Blog Commentary

Its been so long since my last entry! Today I shall do a blog commentary on my classmate Geng Yuan's blog, http://harangueing.blogspot.com/.

After reading through the entries he posted, I have decided to comment on his entry entitled "Internet censorship grows worldwide"

I agree with him as he agrees that internet censorship has grown worldwide. Giving the examples of the Middle East where governments do not want those ideas which are in contrary to Islamic teachings, thus having censorship in the information provided to the public. Also the example of communist China where the government stops information opposing the idea of communism eg. democracy, censorship has taken place. These two examples are strong enough to say that censorship has grown worldwide.

Further on, he mentions about the point of propoganda where it is derived when censorship has occurred. I agree with him as this is a form of how government spread the information which they want and discarding those that they do not want. This is propoganda where the public only gets to see what the government has already chosen for them and not the other side of the information which is discarded, soon, the people will be like what the government wants.

However, I do not quite agree with him too. Censorship and propoganda is also unrelated. Censorship refers to the discarding of undesired information like pornography, terrorism teachings etc. But propoganda refers to the selection of information. These two terms cannot be related to each other and be refered as the cause and effect.

Also, I feel that the example he gave is strong but not of much relevance to the main topic of internet censorship. Does the people in the Middle East use internet daily or depend on internet strongly? I think their means of obtaining information would most likely be from newspapers, radios, television programmes and seldom from the internet.