Thursday, February 04, 2010

3 youths arrested for posting racist remarks at Facebook



3 youths were arrested for posting racist remarks at Facebook. This is not the first time that a person here is brought to task for posting some remarks injurious to the common goodwill of our people here. Some months back, a blogger was also similarly caught for posting racist remarks in his blog.

I believe such cases do happen from time to time here in Singapore and other countries. I believe it is not that these perpetuators cannot tell right from wrong or deliberately post these radical comments on social networking media knowing the government’s stand here. The reason for them posting such comments is most likely due to the fact that social networking has become so intertwined with our personal life that it has now become our personal domain.

We witness this increasing trend of the invasion or integration of public social networking tools into our personal lives. Modern people spend hours and hours on Facebook, blogs, twitters, forums, MSN, Youtube among many other new media tools. Got an opinion to share? Blog it or post it on forum and Facebook. Got an interesting video or photo to share, do it on Youtube and Picasa. This is now the way of life. We spend countless of hours on all these new media so much so that now we cannot distinguish what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’. The distinction between public and private self domain is now blurred. It is little wonder that people often vent their spleen on blog posts, forums and Facebook without little consideration, assuming that it is their right to do so on their supposedly private space.

However, in doing so, they have forgot that everyone is responsible for his or her own actions, offline or online. If one is not able to defend his or her own words or actions, and what he or she has written or said cannot bear up to public scrutiny and are in public distaste, he or she will be taken to task like what the youths in this latest case found out.


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