Dam this Net Nanny

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-19 09:19

Maybe the regulators' logic is that it's less detrimental to ogle at Caucasians and blacks. They are - shall we say - "others", people who are less likely to distract our hard-working bookworms into testosterone-driven reverie. But then, they may realize their lapse and start blockading the colors white and black, which will leave so little on the palette that visual artists will have a field day living up to the challenge.

The Green Dam designers have the best of intentions. They want to protect you from things that will harm you. They want to be the terminator who terminates all the germs in this world. But we live in a world with pollution. If they create this artificial bubble, that basically turns all of us into patients of severe combined immune deficiency. Our immune system will wither and we'll become a country of bubble boys.

There are people who need this kind of protection, though. The under-aged may not be able to distinguish between porn and a physiology diagram. They should not be exposed to sex and violence such as those depicted in City of Life and Death and Curse of the Golden Flower, movies that can legally be shown to kids in this country. China's Internet overall is oversexed, yet much of it is perfectly legal because it doesn't expose everything.

To prevent children from seeing this kind of content is the job of parents. If the government says it's OK to see on the silver screen a battalion of bulging breasts and a cartful of naked female bodies, it falls to the parent to say: "No! This is not OK! I don't want my 11-year-old to see this." Likewise, the parent is the best arbiter when it comes to what the kid can be shown on the computer screen.

The best place to install Green Dam is schools. Parents can then decide whether it's necessary on their home computers, too. Look around any Internet caf and you'll realize it's much less a concern than adolescent addiction to online games.

By name, Green Dam is supposed to shut off the valve of porn. In reality, it will stonewall politically sensitive material by identifying key words. I won't delve into the argument of personal liberty because it'll be like a chicken trying to communicate with a duck. I'll just point out one problem: The space-saving Chinese language differs from Western languages in that it does not leave a space between two words. As a result, a web page with perfectly non-sensitive content can be blocked and an editor looking for these key words won't be able to figure out why.

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