These two words should be added to the urban dictionary. I would propose the following definition :

A feeling of fear towards the spread of information, or the existence of tools for the spread of information (specifically here, blogs) among the people served by elected and non-elected officers in power.

According to several articles in the news today, online information repression and censoring around the world is on the rise. A good article at MIT’s Technology Review quotes a researcher :

“Over the course of five years, we’ve gone from just a few places doing state-based technical filtering, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to more than two dozen,” says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “As Internet censorship and surveillance grow, there’s reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism, and economic development around the world.”

What I find rather hilarious is what South Korea does. According to the same article :

“The South Koreans block several North Korean websites,” says Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. “They even tamper with the system so that when you try to access one of those North Korean sites, the URL resolves to a South Korean police page telling you, ‘What you’re trying to access is illegal, and we know your IP [Internet protocol] address.”

If the South Korean information police has a little more sense of humor, they could’ve added, “Big Brother is Watching You” to that warning message. Compared to the old crude methods of blocking which required national ISPs to ban an entire domain (like the whole of blogspot) or other similar measures, governments now have much more control over the methods which they may use to control information. It would appear that this new level of sophistication in information repression has arrived thanks largely to technology provided by US companies. Also interesting, is that Thailand is blocking YouTube, that some countries block Google Maps (too much geography is bad!) and Skype and that some countries are practicing election-time-only censorship.

Although apparently informationaphobia haven’t reached Malaysia yet, we’ve been seeing some waves of blogophobia here, especially among our politicians. There has been much written about this. But my favourite one has to be three paragraphs in an article by Marina Mahathir on The Star :

As they say, if you cannot beat them (and you cannot), then you might as well join them. Indeed, there are several politician blogs that could be very popular.

The only thing, however, is that politicians must be prepared for the Net to bite back at them. Unlike ceramahs to supporters and cosy chats to compliant reporters, netizens have a tendency to talk back, and not always very politely.

If they think you are talking garbage, they will tell you. The only solution to this is to not talk garbage, which apparently some of our politicians find very hard to do. Perhaps this explains their reticence in embracing the Net.

I wish I dared to write something as cool as that! Malaysian politicians have suggested things as funny as registering or classifying bloggers. Although the government generally seems to take a negative outlook towards blogging, every now and then we get a breath of fresh air. I feel a healthy respect for a minister who is willing to allow for the concept of public intelligence.

Many people in public office seems to think that the existence of too many information sources causes people to become confused and that people are too dumb to be able to differentiate fact from fiction, hype from truth. Are the Malaysian internet public really that dumb? I honestly don’t think so.

If there is any reason at all that the public is unable to practice wisdom in information filtering, it would have to be due to the fact they have been spoon fed information that they’re expected to believe at face value for too long. Isn’t now the time to start changing that? The only way to fight (alleged) misinformation is with information. And information technology (ironically) has completely left them behind. Catch up guys. Start your own blogs. It’s either that or internet censorship.

The reason why I’m writing this in the first place though, is far more interesting. The level of controversy towards blogging have apparently reached a level where even administrators of private institutions are afraid of it. When I proposed to initiate a blog to discuss issues related to student development, which is relevant to what I do, I was told that it is a ‘difficult’ idea and that I should hold off on it until it have been brought to a meeting and discussed. The poor administrator is so afraid of the negative view of the powers that be on blogs that he hesitates at the sound of the word.

What an irony, here I was, wanting to spend some of my time to communicate with our students - to exchange ideas, discuss issues and fill in the gaping information vacuum that exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Leadership by ignorance continues to be the main practice. How can we be at the same time wondering why our youth are incapable of critical thinking and analysis, and of original ideas? How can we be loudly proclaiming the importance of information technology and at the same time attempting to stem the flow of the single most liberating product of this technology?

One of the greatest leaders of all time* put it quite eloquently :

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
- John F. Kennedy

But perhaps Jefferson puts it a lot more elegantly :

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
- Thomas Jefferson

I can’t agree more.

*Imo, he deserves that for being 1 of 2 people responsible for preventing nuclear holocaust on earth.

These days, it feels pointless to talk about climate change - everything there is to be talked about has already been covered - it’s such a hot topic these days. It seems to have hit critical mass thanks in large part (imo) to people like Al Gore. A best-selling movie and an Oscar for a global warming documentary! How do you achieve something like that. I am still a little dazed with disbelief at the amount of effort this man put into bringing awareness to this issue, and the level of success which he has achieved.

