It is rare indeed for me to find myself feeling any sympathy at all with acts of censorship - and particularly not with the acts of China's Net censors, the buffoonishly heavy-handed and bewilderingly inconsistent rabble that I have dubbed The Kafka Boys.
But I hear that their latest piece of petty tyranny has been to block Facebook in China. And I find that I do in fact loathe and despise Facebook even more than I despise censorship. Good on you, Kafka Boys! If you block Twitter too, you will be doing the world a great service.
Although, if such measures are conceived of as part of a policy of social control, I think they could be a serious misjudgement. Social networking, instant messaging, chatrooms, and other general blather sites eat up a huge amount of young people's time - and hence keep them off the streets, prevent them from doing anything significantly subversive.
The Internet - alas - is not so much about the dissemination of information and the organization of protest as it is about the cultivation of apathy and inertia. It is the new "opiate of the masses". Repressive governments - like China's - ought to be doing everything they can to encourage the soul-sapping, time-wasting addiction among their populations.
No comments:
Post a Comment