Internet Censorship and the Simple Minded

Censorship Reaches Ridiculous Extremes, by Kari Lyndersen of AlterNet, focuses on the censorship of the Internet at public schools and libraries, as well as the pressure on public schools to teach abstinence only cirriculum. This article discusses the implications these policies have from widening the divides between economic classes, to spreading STDs through ignorance.

Internet Racism Targeted, by Jamey Keaten of The Associated Press, discusses how the Internet has been abused and used to spread hate propoganda. The article argues that more than half of all hate sites are hosted in the US, and that these sites are a primarily source for the recent rise in racist violence.

There were also three other articles focusing on Cuba and China's censorship of the Internet, but I will just focus on the first two articles.

Should public school libraries and federally funded public libraries have their Internet access censored? The people most effected by this sort of ignorant policy making are obviously the poor. Everyone else in middle to upperclass income brackets would have the luxury of browing the Internet uncesored from their homes. It seems strange to want to put those who have the least at an even greater disadvantage. Obviously this is a bad idea. So what do we do when little Billy stumbles upon pornographics sites at his school or public library? Well how about we explain to him that expressions of intimacy and love are a positive side to human nature that he'll understand more clearly when he is older. That would be awfully un-American of us wouldn't it?

Should we teach abstinence instead of sexual education? If you are reading this and you fail to understand why abstinence is an ineffective and damaging curriculum to teach children, you should probably stop reading and return to a more natural and safer task like drooling. Teaching abstinence in place of sex ed is reason number 96778372921739050868 demonstrating that religious devotion and intelligence operate on a sliding scale.

Should the US censor hate sites in an effort to reduce violent hate crimes? I've said it in class, and I'll say it again. The human species has 1000s of years of practice at committing violent acts because of personal bias, and believing that recent Internet technology is causing us to regress in some way is highly questionable. Unfortunately to fairly protect all free speech we must accept the lesser examples of society who would choose to spread hate propoganda. If anyone is actually swayed to become a bigot because of a hate site they were an unfortunate event waiting to happen. Hate sites should be protected under a fair interpretation of free speech, and those who choose to visit those sites regularly should be minitored carefully like any other potentially volatile person in our society. We can't abolish this sort of bias by banning Internet access to it, and I don't believe there is a direct correlation between hate sites and any rise in violent crimes. Social situations like bigotry are complex problems that can't be reasonably understood by over-simplified 1-1 correlations. If our government truely wants to reduce hate crimes they should increase public education funding for a change, instead of their usual backwards approach of stopping some series of events by targeting the finals stages of the events.

Nearly Top Secret

This is a response to the following 3 articles.

Federal Web sites violate privacy policies, from the Associated Press, reports the illegal retention of vistitor's information on Federal sites.

More information under wraps, from The Boston Globe, reports vast amounts of non-classified information being withheld from the public by officials as low ranking as clerks.

Top Secret, by Todd Shields, reports on previously public information now being withheld from the press, and the possible government abuses that may arise.

Well, since this is a pretty broad range of material, I'll focus on the Top Secret article primarily. Will the government abuse the system once they withhold more of the checks and balances rights from the Media? Of course. You'd be fool to trust the government not to after our present administration has been caught at it already. Does the News Media have the unequivocal right to access all public information? Absolutely not. With the right to public records, investigative reporting, and a major share of checks and balances to government power comes certain responsibilities. Namely the responsiblity to report important information only and to use responsiblity, sensativety, and discretion about people's personal lives. The US News Media has lost their reporting pass as far as I'm concerned. When News Media has been reduced to a circus of morons gossiping about sex scandels and religious zealots extremists views (and whatever else morons gossip about) than what do we really lose by their loss of resources? Not very much. If you need evidence to that fact than read the Top Secret article and see how thin the arguement for the benefit of Media in recent history has been in aiding our checks and balances process. They only have a couple of good examples because they didn't have a lot to choose from.

Obviously the course of recent events regarding privacy will hurt the US citizens, because we need responsible government and Media and we have neither. I wish I had an positive spin to end this story with, but I personally believe things will get a lot worse before they get better.

