Prof. DREYFUS (from Dept. of Philosophy at Berkeley) gave us a lecture this afternoon. He criticized the anonymity of Internet in a Kierkegaardian tone. Kierkegaard’s stance is that people shall make a commitment to morals and ethics, and when people have the chance of speaking out their opinion through press anonymously, they have no constraints any more and thus run wild. This will eventually corrupt the society. But fortunately, Kierkegaard’s worries did not come true.
Nowadays Internet provides a more accessible way for people to express ideas than other media do. For the critics who pursue moral idealism, Internet is the breeding ground for evils. Verbal violence, rumor mongering and the like are the accusations against Internet. However, in China, the anonymity becomes an important role in pursuing morals and ethics. When an event or incident happens, the masses have not the right to know at most of time. Some eyewitnesses will post fact descriptions and pictures on the forum. For these people, it’s ethical to let the fact go public. Anonymity, more or less, protects the author from tracing and keep him safe.
At the same time, Google is not that fortunate. As the top search engine, Google collects a great amount of blogs and posts on the Internet. Maybe some pieces of ‘news’ in search result are ‘illegitimate’, but Google still keeps them because it’s Google’s duty to make information available to its users. Sadly, this great corporation cannot be anonymous and escape revenge. The biggest organization over the world made a decision to quarantine Google today.
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I am a Google fan and I will support its rationale ‘Don’t be evil’, even though I cannot log into my GMail from now on.
A post to post just for amazement:
清华夜谈的经典台词：
A：GRE单词多少啊？
B：20000吧。
A：那全额奖学金多少呢？
B：20000刀。
A：你瞧瞧，这动力太大了，背一个单词一刀啊！
