Censorship Is Losing Its Relevance in Today’s World. Do You Agree?
“If one were to post a blog entry titled ‘Jasmine Revolution’ several months back, he would probably be asked to have ‘a little tea-talk’ with the Chinese police”, a citizen mordantly remarked. Indeed, when the call for a revolution was at its peak, the Chinese government tried all approaches ranging from sporadic searches to large scale new blackouts in an attempt to clamp down on those who voiced out. Nonetheless, details about the revolution still remained widespread across the Internet. It is thus pertinent to question the effectiveness of censorship in the age of new media. While censorship had been useful in the past, now it seems effete in front of the gigantic amount of information produced and the staggering speed at which it is delivered. Hence censorship is getting increasingly irrelevant in the age of new media.
In the past, information is usually disseminated in the form of books or newspaper, both of which requires huge amount of capital to produce and are either controlled by state-funded media corporations or run by a few private juggernauts. Censorship is highly adapted to this kind of situation as the amount of information delivered is generally small, and it has enough manpower and resources to scrutinize every chapter in the book, or every news headline, and check for any undesirable contents. In the age of new media, however, technologies such as the Internet have pushed the amount of information produced to unprecedented heights: any individual with a computer or even a mobile phone has the capability to publish information to the public. Twitter, for example, has reported that it receives hundreds of millions of tweets a day, to the extent that their servers are frequently struck off-line by the surge in information. The gigantic amount of information is one of the major factors causing censorship to be virtually defunct. There is simply no time or manpower for censorship authorities to filter every tweet, blog post or Facebook status,
In the past, information is usually disseminated in the form of books or newspaper, both of which requires huge amount of capital to produce and are either controlled by state-funded media corporations or run by a few private juggernauts. Censorship is highly adapted to this kind of situation as the amount of information delivered is generally small, and it has enough manpower and resources to scrutinize every chapter in the book, or every news headline, and check for any undesirable contents. In the age of new media, however, technologies such as the Internet have pushed the amount of information produced to unprecedented heights: any individual with a computer or even a mobile phone has the capability to publish information to the public. Twitter, for example, has reported that it receives hundreds of millions of tweets a day, to the extent that their servers are frequently struck off-line by the surge in information. The gigantic amount of information is one of the major factors causing censorship to be virtually defunct. There is simply no time or manpower for censorship authorities to filter every tweet, blog post or Facebook status,