Are We Doomed Yet? Review

The basic premise of this article is that with the growing threat of self-replicating technologies (nanotechnology, genetic engineering, etc.) we have a fundamental choice of how we monitor and protect ourselves again their abuse. Essentially the author argues that we can trust governments to monitor and control the information citizens receive, or we can give all citizens access to monitoring tools and allow them to police themselves (like how computer virus protection is presently handled). The author writes that any improved protection gained would probably not be significant enough to justify sacrificing personal freedoms, and that once lost these freedoms would much harder to gain back. (Pacotti)

I believe the author may have over-stated the potential threat these technologies could cause to mankind. Global extinction of the human species because of a terrorist engineered nanotech disease doesn’t seem very likely to me. Of course there is a potential for significant disaster in this hypothetical scenario, but these technologies are in such an early stage of infancy that creating policies to safeguard their abuse is premature. I believe it’s far more likely for governments to misuse these technologies for biowarfare, than it is for crazed citizens to unleash their own personally engineered diseases. Take nuclear technology for example. The only non-test nuclear bombs ever dropped in the 50 years since their inception were dropped on two non-military Japanese targets by the US government.

This leads me to my other point. I strongly agree with the author about the rewards not justifying the sacrifice of our personal freedoms. If we really do only have two scenarios to pick from, I’d definitely choose the society with an open information system that polices itself. Of course government agencies will always exist and act as authorities on protecting citizens, but I sure as hell would prefer to be able to monitor those agencies for potential abuses of power. Only a fool would trust our government enough to regulate the access of all information. Unfortunately fools are not in short supply in our democracy, and the current trend has been for people to sit idly by while our federal government continues to vastly outgrown the scope of its intended powers of operation. I’d much prefer a more Jeffersonian government, but now even talking about that reversal in power seems naïve and idealistic.

Pacotti, Sheldon. "Are We Doomed Yet?" Salon.com (2005). 28 Apr. 2005.

Blogs of War Review

The basic premise of this article is that blogs, online interactive diaries, have empowered many people to report their experiences as sort of amateur journalists. Without the restraints of media conglomerates, and with the luxury of remaining safely anonymous, many people have used this form of communication to provide information they otherwise would have been unable to. One profound area of blog reporting has been with war, and this article focused mainly on Iraq war blogs. Several major Iraq war blogs are examined for their basic content in the second half of the article. The author concludes by stating that the impact of blogs will be significant in future reporting. (Piper)

Considering the author is also my professor, I’m obliged to say I wholeheartedly agree with everything said in this article. Pure genius!

I’m not really sure what more I can add. I suppose the truest test for how long blogs remain a good raw source for information will be closely related to how long it takes someone to discover a way to profit financially from them. As useful of a tool as blog reporting currently has been, the ease of anonymously spreading misinformation could be a potential for abuse. I’m sure some have already attempted to use blogs as a platform for promoting their own professional agendas. While blogs continue to grow in success, and the abuse of them grows as well, sifting through the misinformation will become a much more tedious task. Perhaps the best thing for blogs will be to remain underestimated much longer after their initial boom in popularity.

In our age of information censorship and media consolidation, blogs are a welcome relief for those seeking alternative news sources. Because the format for blog reporting is so free form, any potential abuse of the system will probably not destroy it completely, and blog reporting will continue to be safely used for some time to come. Blog reporting clearly has the potential to do a lot of good.

Piper, Paul S., and Miguel Ramos. "Blogs of War." Searcher (2005). 14 Apr. 2005

Media Literacy (Ch 5) Review

The basic message of this chapter is that contrary to popular belief, news is a biased construction of the organizations that report it to us. While journalists claim to strive for balance in reporting, analysis of this process proves that most stories are not balanced. The almost universal formula for reporting news has led to a very narrow spectrum of stories being reported. News organizations have shifted from informing the public to entertainment in an effort to win ratings, get more corporate sponsorship, and ultimately make more money. Finally, in order to be well informed the public needs to be skeptical of all information they receive, search alternative news sources, and attempt to interpret the news from different points of view. (Potter, 84-107)

My reaction to this chapter is very similar to my reaction to John’s Stewarts Crossfire interview, and to America (the book). Yes I agree with most of what this author says about the subject, but I didn’t find the chapter be at all informative. Furthermore, the oversimplified way of explaining the subject might be construed as a wee bit derogatory. That is unless of course the author was attempting to reach middle school students with his message of healthy skepticism for news organizations. At least in the Jon Stewart cases the topic was presented in a humorous manner, so the jokes were new and that made it entertaining. With Media Literacy there was no such cushion.

