experience very little difference from Google's withdrawal, Hung can see benefit in Google’s move. She says that, along with “a very small number of netizens, mostly writers, editors, and university professors and researchers” she applauded Google for their strong stance.

Interestingly, Hung says that a Chinese person that doesn’t work in the media industry “doesn’t really feel the invisible hand of the censors”. As someone who has lived in Beijing and worked in the media amongst local people in the infamously censored nation, I agree wholeheartedly with Hung’s sentiments. 

For a technically savvy young person who can speak English and knows what they are looking for, negating the censors is something Hung says is relatively simple. Since the explosion of social media too, Hung can see the Firewall beginning to crumble at the edges (“Web 2.0 technology has blown a huge hole in the Chinese censorship system”) but is doubtful of it collapsing anytime soon. “We have to be patient, we have to treasure the incremental changes that come our way, we have to use self-restraint, and we are good at self-censorship.” Happy belated Ada Lovelace Day to you, Ms Hung.

Lastly, one party that is probably celebrating Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese search market is Baidu. While the company has been surging ahead as the country’s search leader for some time, Baidu shares hit new heights yesterday, reaching the $600 price mark. In 2009, Baidu claimed almost two thirds of search revenues in China, more than doubling China’s numbers. Gaining such traction in the world’s largest country has delivered Baidu with the bronze medal for the biggest search property across the globe, narrowly sneaking in behind Yahoo, but well-beaten overall by Google.