The Dark Shadow Shrine

embrace the darkness; that you may see the light nestled within it......

Friday, February 08, 2013

The Jansen Lim incident

For those whom I have mentioned the Jansen Lim incident, u can access the link HERE to read up on it. Here's an article on it that came out in the Chinese papers:
As you read the thread in the chatroom, think of two issues:
1) anonymity -- this eg clearly shows that anonymity is no longer a guarantee in social media. Netizens can ferret out private, personal info on you based on just a name or a photo (data-mining) For a sense of this, take a look at the two articles at the end of this post and think about the STOMP website. Note also that given Singapore's small population (a Singapore feature), everyone knows everyone else, unless the person is a hermit. Hence, chances of having a person identified online is relatively high. Just show a photo or mention a name, and there's likely to be someone online who knows you.
2) censorship -- is there a need for censorship now that the online community can apparently self-regulate? There may be some who are not media literate (e.g. Jansen) and may post undesirable material online, but the larger online community can be counted upon to bring him to task (online vigilante) by naming and shaming him (think STOMP again). But looking at the comments by these online vigilante, they are not that different from Jansen, i.e. there is a thin line btw online vigilante and cyberbullying? So does that mean some kind of censorship or govt intervention is still needed after all? An eg of comments by the online vigilante: Running your mouth and running away from taking responsibilty for what you said is not freedom of speech. The age of anonymity on the net is long gone. "We don't know who you are. We don't know what you want. But what we do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career of reading EDMW. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like you. If you say sorry and repent, we will leave you alone. But if you don't, we will CSI you and we will destory you. We are LEGION!"

Try to recall the Amy Cheong incident that occurred late last year. Also mentioned in the thread were the two kids involved in the library's breastfeeding room incident who were supposedly from the same school as Jansen. You can read more about this in this blog under the entry dated 'Saturday, November 17, 2012' and entitled 'Interesting yet disturbing clip'. Use the archive hyperlinks on the left panel to navigate to this post.

For those familiar with the K-pop group 2PM, it may be interesting to note that its original band leader, Jay Park, was evicted from the group because of something controversial he posted on MySpace a few years ago.