‘if you want to test a man’s character, give him power’ –
Abraham Lincoln
Being a blogger, you are expected to be politically correct
and subtle with your humor because here’s the thing about power, it doesn’t
encourage mocking. Sarcasm gets away because not many people are able to see
the underlining pun and even fewer find it funny. So in a country where subject
such as how many cartoons should kids be exposed to, makes it to national
newspaper’s headline after being debated furiously in parliament, I found it odd
that arresting people over posts on social networking sites/blogs came as a
surprise. Furthermore, when a search engine is forced to tell you that govt’s
are planning to gag internet to suit them, it brings up a huge dilemma.
Internet is and
always has been free barring some pseudo democracies and countries feeling too
good about themselves. World Wide Web,
in its earlier phases, was supposed to be paid according to rumors but the guy
who invented it decided to give it up for free. Millions of data transfer and
invention of iPod’s later, apple fans please pay attention; people realized
what a boon that turned out to be. Egyptians can elaborate here. People across
the globe could make their voices heard. Every opinion mattered. If you have an
internet connection, you could make your voice heard. Similar minded people
joined hands to make something as basic as peer-to-peer exchange, a big
industry. Newspapers began to break news on their online portal in real time
because of large readership. Comment threads were opened for discussion and
turned out people who seemed pretty content earlier had an opinion too. Secret
wires between diplomacies were put up for the world to see the dialogues
between closed doors.
But like every good
thing, some people took the power of anonymity along with the ability to
express themselves independently and used it to voice their extreme opinions.
When I say extreme, I mean the inability and refusal to hear and/or acknowledge
a counter view. like in real life, people began hijacking discussions forums
and comments section were strictly moderated because there can be no limit to
what you can say when you don’t have to say it face to face. Govt’s understood
the need to monitor and make laws, which governed Internet. But there lies the
problem.
How much policing is too much?
 |
| Google's initiative |
Which brings me to my
post, is government right is trying to enforce laws that prevents us from
looking at certain pages because they think its not right? Isn’t government, by suggesting that we can be
tried for something that so much as even causes ‘Discomfort and annoyance’,
taking away the right to speech in some way? More importantly, how and why do
you plan to filter communications between citizens of free country? Is a post
on some social networking site worthy enough to get you detained? 10 years
before today, this might not have created such uproar but now, when every
second marks a new breaking news and the 24-hour news channel thing has
actually started to make sense (talking in terms of quantity, quality on the
other hand leaves much to be desired).
Talking about the
illusive democracy we live in, Mr. Sibal has been defending government’s action
continuously by saying they don’t want to curtail free speech and are in favor
of citizens having opinions. Well I trust Mr. Sibal because he is in a position
of power and for the well being of my extended family, I cannot afford to
afford to disagree with him. But if Google is anything to go by, and I don’t
see why they would want to lie about it, there seems to be some
misunderstanding somewhere. Because we are number 2 in asking for details about
citizen’s browsing details and asking for shutting down sites. Plus, those two
Mumbai females did not have a very good experience for having an opinion
online, and her doctor uncle will vouch for that because his office got
ransacked by some guys who disagreed with said lady’s comments and were not
able to find a dislike button on the networking site in question, nor did that unknown
guy from Pondicherry for causing displeasure to a certain MP. Let me specify
explicitly, for obvious reasons, that I don’t necessarily agree with either of
these school of thoughts but these cases could have been handled better. And I
am not even going into the way the north-eastern fiasco was handled in recent
times.
And shutting down
every channel/medium, which disagrees with government, is certainly not the way
to go forward. Agreed, people need to watch their words and verify sources
before making claims but going all ballistic on netizens because they don’t
make too much difference in polling number game is not a very smart move. What
makes government’s claims even more absurd is the way Internet is treated when
used in general discussions. Considering how it has turned every user into an
activist of sorts, we, as citizens who voted them to power, need to ask
governments, what exactly is that they are afraid of? Why would they want to
shut down a page? Because I still
believe that something, which connects people and makes them audible can only
help in growing democracies if dealt with wisely.
Agree/disagree, have something to say? do share \m/oO\m/