Of course, those of us who were willing to use our brains and the basic math we learned in primary school figured out the very bad stuff we’re doing to the environment years ago. I remember talking to friends about the urgency of world problems, and that there are very real possibilities that mankind can destroy itself, only to be silently stared at and thought of as some kind of hype-mongering doomsday soothsayer. (Ok so that line didn’t work out so well.) The author of the now famous “War of the Worlds” story puts it so well :

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G Wells

The above paragraph reads like a “I told you so” paragraph. However, there is very little to gloat about. International political awareness may have risen about this issue, but locally in Malaysia, awareness is still abysmally low. I organized a couple of events a few months ago to help raise awareness of global warming and its repercussions, and the disappointment was so stinging I literally had to eat ice-cream for a week. Amongst the staff and students of the whole of a university in Cyberjaya, I had about 40 participants max. In Melaka it was reasonably better though - about 75. But lol. 115 out of a population of staff and students exceeding 20 thousand is laughable. And we’re talking about a university here - the pinnacle of thinking, awareness and… oh who am I kidding.

For the brief period of time after the floods in various parts of the country, the papers in a need to relate the floods to something started interviewing climate researchers in our country. For a brief moment, local heroes for climate research like Dr. Fredolin T. Tangang and Faizal Parish had the opportunity to warn us that we have wild weather ahead. Now that the worst is apparently over, the media is generally silent about these issues once again. Until we have to ration water or mount more flood rescue operations of course.

In February this year, the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finally published the first of their reports. Being that this panel is a UN (and thus politically) initiated effort, they were very careful not to include conclusions which seem too drastic in case they make politicians and nations with vested interests in existing world-polluting enterprises unhappy. I have to hand it to them though. Without their effort (part of which I suspect is sitting in rooms debating about which pieces of damning research is too hard for politicians to stomach), there would never have been an ‘official’ (political) consensus that climate change is ‘real’. It takes millions of dollars and years of talking to conclude the following :

1. Climate change is real.
2. We (humans) are causing climate change.
3. We need to do something about climate change.
4. Urgently.

Like doh! Despite IPCC conclusions and the rise of international public and political awareness of climate change however, in discussions leading to what hopefully becomes the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the United States is still attempting to mess up declarations recognizing the four points above. In a G8 declaration set to be announced next month, they disagreed to :

“limit the global temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as an agreement to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.”

“acknowledge that the U.N. climate process is the appropriate forum for negotiating future global action on climate change.”

“underline that tackling climate change is an imperative, not a choice.”

“firmly agree that resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.”

“increase the energy efficiency of our economies so that energy consumption by 2020 will be at least 30 percent lower compared to a business-as-usual scenario.”

Thank God the rest of the world isn’t listening to them. However, being that they are policy makers for the most polluting country on earth, their resistance to address this problem is significant. From Hartford Courant at courant.com :

Philip Clapp, who heads the advocacy group National Environmental Trust and has read the document, said U.S. opposition to the draft declaration could strain the country’s relationship with its allies and jeopardize the world’s ability to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decade.

“The administration is proposing to eliminate any statement that acting on global warming is urgent and all measures that will begin to reduce global warming pollution, including any proposal to improve the energy efficiency of our economy,” Clapp said in an telephone interview. “A continued U.S. refusal to take a lead in combating global warming will set back progress for years.”

And from Bloomberg :

“The U.S. is happy to sign onto endless pages of meaningless verbiage, but they refuse consistently to commit to measurable action,” said Philip Clapp, president of the U.S. National Environmental Trust, in a telephone interview from Washington.

This is simply to ‘acknowledge’ the problem exists, and to do something about it. While all this silly political tug-of-war is going on, we’re getting information that IPCC’s report may not even be warning enough. In their need to produce a statement which is acceptable to international politicians, they have not taken into account possible non-linear climate changes involving the ocean conveyor’s destabilization (watch An Inconvenient Truth for that), evidence that previous predictions were too low and also recent research which demonstrates that climate feedback loops (translation: you mess with the weather, the weather messes with you) are happening years earlier than predicted, giving us reason to believe that global warming with happen at a quicker pace. Here’s an example.

I’m glad though, that public opinion around the world is changing. Sad that it came so late, but glad that it came at last! With more and more research on climate change producing alarming conclusions about the actual rate at which our atmosphere can potentially heat up however, I can’t help feeling a sense of queasy uneasiness. Whatever it is, we are already feeling the impact - I don’t think I’ve ever felt heat this bad, this consistently locally.

Now comes the question of whether all this came soon enough, and whether actionable plans can be rolled out before “damn it’s a hot day” becomes “honey did you close the rubber-sealed concrete cover of our underground cave?” With Bill Clinton and Al Gore on our side, maybe we can.