Note: I'm a technical blog writer and if you are reading this from a Java/IT blog-aggregator, it's probably that I labeled it incorrectly for some reasons.
This blog entry is written for the sake of being patriotic (patriotic doesn't mean that you are siding any party but you love the country for your own god's-sake reasons) and not being a quiet blogger, in response to:
If you read about one of my entries earlier ago, I attended a blogger's meeting and one of our forum discussions was about being a responsible blogger and how we should exercise the freedom of speech. That simply says that bloggers in Malaysia do meet up to talk about serious stuffs and care much about the country's future, but sadly, bloggers are wrongly labeled by the Malaysian media and government as irresponsible and culprits (citation needed).
In the discussion, we mentioned about the impact of blogs to the upcoming election in my country. (And for my dad who did not really understand what bloggers truly were but did read about some influential one being a DAP guy from the paper, I spent some time to explain to him about cyber communication, and I urge you to do the same to your parents.) And at that time, I did not really realize about how our government would react like today's, and it would have not been fun if I did realize, perhaps, would just feel a little bit more disgusted.
A few years back when it was our last election, Internet and blogs couldn't play a role in driving and educating the people, mainly because at that time Web 2.0 has not exploded yet and personal homepage could hardly be widespreaded unless you hosted interesting contents, and simply at that time, the voters preferred reading cooked-up news from the local media (citation needed), which I believe could be the matter of age. Right now, as people move with Internet daily or in another words: Internet moves and feeds people to be more intelligent, the decision of casting a vote can be more rationally made than emotionally, and surely for that, our government freaked out (did they? citation needed) and all the hypes of arresting and suppressing bloggers came out (citation needed).
To brief you, in case you do not know or read the links above, blogs make some parties unhappy and they thought of eliminating or controlling them as they could for other protocols, say, newspaper. Being a blogger and all-time geek in responsible of helping the growth of my country in terms of Information and Technology, I have a few words to say: the tool is neutral and innocent but opinions are always subjective. I would love it, if, besides of reading all other political blogs, my government and the ruling party could set up some good blogs to write about what they have done good for our country daily.
If any piece of the content above is offensive and considered breaking the laws of Malaysia, please let me know, as the content is written when I am physically in Sydney and the data is stored in Google's server which I believe do not have an immediate mirror service located at Malaysia at the point I commit this cyber crime (at the point I press the submit button).
yc, BLOGging
2 comments:
hey yc! i remember you! :)
the only way media is only is through the Printing Presses and Publications Act where the govt is simply at best arbitrary when giving licences to media org. that's why there are are more weird malay hantu magazines compared to critical newspapers or magazines (they've not responded to malaysiakini's request to go to print for the past 8 years). then there's media ownership. like NST is own by Umno by proxy, The Star owned by MCA etc.
so this is why blogging is feared because the very existence of this tool - its the beginning of the reversal process. sure, guns don't kill ppl, people do. blogs don't hurt people, opinions do. but think about how the government wants to take this tool away from us simply because they don't understand how to use it themselves or engage bloggers in a correct way or even like you say, blog about what 'good' they've done themselves. It's impossible unless they dare take the China route to ban IPs etc.
whatever the govt has planned in clamping us down will do nothing but great disservice to freedom of information and expression - which will once again put us in the international limelight for all the wrong reasons.
How's the weather in Sydney? :)
Combos are not always nice. Religion + politic, politic + business, and we have religion + politic + business in Malaysia. :-)
Weather in Sydney? It is always cool during the winter! I'm probably gonna miss the Merdeka, as I'm flying back on 31st, noon.
yc
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