The debate on censorship will of course have extremities of opinions. With the latest umbrella rule of no bulk SMS-ing, and only 5 messages per day the population affected by it, primarily the networked youth have become vocal about the censorship, and the unconditional censorship.

In one of my previous posts, elucidating the role of Internet and censorship, I had called the Internet to be a ‘self conditioned’ environment – that is the arbitration mechanism needn’t be external to the system that Internet provides, but internal contradictions will nullify each other.

In this post, I am not delving into the rightness or wrongness of the decision of DoT about the curbing of SMS. I only want to probe and throw some light on one issue I too have been gravely concerned about, since the ubiquity of social networks in the last couple of years.

Sensationalising stuff and propagating junk seems to be innate to the reckless humans that we all are. And for the same reasons that the media today feeds us with futile, demoralising and un-intelligent trash, is somehow because a majority of the audience seems to get along really well with it. This seemingly natural tendency of populations to want more sensationalised news and reports, have now also percolated into the social network channels.

The ‘alter society’ that exists on social networks, where every one is at least 2x the nationalist, the linguistic chauvinist, the philosopher or even a parochial moron, is a haven for the no-action-only-bhashan crowds. Because social networks require no more commitment than an un-thought comment, a like or a share, there is very little holding on individuals who want to satiate their urge of doing ‘something’ about issues!

This provision of doing ‘something’ about many things people know nothing about is the grand depressing reality of social networks. Social networks are most efficient as broadcast channels, and like the Internet itself the framework can best be used for purposes which can alleviate or aggravate the conditions in the real world.

Ethics cannot be taught, must become the subtle way of life. With mere restrictions on propaganda, the real rot of irrational ideas cannot be eradicated.

Another excellent post that instigated me to write this post

http://kafila.org/2012/08/13/how-to-start-a-riot-out-of-facebook-yousuf-saeed/