မႀတ္တမ္းမႀတ္ရာ လုပ္ေဆာင္မႁ
English Essay: Censorship
Search the Internet for articles on democratic revolution. You will get thousands upon thousands of articles, some of which inciting violence toward a perceived tyrant, others promoting peaceful means of revolt. These articles could be written by anyone: a college professor, a common worker, or a young revolutionary, but as it stands today, you probably wouldn’t be able to find any of these articles online if you live in China. As we begin to move toward an era in which anyone can easily publish and access information, we see that it is increasingly hard to censor information, yet there exist methods by which some ideas can be slowed or hidden.
Like Catching Ghosts
Once online, worlds can be opened and accessed. Ranging from economic theories and product reviews, all the way to personal diaries and cultural distaste, anyone can find an author that they can relate to. Consequently, anyone can write and expect to find an audience. Online web logs such as these can lead to people coming together to agree on idea, or possibly even coming together to create bigger and better ones. Debates over issues that are fictional, as well as discussion over things that affect day-to-day life in other places take place all around the world on a daily basis.
With the advent of global communication through the Internet, people are able to push ideas and news into the spotlight faster that ever before. For example, when the 7/7 bombings occurred in England, moments after there was a visible swath of media pushed forward online by bystanders and survivors of the attacks. “The London bombings were the first domestic news story where the most significant coverage came from people at the scene - via mobile phones - rather than from established news outlets.” (Bell). This widespread availability of products that enable you to produce media and send it out for the world to see, has led to an increase in citizen journalism. As Ivan Tossell says in his article ”Think globally, Blog Locally”, these citizen journalists also have the luxury to “offer residents things that their newspapers don’t: that wealth of daily items that might not be “newsworthy,” but are perfectly engaging all the same, and a place to talk back” (Tossell).
The Internet has also led to an increase in general expertise. Since anyone can contribute to the global conscience that the Internet has founded, people can lend their special skills and knowledge and help educate others. Dozens of how-to websites allow people to exercise a wide variety of skills. On one such website known as WikiHow, one can get people’s advice on subjects ranging from “How to Optimize Computers” all the way to “How to Run Up a Wall”. Other sites offer valuable information in an encyclopedic format. Wikipedia is a great example of such an attempt to harness the collective collaboration of the world’s people, and create a reference that anyone can use. As described by CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout, in Wikipedia “an expert on any topic can find a home” because Wikipedia “allows users to go in and edit entries” (Stout). Sites such as Wikipedia have their skeptics, but recently Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, ran a report that states that “experts rate the articles [on Wikipedia] more highly than do non-experts.” (Anderson). Articles such as this are more proof for a phenomenon called “collective intelligence”; an example of which is also seen “when political parties choose a candidate or create policy platforms” or “groups of strangers solve problems and edit collaborative encyclopedia entries.” (Steele). With wide spread collaboration often involving several people spanning many countries, it seems impossible that these powerful ideas, ideas that people heavily invest their time and effort in, can be hidden from people, be it some specific group, or everyone in general.
Ideas, naturally, are hidden when on the Internet. If Internet search engines did not exist, someone could write pages upon pages about a certain subject, and it would remain unknown to you unless you specifically knew that website’s address. To alleviate this inconvenience, many companies started up to index the Internet and help people find what they are looking for. First it was Yahoo!, then MSN, and now Google is the dominant Internet search engine on the Web. Many people visit these websites to be redirected to places on the web that hold information that they seek. These Internet search engines eventually became the gateway to the wealth of information found on the Internet. The country of China realized this fact, and to extend its control over its citizens, sites like Google “will comply with local Chinese laws and regulations,” (Mills) and censor themselves according to Chinese media laws. This is not the first time that Chinese governmental authorities responded to the growing freedom of ideas that the Internet brings forth. As described in news.com’s article “Google to censor China Web searches”, “A crackdown in 2003 closed websites and internet cafes and saw the arrest of dozens of online commentators” (Qiang). While this method of censorship is limited to only being reactive to growing informational threats to the Chinese control over the media, it is not entirely effective. Shortly after ‘Google.cn’ succumbed to Chinese censorship laws, hackers got to work immediately and began to create code that bypassed the censoring protocols. There is an ongoing battle between these clever hackers who do what they can to promote informational freedom, and the Chinese government who wills to crack down and control what information its citizens have access to. As radical as these measures are, the censorship used is not necessarily effective enough to block information transfer over the Internet completely.
The government in the country of Burma took even more drastic measures to ensure that certain information flow would be blocked. In November 2007, monks in Burma protested for democracy; an idea that the Burmese government had been fighting for years. Reacting to this, many of these monks were killed, and the only was the outside world know about this was through “about 1 percent of the Burmese population [that] has access to the Internet” (Kaufman). In response to this, the Burmese government quickly realized that they should shut down the information flow in order to remove evidence of the crime committed, and so the entire county of Burma had its Internet and cellular phone services shut down. Even so, in the few hours after the event had happened, the news quickly spread, showing everyone that information cannot be stifled. Through censorship efforts like these, people come to realize how powerful information really is.
In early 2006, the movie V for Vendetta was released. Based on the fight against censorship, the main character of the film, V, quite eloquently stated about ideas and censorship that “Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.” (Wachowski). The beginning of the film starts with a short quote about the power of ideas, which states, “We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught. He can be killed and forgotten. But four hundred years later an idea can still change the world.” (Wachowski). Amid the entire flurry of information, and the censorship arising to control it, we are constantly reminded time and time again that the power of ideas cannot be tamed and controlled. As we progress forwards as a collective human race, we generate our own ideas and as such we will to pass them on to the next generation, for building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815613,00.html)
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070105.gttossell15/BNStory/)
(http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/02/citizen_journal.html)
(http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296.html)
(http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/)
(http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/04/15/open-source-intelligence_cx_rs_06slate_0418steele.html)
(http://www.news.com/2100-1028-6030784.html)
(http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6707)