Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘That Balance’ and the New World Information Order 189
We have more than 300 gigabytes of data, representing 250
million messages dating back to March 1995. Over 4 million
people access our site, viewing over 90 million page views each
month. 10
Cyber Patrol blocks all of this. Other large archives of general content,
more than a million pages at members.tripod.com, are also regularly
blocked by filtering software in its efforts to prevent access to material
that might be limited to one or two pages. For public libraries to use
such a blunt instrument to block access to information resources of
such magnitude might seem perverse but it is no more so than those
churchmen who wanted to curb the perceived excesses of printing
during the late medieval period or those who wanted to abandon the
general postal service in Victorian Britain because it was being used to
disseminate pornographic material. That problem was resolved, as we
have seen, with a series of Post Office Acts in many countries, which
targeted abusers of the postal system rather than the technologies
that enabled it. When the moral panic around pornography and the
web has died most countries which do not already have it will enact
similar legislation to deal with the present problem. In the UK a relatively
minor amendment to the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959
and 1964 in 1994 brought the Act up to date with electronic storage
and transmission of information.
Censorware, for now, is little more than a spurious sop to a media
induced panic. The software cannot possibly meet its claims without
blocking large amounts of quite innocent material, including most
news sites. Some filtering software offers a more sinister facility in
the audit trail function, allowing installers to check the sites and
newsgroups that users have attempted to access. While most
browsers offer similar trails, albeit of more limited duration, as a
matter of course, they are not necessarily apparent to casual users.
The potential for tension and isolation in both the workplace and
the home that such information offers seems to mitigate against its
employment. PlanetWeb, the web browser packed with the Sega
Saturn game console offers the option of actively blocking information
on alternative lifestyles which may well signal a more general
development in the design of browsers as the web becomes a genuine
mass medium.