‘Technology bring to democracy’, is it true?? (PART 1)

As we know, a lot of people think that if we have advanced technology, which can bring us forward, then we will be able to develop into a more democratic country like the United States. But, I just want to bring out some questions to discuss with you all…Is this really true? If our society possesses advanced technology, our nation will become more democratic in the aspects or human rights, attitudes, thinking or opinions, truths and so on and so forth? Just take a few minutes to think about it!
What is the definition of democracy? I think everybody have a basic understanding about it. Here, I am not going to talk about what is democracy, instead, I want to share something on what do we need in order to be democratic and what is the reality we have when we have various technologies like the mobile phone, computer, PDA, Internet system, satellite, television, radio, newspaper and many more which enable us to gain the important information from all over the world.
When we talk about democracy…Accessibility, Diversity, and Accountability are the three aspects which we can use to see whether a country is democratic. I use the first alphabet from the three words to create a new word called “ADA” (Malay word), which means “HAVE” in English. Now, I want to ask do we have “ADA” in Malaysia where we always say it is more democratic than other countries? Let us do a little observation on our society. First, I want to talk about the accessibility in our democracy system in Malaysia. Long ago, newspapers were one of the main sources to get true and free information. Now news agencies are controlled by our government indirectly, and this control is due to power crisis. But nowadays, we have advanced technology like SMS and Internet to gain the true, free and various information to replace the newspapers. Obviously, the new technology actually lets us express our different opinions easier, discuss about our routine matters and making it more complete.
However, if we look into the issues in our country seriously, that we can know that it is not true actually. Let us use the current issue to talk further about it. MALAYSIA TODAY has been blocked by order of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). It is because it posted many comments which are able to incite the country’s multi-racial society to hate each other. Accessibility is basically about the equal chance that is given to everybody to gain any information and use the communication technology freely. In the case of MALAYSIA TODAY, the government blocked it for the sake of our society, do you agree with it?? Or you might think the government is trying to protect itself? If the decision to block MALAYSIA TODAY is to limit our accessibility to it, so now do you think Malaysia is still democratic???


BY ER SIANG(ryan) & YING SHIN