Unspun

Indonesia’s norther neighbor, Malaysia, is a place where blogs are taken very seriously indeed, probably because the newspapers are so bad its better and more reliable, not to say entertaining, to get their information from blogs.

Over the past two weeks we have seen the Government threatening to bring blogs more under its control by making amendments to the Printing Presses and Publications Act, a piece of legislation that it uses to regulate and, some say control the Press.

At the same time a Battle Royale is being waged between Screenshots‘s Jeff Ooi, most probably Malaysia’s most reknowned blogger, and business publication The Edge. The battle has one that has pretty interesting ramifications of bloggers worldwide as it opens up the question of who should be held responsible if a reader posts a comment that can be interpreted to be a threat?

The story unfolded when a blog reader posted a comment on Screenshots attacking The Edge’s Executive Editor P. Gunasegaram for criticising Mahathir. The reader said something to the effect that Guna should be shot for his comments. Taking exception, Guna filed a police complaintagainst the reader and Jeff. The reader and Jeff has apologized since but hve also accompanied the apology with some creative interpretations of the word “shoot”. Jeff has also used his blog to mount a campaign against the Edge and Guna. On the other hand, the Edge has also mounted an offensive through its own pages and that of The Sun, its sister publication, against Jeff.

The incident is being debated passionately by bloggers Malaysians but, as usual in Malaysia, the real issues are lost in the muck being raked up through ad hominem attacks and discussions more on personalities rather than the issues that matter. At the heart of the issue is what shoudl one do with this phenomenon called blogs because they can be pervasive and it has grown out of a culture of a very liberal approach to freedom of speech.

The quintessial blog should, for instance, not be moderated as it is meant to open topics up for naked conversations. The theory is that if a participant is too extreme and unreasonable in what they say, they would be shouted down by other more reasonable but equally articulate bloggers and readers.

When it works well this can be very powerful. The growth of the Wikipedia, for instance, is a testament that exteme democracy need not degenerate into mob rule. So what shuld one do about blogs and also their potential to incite hatred or violence, if left unmoderated?

Perhaps the key to a solution is to recognize blogs as a ned medium in communications. It perhaps will herald new ground rules rather than the present perception of, say the Malaysian Government and The Edge/Sun that looks at it as merely another manifestation of newspapers or other mainstream publications, where the means to get published can be controlled.