Technology brings to Democracy, is it true? (PART 3)

I have talked about the Accessibility for the past two posts last week. Now, I will continue the topic that we have discussed before. Today, I will share something about the character of Diversity in a democracy system. There are three aspects of diversity which are the diversity of the range of different information, idea and the pattern of thinking, and the pattern of media. We always say that we are in the democractic country, but have we ever thought that do we really have diverse information?

I think that technology actually can bring various of information to people. For instance, the internet system can provide us unlimited resources to identify the information whether it is correct or not if compared to newspaper, radio station, and television. The obvious comparison is that all of the traditional media always choose the information for us to read and to know it.

On the other way round, actually we can choose what kind of information we want to obtain through internet or the new media. This kind of technology has different structure of operation which can let us freely to select the information. For example, we can get the latest information through internet immediately so that we do not need to wait until the next day to buy the newspaper. The current hot issue in our society is about Internal Security Act (ISA) which known as a bad act to cope with people who are against BN government without fairly interrogation in court because of the reason of internal security in Malaysia. Now, I just want to ask you what is the definition and the interpretation of Internal Security in Malaysia? There are different definitions of Internal Security if we compare between the newspaper which mostly controlled by our government and the bloggers in internet. As we can see, there are two kinds of paradigm and ideology.

For new information, our government used the ISA to arrest Raja Petra (known as most popular holder of an objection website-MALAYSIA TODAY), Tan Hoon Cheng (a senior reporter of Sin Chew Chinese Daily) and an opposition leader of DAP. I am very not satisfied with the current government using ISA to arrest people who are telling the truths, I think everyone has the right to get these information because the newspapers had lost their reliability and people need to gain different information from other ways. I want to voice out that we are not afraid of the ISA and people should not afraid also in order to protect our democracy system in future. If you are conscious of this issue, ISA is one of the tools that government always uses for cracking down on people who threaten their regime. Is this ISA really useful for the security of our country or protecting the hegemony of politicians?

Let me take another example from foreign country. Community radio is a media which is used widely in many countries like Vietnam, Japan, Australia, Philippines, Thailand and so on. Here, I am going to focus on community radio in Thailand. This media is a very important channel which disseminates a variety of information to the public like farmers. However, since the changes of politic, there is an act which might restrict the community radio from disseminating the information. From here, we bave to think, is the information in Thailand still diverse?

We really need diversity of information to solve a lot of social problems and this can be done by the internet platform. A society which is considered to have a healthier development is which has freedom to speak up and free diversity of information so that people can be mature to think and discuss national problems.

BY : ER SIANG (ryan) & YING SHIN