As I’ve already stated, I do agree with most of what the author had to say, however my cynical side prevails against James Potter’s final message of all we need is skepticism and objective reasoning to have a better informed public. In a more ideal world this message might be true. However, I personally believe that if you make it to adulthood and still need Media Literacy to inform you that the news is biased and that you should be skeptical about what information you believe, your reasoning skills are probably a lost cause. That probably sounded mean, so lemme rephrase that. There are likely two types of people in the world. There are the types of people who prefer letting a large organization think for them, and then there is the 0.001% of the population remaining that chooses to think independently. Is it possible for a Morlock to become an Eloy? Sure! Though it is just not very damn likely.

We all know that human history has had a very long tradition of attempting control each other through monopolizing information, and I doubt there has ever been a society completely free of that struggle. In a fictional world where the news media had integrity, there would still be remain other darker organizations willing to exploit the simple folk for their own selfish purposes. My point is this: If the population wasn’t misinformed about their world because of popular news media, well damn it, they’d go find someone else to misinform them. One thing we know how to do well as a species is to be misinformed.

Lastly, I’m not really convinced that you can teach the reasoning skills necessary to be skeptical of complex social problems. Logic seems like the sort of thing that you either have or you don’t. Sure it can probably be taught to a limited degree, but enough to objectively understand the 100s of factors influencing something as multidimensional as poverty for example? I just don’t know.

So as not to sound like a stick in the mud, in closing I’d like to say, “what the hell, give the peasants books and see what happens.” What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, and I don’t know of a good alternative plan not involving mass extinction. To end on a positive note, at least studying this information experiment on the masses will be way more cost effective than using lab monkeys. Thank you.

Potter, James W. Media Literacy. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 2001. 84-107

Jon Stewart on Crossfire & America (the book) (Ch. 7) Review

"To do a debate [on Crossfire] would be great, but that's like saying pro-wrestling is a show about athletic competion." - John Stewart on Crossfire.

In response to Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire as seen in the following video clip: http://homepage.mac.com/duffyb/nobush/iMovieTheater231.html

My response to this clip would be more interesting if I disagreed with what Jon Stewart seemed to be saying, but his opinions towards Crossfire and bipartisanship closely align with my own. It's unfortunate that in standard Crossfire format, neither side was able to make an intelligent argument backed by reliable facts and sources. As usual the show quickly degraded into a playground argument of who can speak the loudest. This seems to be the standard format for Crossfire and every other political TV show I've personally watched.TV commercials often use the lowest common dominators of human nature to grab our attention; using sources like sex, drugs, repetitive songs, and pretty flashing pictures to sell their products. In many ways I believe political talk shows, "debate" shows, and television news media are exactly the same. Their purpose is to sell their product, in this case their own respective brand of bipartisanship, and to do this they will use misleading statistics, visual imagery, biased sources of information, childish moral arguments, and personal attacks against those who disagree. Perhaps the single biggest disappointment is that popular television news media will filter what information they provide us based strictly on the considerations of TV ratings.

A prime example of this is as follows: During the months following the September 11 attacks on US soil any visual imagery seen on popular news media of Afghanistan and Iraq were video clips of human suffering and injustices in those countries. Every time I watched the news at that time I never failed to see a picture of the some form of human suffering taking place in the Middle East. I saw clips of rubble from previous battles, clips of poor peasants begging for food, clips of radical extremists firing weapons, etc. The video clips I never saw during the several months following Sept. 11 were the clips of the middle class Iraqi citizens. I never saw video clips of any Iraqi malls, or elementary schools, or office buildings. The fact is that we never got to see the more conventional side of Iraqi culture because the powers that be wanted to sell a war, and what better way to do it than by convincing US citizens we need to liberate the poor downtrodden Afghans and Iraqis. Now I don't mean to imply that there weren't very real injustices taking places in those countries, because that's obviously untrue. What I mean is that we weren't shown an unbiased glimpse of Iraqi and Afghanistan culture and allowed to make our own adult decisions regarding what should be done. We were shown a very narrow, misleading view of the circumstances that just so happened to support the views of the ruling political party.

I could write another 20 pages regarding my opinion on the lack of journalistic integrity with our modern corporate run news media, but I'm going to cut this one short here and say this: If anyone else feels the same way I do about this subject there is one thing we can all do. Stop watching TV news, and turn towards more unbiased sources online like google and yahoo. I personally won't even a pick up a local paper because if I want to read about international news I'll be lucky to get 1-2 pages buried in the back out of most local papers. If most of us stop watching TV news they will be forced to change their approach.