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Non Fiction
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CDA Statement
"Tolerance has never brought civil war;
intolerance has covered
the earth with carnage."
Voltaire
Every new media will cause commotion when it arrives. They always have and they always will. When the media has the expressive and communicative power of the Internet the consequenses can be very far reaching, and thus the commotion caused by it's arrival as a common medium are very great.
What easy access for more people to the Internet means is simply a more efficient way to find people of the same inclination and to locate that hard to reach information without spending as much time and effort. It is a place were thoughts, ideas and opinions can be easily shared. It is also a place were business can be made, deals of all kinds can be negotiated and plans can be brought to fruitition.
For some this means incredible possibilities, the advent of a new borderless trade system where the level of service and personal contacts govern who will fare the best. An all-win situation where the true power of capitalism can finally flourish.
For others it means the possibility for terrorists to gather undetected, for criminals to aquire new knowledge and contacts and for the undiscriminated sale of all that can be sold.
The reality of the Internet is of course not either black or white. Like the rest of reality, virtual or not, it's various shades of gray. For those who see it as mostly black that does not matter. Since there exists darkness in the mix, all of the Internet is dark and ominous.
Thus they hold that it should be regulated, censored and controlled.
In the past we have seen that no good comes from centralised censorship. All that happends is that those who want access to "forbidden information" go underground and that absurd "fringe cases" crop up where the censorship laws are unclear. Why would it be different with a complex and international organism like the Internet?
To censor information from someone is to judge that someone to be incabable of common sense and judgement. Is this what our civilization has fallen to? A government acting like big brother for - in practice - the whole world, deciding that people cannot themselves know what's best for them?
The real issue here is that it's not possible to educate people by keeping them uneducated. What is needed is active information. If propaganda is displayed on the net, counter with truth. If there exists material that is disagreeable to some, then they do not have to access it, and they even have the possibility to display their own views and values and make them heard.
This way everybody wins. Is it so difficult to handle the fact that all people are not of the same opinion or have the same dreams and values? Let's hope that it isn't.
If this sounds harsh it is because my feelings on the matter are strong - I am very much against centralised censorship and big brother mentality.
For more balanced views on the matter I can recommend EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org, who maintain a large database on real world cases on the matter.
Thank You for standing my rants this far. If you have any comments, email them to the webmaster.
Please note that all views expressed here are the author's own.
Last updated on 1998-06-01; 12:45:22 using Frontier 5.0.1 and Edlin.
Send comments to the webmaster at vapors@pobox.com.