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blogs and google, tails wag dogs? | 7 comments
[new] agreed... but raises more questions... (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#3)
by amy on Tue Jul 8th, 2003 at 08:39:28 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info) http://plagiarist.org

aileen, you took the words right outta my mouth! (argh, what good is discordia if we agree? :-) )

yeah, with the government censorship thing i tried to use that in the context of "if google weren't important, governments wouldn't bother." (which brings up the question: do they bother with all the other search engines too, and it's just that nobody pays attention? in either case, makes the point that google is the dominant player.)

your thoughts about americans complaining about other countries censoring "free speech" while happily submitting to surveillance, government harrassment, and the killing thousands of civilians, all in the name of "freedom" really hit the nail on the head. here in the "homeland", one still constantly hears the same ol' song-n-dance about how the US is such a great country that "the rest of the world" is beating down the doors to immigrate here... and so therefore, it must be a great country, so we should stop complaining about what is going on. amazing how reality just doesn't sink in, but what people learn in grade school does... perhaps this demonstrate that the educational system is fulfilling its mandate after all.. :-/

meanwhile though, curious your thoughts on the ethical question at hand: governments are "censoring" information from their local versions of google. i say "censoring" in quotes, because in fact they're just making it a bit more difficult to access it. if you're in france or germany, you get the local .fr or .de google by default, but there's a link you can click if you want the standard google.com without the local language customization and censored material. anyway, hypocritical as it seems, americans do have this knee-jerk reaction because of what we've been indoctrinated with regarding freedom of speech - and we're not hearing france and germany's side of the story, so it just sounds inherently morally "wrong" to our ears. "let the hatemongers say what they want and let the people weed it out! free speech doesn't stop at speech you don't agree with!" thinks the PC American. at least until the local KKK chapter signs up to join the 4th of july parade. and at least PCA is a little more tolerable than his/her cousin, Patriotic American, whose position on international relations is "kill em all and let God weed em out!"

so as someone with ears in both cultures aileen, what are your thoughts? (and anyone else who cares to chime in, of course.... ) a) are governments justified in trying to keep certain forms of speech out of their googles? b) given the way the net works, and the fact that the information is easily accessible anyway, is there any point to that? and c) despite their obvious local blindspot, are americans justified in protesting issues in foreign countries that seem morally wrong to them? obviously there are cultural differences, but then again, there are cultural differences in countries that practice institutional mysogyny and racism... what about people from other cultures who protest against those?




# begin amy's sig
-- Discordia is nice.
# end amy's sig





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