|
In the information age, private citizens have the option to make themselves "known" through the internet or to not make themselves available publically. Yet almost any person can be found someplace on the internet - it may be through a photo someone posted and then tagged or it may be in the results posted from a sports competition or from a club roster. Simply making a political donation places you in a publicly aceessible database. Once someone goes public - either by choice or happenstance, an internet search result is unavoidable. Hopefully such a result will only be positive, but in the days of photo editing software and cut & paste plagerism, anything is possible. In the Photograph above, I digitally removed an ugly radio tower and some smoke from the left side, and that was only after cropping the photo to eliminate the street traffic in the bottom portion of the picture - Jerusalem looks better without them in my opinion, but it is not how things really appear. In the news media, cropping is allowed and commonly used. Digital enhancements are not allowed, but are probably fairly common. But even cropping by itself can easily misrepresent. Fortunately in the court system, if even one pixel has been changed or removed, it is unadmissable as evidence. Whether being incarcerated or inagurated, it always pays to smile - becuase your worst shot will eventually make it into print or on-line. Censorship is good and censorship is bad. Really, I don't want to hear those foul sounds rolling of your lips, and fortunately there are laws against "cursing" in public. There are also laws against the public display of pornography, graphic violence and more. This is good censorship. But what can be said for Google and the rest who have bowed to the wishes of the Chinese government. Is some information better than no information. Probably. China still calls themselves communist, but they are no more communist than the USA. They are however, not a democracy, for they have a ruling elite and oppressive laws. Yet exposure to the west, limited as it may be, is impacting their country - hopefully for the better. Though certainly not all we have to offer is good. Indeed when censorship ended in Hollywood, movies didn't get better, in fact they got worse. Many of the great movies out of hollywood these days are Animations. The art of acting has changed and the extended take has all but disappeared, in favor of fast cuts and over the shoulder dialogue shots (which are actually shot as seperate monologues). It would be great if we could get pornography off the internet all together, perhaps in the meantime, there could be some voluntary censorship such as creating a new suffix such as .porn or .xxx, then filtering them out would be easy. Or perhaps every site could be required to rate itself on a G-PG-PG13-etc... system. Becuase really, your teenage son doesn't need access to that Lingerie website or to graphic violence. In fact we all spend too much time on the net anyway.... If you've read this far, you probably need a break - so shut the thing down and go enjoy the day! One more thing: The Rainbow was God's sign to mankind that he would not destroy the entire earth again by a flood (Genesis 9:12-16). In church I was taught "red and yellow, black and white - they are precious in His sight". No one should be judged by the color of their skin, but rather by their deeds. Where will those be found who misuse this holy symbol ? On June 2002, my travels to Israel landed me in the midst of a terrorist attack. More here
|