Blog: Freedom or Privilege?

The Internet's awesome growth has given the freedom to use the connection without limitations. The success is derived from the interactive atmosphere, most importantly, the Internet can world widely spread to every communities and the whole world. Hence, to enroll in the space of freedom has been known as a pervasive act, a place where people can always voice out their discontentment. In vogue, the application has turned into a privilege; it allows every user to convey the truth and to make emotionally demands.

People use the privilege to communicate with their own and the outside world. Blog has become a power that people make democratic demands and desiring of political transformation. In some developing countries such as Iraq, Cuba and Egypt, the access of The Internet is among the restriction so that the country will not end up in rebellion. However, blogging is not only about a definition of democracy, nor the case of making the country more open. In fact, it is a term of people asking for greater living and just.

There is a mistake in Western societies, where the journalists have wrongly interpreted that in China, with the commoncensorship system, people are hoping for an open democratic system. In fact, the web has taken effect of managing the society towards greater social demands.

Why Censorship?

Censorship is the suppression of speech of communicative material which is considered inappropriate, harmful or critical to the government or community (Wikipedia, 2009).The web has undoubtedly honored its claim to be the democracy of the air (Jenkina, 2005). The blogger often claim that they are merely keeping the bad guys honestly. It is controversial that with the filtering process, the information flows will only fake in its way of reporting.

Censorship of information is ineffective due to the underlying distributed technology of the Internet. Censorship is not a long-term solution pertaining to issues like religion sensitivities, hate speech, pornography, excessive violence and so forth. However, the most crucial key is that the content of the writing must always come in relation of reality and self (Putnis,1996). It is essential for people to judge by themselves what is right or wrong is important.

Despite overwhelming censoring, still, people's freedom will actually speak out in the end. It is a contradiction to sustain democracy if the authority implements censorship. If freedom is about to voice out, it is a good opportunity for the Internet to provide that kind of exposure for us to learn from different opinions and point of views.

References:

Jenkina,S. 2005, 'Under my keyboard the dest shakes. The Bloggers are on the march', Times Online, 11th Mar, viewed 12th June 2009
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk>

Wikipedia, 2009, 'Censorship', viewed 13th June 2009
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki>

Putnis, P& Petelin, R. 1996. Professional Communication: Principles and Applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney.