A partial wrap of the protests over the weekend.
Coverage of the Brisbane rally is at Nocensorship.info, and Skribe has uploaded a citizen journalism video report of the Perth event to YouTube:
Please feel free to add links or reports in comments.
It’s worth noting as well that the latest Essential Research poll found support for the censorship plan running at 49-40% [via The Poll Bludger]. Remembering that their sample is online and thus of internet users, there’s still obviously a way to go in turning around public opinion on this issue.
Related posts: The politics of the clean feed and protest tactics.
I’m sorry to say it, but we really have become a technology backwater. Remember the days when we were the first to take on any new technology? Now, we’re so technologically illiterate, we’re all swayed by crappy motherhood statements that insist that “we can/must protect the kiddies”.
Does it bother anyone else that we don’t have a mainstream technology program on TV (something like Click on the BBC) – you know, something that the great unwashed can get their weekly fix on technology. The reason I ask is that there is currently NO medium where topics like this can be given a decent dissection. Yes, ACA might do a story, but they get more mileage out of titillating the audience with soft porn or scaring them with paedophile stories so they’re they’re hardly going to do it justice. However, if we had something like Click, it would be nothing to demonstrate how naff all this stuff really is and how easy it would/could be to circumvent.
However, at the moment, the pollies are feeding off the majority’s complete lack of understanding about the technology and are ramming it home. I thought we’d seen off all this crass mismanagement of technology with Howard’s lot yet we seem to be seeing the same illogical/uninformed arguments being recycled with Rudd.
Of course, something that looks like it will protect the kiddies, regardless of its effectiveness, is going to be more politically successful than that nasty dangerous freedom and lack of censorship. I don’t think parents like being told that making sure their kids don’t look at porn is their responsibility.
Nothing about this filter is going to prevent people who want to access illegal materials from accessing illegal materials. It *may* stop kids from stumbling across porn – but sure as hell it isn’t going to stop anyone who’s looking for any.
What it will do is annoy everybody who likes having a fast internet, regardless of what they’re viewing; if it slows down access to the rest of the internet, e-commerce will suffer. As GoTroppo has pointed out, we ARE a technological backwater – and if Conroy gets his way, we’ll stay that way. Nice job.
The question is, how can we present this information in a way that is a) important, and b) relevant to Joe The Non-Internet User?
It *may* stop kids from stumbling across porn – but sure as hell it isn’t going to stop anyone who’s looking for any.
So what’s not to like about it then?
@ Marvellous Mr B,
The closest the ABC has to a tech show is Good Game – a program I can’t help but think is as useless as Wilson, seeing that its target demographic will have already got the preview, downloaded the beta, have tired of it and have cast aspersions on the product before the relevant episode ever gets televised. It also has a documentary segment, but it’s far too nerd-factorish. Zero host charisma, too.
There’s an idea for the ABC – make a Top Gear-of-technology, and have it actually get stuck into politics once in a while.
(In before Balance Police)
@H&R
We tried to get the ABC interested in exactly that sort of show back in 2005. Even produced a pilot, but they’re simply not interested.
Sometimes how things are done is as important as whats done.
And the way this decision was done really stinks imo.
I almost threw a shoe at that jerk Conroy on the ABC last night, while he was yapping on about ‘ Open and transparent processes’, and why Telstra should adopt them.
I don’t have much time for Telstra – but maybe they were just copying him.
Conroy is single-handedly making a mockery of all the ALPs mucho stated ( Faulkner and Gillard for example) ‘open-and transparent’ pretensions. He’s also demonstrating once again for the record that in many ways the ALP right is actually shockingly even worse than the conservatives.
Bearing in mind the apalling, unwatchable, cringeworthy mess that Australia made of making a Top Gear of cars (a subject which, there is some evidence to show, we can be quite good at), I suspect our chances of ever seeing a worthwhile Top Gear of technology (a subject which, whatever our delusions, we’re astonishingly bad at) are, at a conservative estimate, zero.
I actually find TGA watchable. It’s by no means as good as the British version but the first season of the revamped TG was unmemorable too. I don’t think TGA has the right host combination yet and that’s the main problem. Their writers also need to learn how to write snappier hooks. It takes a while to get the right combo and the current Australian industry lacks serious skills in almost every department so they have even more to learn. Unfortunately the typical response has been like TIB’s. In Oz you have to get it right first time or the Cringers start howling, “Getit orf”.
@wbb
It won’t stop anybody who’s looking for child porn, either. Or anybody who’s dedicated to circumventing it.