notes

All I could do

Censors appeared to ease their grip on the Internet, mobile phone text messaging and uploading videos to the Internet, allowing information and even rumors to flow freely. One text message insistently making the rounds forecast a quake for Beijing in the early morning.

“It was really all I could do to convince my friends that this isn’t something that will happen,” said Graham Webster, a journalist and blogger on technology issues in the capital.

From Johnson, Tim. “9,000 still buried in China quake debris; toll at 12,000,” McClatchy Newspapers, May 13, 2008