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IN this age of freely flowing information, one cannot afford not to.
SINCE roughly 30 years ago we have been living in an information age as a concept and reality. The calling in fact traces to a much earlier point in the time-frame. It means the whole gamut of information-giving, spanning the hardware and software of electronics, the age-old printing process and the inter-personal or, in commonplace expression, face to face.
This age is characterised by the dominance of the service industry as opposed to that of manufacturing and its attendants. On another plane, the freedom of information per se has taken a new, revolutionary dimension. In most countries of the world, information transmitted electronically from, say, New York City, Moscow, Beijing, London, Berlin, Doha, Atlanta or Kuala Lumpur finds its place in the bedrooms and family lounges, more often than not in real time. The world has to accept the reality that nothing can stop the onrush of such information emission.
The attempts at its control as demonstrated, selectively, by North Korea and Myanmar, for example, may unwittingly assign one to a class of international pariah, scorned at and boycotted. Perhaps invoking and extending Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill and John Milton beyond their wildest dreams has witnessed the freedom of thought and opinion finding their just-discovered expression in what is now referred to as `blogging', which is a figurative window to emit information of enormous shades, not without adding fiction to fact. The truth may come from their sieving, depending on one's capacity.
Mill said in his On Liberty that denying a dissenting, unpopular voice may in all probability prove to be a momentous error. The voice may turn out to be a brilliant proposition and most productive to the greater common good. It may contain a grain of truth that can germinate into much wider and substantial ideas beyond what it is thought to be in the...