The world has changed immeasurably in the last thirty years. We’ve gone from mobile phones to computers to the internet to all sorts of devices like iPhones and iPads that seem to do just about everything.

Some of us use this technology to play games, whilst others use it to make our jobs easier; in fact there seems to be an endless list of applications for the online world. Perhaps though, its most impressive attribute is that it gives just about anybody with an internet connection the means to speak out against tyranny and oppression.

Now, with the anonymity of the internet, people who would never have dreamed of speaking up can finally have their say without the same fear of reprisal. But is this blogging community really representative of the population or just a small section of it?

“I think in Russia the digital divide is shrinking," says Emily Parker, former Wall Street Journal reporter, State Department policy adviser and Author of the book Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From The Internet Undergrounds, about the power of bloggers and internet activists to organise political protest and effect policy in the 21st Century.

"Yes, there have been surveys saying younger Russians are more in favour of internet freedom. But some of the Russian internet activity I talk about isn’t just anti-government, it’s anti-corruption. It’s asking for more transparency and a fairer system. Alexei Navalny, who’s the most famous blogger in Russian, became famous by launching campaigns against Russian companies and corporations that he saw as corrupt.”

Yulia Navalny, Alexey Navalny and Ilya Yashin at Moscow rally, June 2013, Photo: Commons Wikipedia

But how did Alexei back up his claims of corruption? “What’s extremely interesting in Russia is that there’s a lot of information already online. What Navalny is doing is using public information that’s available. So why is this official buying golden beds, or why did this official ask for drummers from Burundi to come to his party? In the past Russians had this information but they just didn’t have any way to use it. So he took this information and got people motivated to do something about it.”

But did the Russian people feel compelled to act following the Alexei’s revelations? “Russians were pretty apathetic, exhausted, 85% of the population didn’t think they had any influence on politics. So they didn’t have any real interest in doing these big energetic internet campaigns. So Navalny would give them these very simple solutions. All they had to was fill out an online form or write a petition. Or ‘here’s how to report potholes in front of your house’. A lot of these campaigns were small, but they got results.”

“In 2011 and early 2012, Russia was home to some of the largest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union. So it’s not only virtual.”

In China, the internet presence is huge, with countless web users working, gaming and socialising. Historically however, free speech and China have not been synonymous. “There’s hundreds of millions of people online. But the thing that’s interesting is China has a very sophisticated mechanism for monitoring the internet – they have firewalls and armies of human censors and filtered keywords.

But there are still a lot of Chinese who learn to get around those controls, either via technological means or just by writing in code. So there’s a very dynamic internet opposition in China despite the fact that censorship is very heavy. It can be extremely simple – they might just misspell words. For example, June 4th is a very sensitive term, the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. So instead of June 4th Chinese people were writing May 35th. It was only a matter of time until authorities caught on and May 35th was banned as well.”

So how have the Chinese Government reacted to online whistle blowers and protesters who have shrugged off their firewalls and censors? “Some of them are definitely being arrested. That’s why the title of my book is 'Now I Know Who My Comrades Are'. It’s much easier for governments to crack down on isolated dissidents. When you have tens, thousands, millions of people fighting online, it’s harder to crack down like that.” Despite some related arrests it seems as though Chinese bloggers are having a marked effect day to day.

“When too many people are talking about something online, the local media has to report it. Sometimes it’s more of a headache for Chinese officials to suppress it than to just deal with it.”

Almost a polar opposite when it comes to internet saturation, the island nation of Cuba has in recent years also developed a dissident blogging presence. “In 2012 internet penetration in terms of the World Wide Web was only around 5% of the population. However I think the Cuban government realises that if they want to be a modern economy they have no choice but to increase internet access. What I’ve observed in my book is that even though there are relatively few bloggers in Cuba, the internet has still had a transformative effect on those who have access to it.”

The fact that the Cuban population’s access to the internet is still so minute begs the question of who their efforts are aimed at. Surely the target audience is the outside world? “They are communicating with the Diaspora, the Cuban exile community, human rights foundations. But it’s also had a psychological transformation on individuals who their whole lives were afraid to say what they think, and the internet is where they find their voice. They’re always extremely careful about what they say even to people around them, and the internet is the one place where they feel they can speak clearly and critically about their country.”

While some bloggers try their best to remain completely anonymous for fear of reprisal, others proudly declare themselves to the world. “All the bloggers in my book aren’t anonymous. They’re fully on the record; they’re using their full names. In Cuba particularly, using your real name can actually afford you some degree of protection, because it is harder for the police to just make you disappear if you have an international reputation.”

The power of the internet is undeniable and in its current form it’s still a little like the Wild West in that no one, even the government, has complete control over it, it’s still a frontier. It’s this freedom that comes with this that affords people the opportunity not only to stand up for themselves but also to unite with their “comrades” instead of being left to stand alone.