Eshin Direct

It’s been a week since the furore over China banning certain blog services in China flared up. The story itself has had some success in reaching further than just the community of bloggers, first jumping to Slashdot.com, which got itself subsequently banned, and the baton being taken up by Reporters Sans Frontiers in a April 1st article about the imprisoning of a Chinese Cyberdissident. Glutter continues the good fight with continual reporting on the situation on her own website and sparked the initiative to turn websites black in protest of this ban.

Last week, I stated that my logo will be black striped for one week and then it’s back to my sexy new logo (hey, I took time to design it, so I value it). However, it appears that May 3rd is World Press Freedom Day and that sites like Glutter will be staying black until that date. Eshin Direct will stay with the black-striped logo too until May 3rd to show it’s support for the protest. One month is perhaps not that bad and with my readership of 2, I’m sure it won’t make that much of an impact.

Does it appear that I am backtracking from my stance that freedom of speech isn’t necessarily sacred? Not really. I have always believed in a freedom of speech that is backed up by a degree of intelligence, common sense and social responsibility. I guess I’m just being cynical and what I really believe in is the “privilege of free speech”. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

At this stage of the world, the people aren’t ready for the power that is promised to them. It sounds patronising but we are not ready yet for the noble ideals of democracy and free speech. The groundwork has been laid, I’ll admit, but we are almost like children playing with a gun with these high ideals but no responsibility to them instilled in us. Pundits harp on about freedom of speech being an inalienable part of human rights and yet they exercise their right to speech by harping on about any crap they feel like, like leching and being insulting.

Again, how can we be expected to rise up to the lofty values that democracy promotes if we ourselves do not rise up to the challenge?

We need to stop letting other people and things think for us. Waving democracy and freedom of speech in the air and letting it serve as a social panacea isn’t going to work. The basic ideas of democracy give people the right and the power to determine the way in which their government is run, their nation administered and how their individual lives are impacted. It’s a tremendous amount of power. One which I have my doubts on whether we can wield it, and others like Glutter still believe we can.

Yet with this power for the people to decide their own fate, freedom of speech, comes great responsibility, socially and to oneself.

This is to engage in intelligent dialogue and through education. It is your responsibility, if the power has been shared to you in a democracy, to have the right knowledge to make an informed decision. You have a social responsibility to do so. Too many times, people aren’t informing themselves and behaving like they were the decision-makers in the country. They still feel powerless to intervene in the workings of their nations. Yet many do not want the responsibility to do anything about it (no voters), lack the responsibility to make an intelligent decision (I’ll vote for the Green party because I don’t like the other two and not because I care about the environment), or just a lack of responsibility at all (I’ll behave in this way because it is my right to do, damned with how it affect society).

So it is for this reason why I support the idea of free speech online. People need information. People need to learn to evaluate that information. People need to be able to decide things having learned the facts, fictions and fantasies of things before they can decide. Of course, it opens the flood gates for some strange, irresponsible, and dangerous ways to express your right to free speech, but the more information that is out there, the more informed the population is when they have to evaluate what is the truth, what makes sense, and how that information takes them forward.

If democracy comes about truly in any country (for I believe it does not exist anywhere satisfactorily), then people need to understand the responsibility that it brings. Failing to learn and to be informed when you have that power is not an excuse.

If this is not enough reason for me to keep my logo blackstriped until May 3rd, then Eyal had made a good point about the priority of some social issues over others. Watching Star News Asia yesterday evening, I watched a report that claimed that hundreds of thousands of women are abducted each year as “stolen brides” to cater for the growing disparity of men and women in China (approx 40m single men in China?). One of the main roots of the problem is poverty. Considering that the number of people in China who have Internet access are a relatively small number, and made up of a generation that cares more about the increasingly modern way of life rather than dealing with politics, the threat that weblogs present is relatively small.

However, by banning them, it gives more power to them, and more resources are spent on dealing with tracking swapped hosts, changed ip addresses, or people simply to surf for content. How exactly do they justify this expenditure of resources when they cannot even ensure the safety of their own citizens from abduction, rape and bodily harm. Do not tell me that banning Winson Choi’s blog on the Merits of Char Siu is a significant national threat.

China will become one of the power houses of Asia and the world. It already has, with the Western conglomerates already leaching away to get their first share. Be great and wonderful. Don’t be great and terrible.

Tags: Political Rants