From Motown to Tehran - Before Breakfast

Here is where I started: I woke this morning checked my laptop for emails and logged on to my Facebook account and ended up asking...

How did you hear about The Princess of Wales’s death? Did you read about it in newspapers, hear it on the radio or perhaps you watched the reports on television as the events unfolded. It was a story that was slowly played out through the media as the world’s journalists gathered information and wrote their pieces.

How did you hear about Michael Jackson’s death? Chances are it was either on Facebook or Twitter. The message was spread virally. Rumour was written as fact before it was confirmed by either the doctors or the family. People all over the world knew that Michael Jackson was dead before his body was cold.

Who controls the information that we are fed, on a minute by minute basis? It seems like just yesterday it was Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer but now more often that not it is the new breed of ‘citizen’ journalist, the blogger and the man or woman with the mobile phone or camcorder who is on the spot as things happen. There is no censoring or verification of most of this news unless the story is later taken up by one of the ‘old media’ organisations. Yet we believe it and take it as gospel.

Factual reporting is a dying art form. Opinion pieces, like this one, are the new way of disseminating news. The Internet gives people who live in countries less liberal than ours the ability to create change. It is no wonder that all through the world governments both elected and non-elected are nervously trying to limit the amount of damage that this freedom can cause by creating new laws to enforce censorship.

From pondering I started to wander and then went in this direction…

Censorship has always been an issue that arouses strong feelings on both sides of the debate. Does anyone have a right to restrict anyone else’s ability to access information? If we lived in a perfect world, which clearly we don’t, then there would be no need for any form of censorship. Fairness and equality for all would be one of the underpinning bulwarks of our Utopia. However people being people this is not how our ‘real’ world works. We live in a world filled with deception and manipulation with self interest and selfishness. So somewhere, someone decided that we could not be trusted to monitor our own reading, viewing or web surfing activities; but the world has changed. The old argument of “if you don’t like it turn it off” has lost some of its power. Today it is almost impossible to turn off information. Information is the constant white noise that continuously wraps us in its warm embrace.

People and more importantly governments are scared. They are scared because they are losing control and the more they tighten their noose of censorship the more people are demanding their right to freedom of thought.

In Iran the message of revolution is being carried to the populace and the outside world by the Internet, mainly Twitter, as the Government tries to control every other foreign news source. Images of a beautiful young girl lying, dying, in the street from an assassin's bullet are carried on to Youtube. Her eyes stare at the camera as her blood stains the road as her life force leaves her.

Similarly in China the ruling elite censor and distort reports from inside Tibet or indeed any of their ‘spheres of interest’ throughout the country. Computers are now being sold with inbuilt filters to block sites that the Chinese describe as ‘unsuitable’. China is now trying to construct 'The Great Fire-Wall' to keep their population 'safe'. They have asked, (demanded) that new software should be designed by Hewlett Packard, Dell and even Apple to allow each keystroke entered on your computer to be tracked. This would allow the Central Government to effectively control exactly which computer user is accessing what sites and then take ‘appropriate’ action.

The Australian Labor Party is proposing to expand an already existing censorship system that allows the government of the day to block sites that it considers to be unsuitable, or worse sites that are not in line with the ‘public morality’. 'The Black List'. The examples used to justify such a move are always sites that promote, propagate or groom young children for sex or sites that associate violence and sex. Of course there is a case to be made for censoring web sites that seek to exploit young children for sexual gratification but who will be setting the limits, who will decide what is acceptable? We all remember what happened to Bill Henson’s photographs.

Senator Conroy the Labor Senator in charge of the implementation of the filter says that there will be an ‘opt out’ option, so you can contact your provider and advise them that you would like to have the filters lifted from your computer, with the exception of ‘kiddie porn’ and ‘R-rated’ sites.

The three major ISP’s in Australia all claim that the proposed system is unworkable and will slow Internet access down by as much as 80%. However as technology improves and the Chinese Government’s demands for greater control over its citizenry increase, then surely Prime Minister Rudd’s ideal moral, Christian, right society is only a mouse click away.

Now at the end I am here; worried about freedom, gossip disguised as news and the Nanny Rudd state we are all about to live in. Who would have thought that the death of Michael Jackson would cause me so much concern?