Tute Week 9

So, this week have had alot of different tasks to complete.

Sign an e-petition

The petition I signed was to protest against the governments cuts to Youth Allowance. You can find the e-petition here. Evidence that I signed the petition below.


Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site

The blog I responded to is by Amanda Mead, she writes a Media blog for The Australian. I commented on her story about a new show on the ABC by John Safran, a comedian who hosts a show on Triple J radio.


What is Barak Obama up to today?

Apparently he just went on David Letterman!



Find out who your local, state & federal representatives are

Local (Southport) - Ron Clarke
State - Peter Lawlor
Federal - Stuart Robert


Look up the Queensland or Australian hansard to find the last time your local member spoke in parliament

Thursday 17th September 2009.


Let your local member know what you think about their last speech

I went to Peter Lawlors website and found his contact details so that I could email him. See my message below.



Read the lecture and the readings, pursue a couple of the topics that you find most interesting and then post your blog with your well-considered thoughts about the theory and practice of politics.

One of the issues I was interested in and chose to investigate further was that of the citizen hacker. Stephen Stockwell provides a useful definition; "Hacking extends to cover any militant and creative intervention into any aspect of the media flow". The idea of the 'citizen hacker' proposes the notion that everyday people, through the use of new communication technologies such as social networking sites, YouTube, email, SMS etc can open up new channels of communication & deliberation, and therefore bring about social change. The internet has definatetly opened up many new channels of communication for people, and if they use them for beneficial purposes such as researching and voicing their political opinions, then this is definately better for society. A well informed society means they are more likely to elect the right people, and be aware if their government is decieving them and needs to be pulled back into line.

Another one of the interesting points raised in the article was that forwarding a political satire sketch could class you as being a 'citizen hacker'. On this note, here's one I thought was midly entertaining.

Another interesting (but confusing...) issue was Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The story goes that a bunch of prisoners are tied up for their whole lives so that they can only look at a wall. Behind them is a fire and between the fire and them, other people walk, carry things etc. The prisoners, use words to describe what they see eg 'man', 'cow' etc. However in reality they have never actually seen a 'man' or a 'cow', what they have actually seen is just a shadow. Having only ever seen the wall & the shadows, they believe this to be the only reality that is possible. If then, one of the prisoners is freed and he is shown the 'man' and the 'cow' who made the shadows, he would not be able to recognise or name them. If he was shown the outside world he would feel betrayed that this 'alternate' reality existed as he had only known the cave and the shadows. Plato argues the prisoner would be much happier to go back to his life of the cave and the shadows, to what he knows and is familiar with.

I'm going to have my own informed guess as to what this all means. I initially see examples between this story and the movie The Matrix. The character Cypher has been removed from the Matrix but wants to be put back. He knows that the Matrix is fake and that the real world is reality, but he would rather be put back into the Matrix and continue to live in ignorance. This is like the prisoner in Platos story that would rather go back into the cave of shadows than live in the outside world.

I also think it relates to the issue of our perception of reality. If for example, the government did implement a censorship program on the internet (see below for futher discussion on this issue) then they may block sites that criticized the government or provided information that the governement did not want the people to know. If society is uninformed or recieved a distorted version of reality, then we cannot enact our rights to stand up against corrupt government or campaign for our rights. It is our perception of reality that shapes our knowledge, opinions and therefore actions.

What do you think of the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")???

From what I've read and heard about the issue, it doesn't sound like a good idea at all. Some issues include;

• legal as well as illegal material will be blocked
• what age group will the internet be made appropriate for? 15 years olds? 5 year olds?
• who decides what material is acceptable for Australians to view?
• how will these lists be created and who will maintain them?
• a filter will decrease internet speeds considerably, some say up to 80%!
• testing shows that up to 10,000of every 1 million sites would be incorrectly blocked
• the task of maintaining the list of 'blacklisted' sites would be overwhelming
• the lists of blocked sites will probably be secret, how are we to know what else the government has blocked?
• no other democracy has such a filter on their internet
• misses other issues people face on the internet eg cyber-bullying, identity theft etc
• expensive, money better spent elsewhere
• raises issues of free speech
• public does not support it

All in all I think its a very bad idea, mainly because we won't be able to know what sites the government has blocked. We could be like China where they block any sites that say bad things about the government so their people remain ignorant. Democracy is not possible without free speech. By filtering the internet as the government proposes, they will be eliminating free speech as anything on the internet that the government does not want us to see, they will be able to block.

For further information on this issue see the No Clean Feed website, they provide alot of detailed information and valid arguments regarding the issue.

What place does censorship have in a democracy?

As discussed above, democracy cannot exist without free speech. It is a democratic right. Once censorship is used to delete messages the government doesn't want its people to hear, then democracy fails.

A more graphic example of this issue can be seen in the below YouTube clip. In this instance, the censorship that is being used in Nepal is alot more extreme than an internet filter. This video is about the murder of journalists in the country as a form of censorship. Luckily as Australian's we don't have to face issues like this, however its good to be aware of situations such as this so we can be thankful that we live in a fully functioning democracy.