Diabolic antennae

The need to be well-informed is strong.  Each of us seeks the truth in our own way. 

We cannot always rely on our own media for reliable and broad-ranging information.  In many countries State or religious censorship is still the norm.  In others there is the censorship of the free market - the indirect censorship of needing to pander to the bottom line and the lowest common denominator, and the inevitable seepage into the privately owned media of the values of the media owners^[1].   

Fortunately the censorship attempts by repressive regimes world-wide are increasingly futile in the face of the technology-driven onslaught of externally controlled media and the internet. 

Initially short-wave radio, then satellite television, and now the internet have done away with geographic barriers to the dissemination of information.  Not that long ago parabolic antennae, the satellite dishes that came to be known as `diabolic antennae' among the self-styled custodians of absolute and State sponsored truth, mushroomed. 

In the former East-Germany, Honecker saw it coming when he proclaimed: "The danger is on our roofs".  In Cuba, backyard technologists made a satellite dish from four tin cans; it was sufficient to direct these at the tourist hotels which received the satellite signals.

The government of Peking placed strict controls on the distribution of satellite dishes, restricting them to hotels, tourist centres, and to the homes and offices of the inner circle of Party faithful, who were presumed to be incorruptible.  The United Arab Emirates banned them, but with little success due to the addiction the local elites had developed for foreign programs and pornography.  In India, the late Rajiv Gandhi was advised that trying to shut out the new technologies would be as futile as the prohibition of alcohol. 

Rupert Murdoch, owner of Star or Sky TV, which even in 1993 reached 42 million homes in 40 countries, from Turkey to Taiwan, openly acknowledged that satellite TV allowed the inhabitants of closed societies, eager for information, to short-circuit their national TV networks.  It was, he said "a very clear threat to totalitarian regimes". 

To the defenders of the Islamic faith, media satellites and, increasingly, the internet deliver the worst of evils: consumerism, secularism, sex, and violence. 

The mullahs and Murdoch were both partially correct.

Open debate and the free flow of information are the best vaccines known against fanaticism and ignorance - the internet offers us enormous scope for good^[2]. But the increasingly prurient, sensationalist and self-validating offerings we are being served through profit-driven content disseminators, is not doing the long-term viability of our species a service. 

How to counter the avalanche of mind-numbing and humanity-depressing material that is being demanded in ever-increasing and ever-intensifying doses by an addicted and rapidly growing global audience, without compromising the free flow of information so vital to our survival, is a significant challenge to all those concerned about our collective future.

Technological advance has rendered censorship at a national level futile.  Various regimes have attempted to ban and confiscate `diabolic antennae' with limited success.  The miniaturisation and rapidly falling market prices of receiving equipment requires impossibly draconian measures for national censorship to be effective.  Attempts to contain the internet are also easily circumvented.

But technological advance is also doing two other things: it is increasingly empowering the individual consumer to self-censor, and it is putting media power within the reach of those who might wish to disseminate views and material different from that of the lowest common denominator. 

Several Middle-Eastern regimes have already determined that the best way of fighting the intrusion of the western media is to broadcast their own flavours of truth.  Fight unwelcome information with contrary information, not censorship and prohibition. 

But while the reducing costs of the digital technologies of the "information super-highway" have brought trans-national broadcasting within the reach of a wider range of mindsets, the same technologies will also see `broadcasting' increasingly supplanted by `narrowcasting'. 

The recipient of information will increasingly be able to filter that information before it erupts into their consciousness.  Commercial advertising of the type that indiscriminately invades our homes at some critical point of a TV drama has a limited shelf-life.  People increasingly pay for advertisement-free programs customised to their individual tastes. 

We are able to self-produce and self-censor.  Some cut the gratuitous violence of broadcast television out of their diets altogether; others watch little but hard-core pornography.  Ironically, many only access what reinforces their opinions and prejudices, insulating themselves from challenges, change and balance.

External censorship is very difficult, but there are still occasions when it is justified^[3].  Child pornography, and information on the making of weapons of mass destruction are examples.

The external censorship of public media and of globally unacceptable private media, in the face of trans-national media control, satellite technologies, and the information super-highway, can be effected only through the international cooperation of Nation-States willing to vigorously prosecute media entities resident within their borders on behalf of other Nation-States, for international media protocol violations.  It will also require the direct activism of an organised international citizenry^[4]. 

But in the final analysis, the responsibility for what information you consume will rest with you.  When absolutely anything is readily available to you as a consumer via the internet or satellite; when those who try to protect you from being exposed to material that may corrupt or desensitise you are no longer effective; then the responsibility to censor what you consume falls back to you, the sovereign individual^[5] and consumer.  That is not a matter of regret.  It is a matter of celebration, because that is where the responsibility for censorship belongs – with you – just as the responsibility for truth, faith and morality^[6] belongs with you.