Current issues, feedback & complaints on public services in Malaysia
I HAVE learned that last year, the Australian government spent A$189 million (RM546 million) on “cleaning up the Internet” for Australian families, blocking pornography, upgrading safety features in search engines to spot chat-room sex predators and cutting off terror sites.
As a result, every Australian family was provided with a free Internet filter when their federal government entered into an unprecedented partnership with their local Internet service providers in the effort to filter pornography at source.
Here in Malaysia, violent and pornographic Internet sites are threatening Malaysian family values. The government must act now to stop our children being exposed to explicit violence and all kinds of pornography on the Internet.
As a father, I am deeply concerned about the material that my children can access on the Internet unchecked. These disturbing sites include explicit pornography or violent criminal activity, terrorism and Internet gambling sites.
Modern technology was created for all the reasons known to humankind. The good ones as well as the bad ones created what is today the indispensable www.
Sometimes, modern technology can make parenting a little bit harder and access to these websites undermines the ability of parents and schools to teach respect and Malaysian values to our children.
One of the important points outlined in the Education Ministry’s National Education Blueprint is to produce students (who are the future of Malaysia) in the shapes and cast that is uniquely Malaysian. I fear that if this goes unchecked, all hopes for better Malaysians will be lost in the www shuffle. The Internet, in the wrong hands, could create a deplorable situation.
On the issue of Internet safety, parents and educators are already worried about children chatting with strangers and of strangers preying on teenagers in chat rooms.
I feel that the government must do more to assist parents in preventing their children being exposed to such damaging “net culture”.
In Malaysia alone, we have over 500,000 active blog sites - the fourth-highest in the world. This goes to show the strength and influence the Internet has on our society.
We must all shape this influence into a welcoming culture that would be uniquely ours, a culture that would not, in the end, erode and destroy us all.
KADIR TALIB, Kuala Lumpur
Source: NST – April 2, 2008
One response to “Impact of the Internet: Beware the www shuffle”
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Luke Gilkerson
April 4th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I agree that the government can influence children much more by assisting parents to teach their kids about “net culture.”
I also think it is important to recognize that if parents want to help their children, they need to model the very behavior they want their kids to live. If parents don’t want their child exposed to pornography, for instance, they should model this behavior themselves.
On this note, have you heard of Covenant Eyes monitoring and filtering programs? It is a unique program on the market because it gives the user flexibility to filter or simply monitor the Internet or both. A good filtering program is very helpful for children and families, but a good monitoring program is great for adults and children alike who want to be accountable to others about where they go online.
Covenant Eyes monitoring program simply tracks (without blocking) everywhere someone goes online. Then each part of each webpage is rated and scored for its content (scores are based on obscene or pornographic material). Users choose 2 or 3 people that they want to receive a detailed “accountability report” of all their online activity (emails to them or available to see online 24/7). What this does is it allows complete freedom to the person using the Internet, but it takes away the anonymity of online activity; people are more likely to exorcise self-control when they know that others will be reviewing their whereabouts online.
Covenant Eyes also has a promotional code you can use to get a free month to try out their accountability service. Go to http://www.covenanteyes.com and enter promocode ‘onefree’ to receive a free 30 day trial of the program.