Brave new blog

"Who in old times ever held anything so uncalled for as an opinion? ...History, history really was, still is, the agenda of activists. The rest of us, you, me, the rest of us, are mere fans of a world view and use the news like theater—episodes, chapters in some Sabbath soul serial... If we don't have the gift for effecting change, we have the solace of criticism." - Stanley Elkin, novelist in The First Amendment as an Art form quoted in Saul Bellows It All Adds Up, Penguin Modern Classics, 2007, pp109.

When I first stumbled into the World Wide Web in 1996, it was purely for the sake of being technologically savvy.

Yes, then it had also to do with keeping in touch with and gaining quicker access to scientific advances that I was interested in. Then again, my obsession with the PC was an expensive hobby, which seemed to be an unending catching-up exercise to try outrun its obsolescence.

I seemed to be upgrading all the time, and the PC continues to advance by truly doubling at diminishing interval - so clairvoyantly predicted by Gordon E. Moore, Intel's first guru and co-founder.

Still, few would have expected how much every aspect of our human lives have been touched by such a proliferation and permeating ubiquity of knowledge/information perfusion, with almost seamless person-to-person inter-connectivity.

In ten short years, this wondrous growth has stupefied everyone including its detractors.

What was a 'nerdy' and 'geeky' preoccupation has ballooned into an all-pervasive universal phenomenon outstripping everyone’s imagination.

By connecting everyone with a click, access to information has never been higher. Even for two-finger typing sorts.

The blog

It created another phenomenon of highly personalised expression (‘spewing’ and sharing) of ideas, thoughts and opinions - with nary a thought as to consequences. One can vent as one chooses.

The anonymity (and perceived closeted safety) of one's own most private thoughts and at times darkest, provides an individual derring-do and bravado that has been restrained previously.

Thus, many of these are indiscriminately enunciated without secondary considerations as to their impact on anyone else. This ultimate freedom to express at will and without any restraints, is perhaps the quintessential mark of a New Age.

Although, this newfound expression of freedom to think and speak out loud is welcome, there are possible downsides to these unfettered unsolicited commentaries and occasionally abusive invectives.

Weblogging has personal say without regulation or verification, leading us to the doors of libellous and defamatory statements.

Blogging apologies are rare, and correcting misconceptions and misrepresentations are even rarer.

Readers become selective on what they read as the quantity is bountiful, and they become easily dismissive too.

This leads to intolerant and lopsided personalities warped by partisanship. Unbalanced bigots emerge - neocons, libertarians and progressives - and are unlikely to change.

Thus, the danger of such polarisation can become extreme, and create fundamentalists.

In this new age information jungle, anything goes. An extension of our multichannel cable television era, surfing on a whim.

The time has passed to control or restrain information - the genie has escaped the confining lamps of regulators, despots and dictators.

Yes, how times have changed.

Healthy skepticism

Yet, this is a tremendously uplifting experience. .

Propaganda and biased messages will struggle to impress modern minds, much less influence them.

These will be sorely tested and debunked sooner than later. Healthy skepticism has become the natural order of the day.

Mainstream media (MSM) has suffered most for taking sides and spinning. Many Malaysians increasingly feel that MSM is too pusillanimous to tackle hard issues directly - they toe the line drawn by the strict diktats of their wayang-kulit (shadow play) masters.

The beauty of the internet age negates MSM.

There are myriad of dissenting and alternate views - with more plausible reasoning - that are more believable.

It is increasingly difficult to blatantly lie and get away with it, unless one is so deviously a master of deceit.

Some have lamented that lies, big lies repeated often enough can be powerful propaganda stuff (so much a cliché of Nazi information chief Josef Goebbels), and they are right - we can become influenced, even indoctrinated into attentive but noddingly agreeable yes-men.

After all wasn't it Bertrand Russell who said:"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

We can still be shaped and moulded into mindless followers of the "great and the powerful" simply because we are drawn blindly to charisma and a memory of a better past.

For decades - perhaps 50 years - Malaysians have been thus pre-shaped and moulded into pliant citizens. Disgruntled yet voting in the same shoddy politicians, despite their lies, threats, corruptibility, arrogance, bullying, known expediencies, excesses...

Mindless nationalist jingoism and positive cheerleading has sustained a climate of feel good used to drive the country forward, but it is a disparate unity cobbled-together for expediency.

When times are fairly good and we were raking in great GDP growth numbers - and a cautious rakyat is relatively contented - then other considerations such as freedom of expression, accountability, authoritarianism, and institutional abuses, disappear from our consciousness. Kept in the backburner. But the world has changed too much for us to ignore our shortcomings.

Perhaps - at our coming of age party of 51 years - this bygone era will be passé and a new era of openness and fearless demand for public accountability will begin.

Malaysians and citizens the world over are hoping that we can cross this Rubicon of political naïveté and finally outgrow the adolescent timidity and awkwardness, that we have been saddled with for so long. We have to mature into a multifaceted, multi-ethnic and open-minded citizenry.

We have to outgrow our ethnic-centredness and embrace a more globally-sensitive and tolerant mindset.

We can only hope to have finally reached the courage of conviction to be our true selves and help the nation grow and build as never before, to greater heights of meaning and cohesiveness.