No wonder most of the products around are made in China …Watch this video to see how Chinese are rehearsing English …However it is interesting thought when Jay Walker says in his TED speech -
“…English is the world’s second language.Your native language is your life. But with English you can become part of a wider conversation. A global conversation about global problems. Like climate change or poverty. Or hunger or disease.The world has other universal languages.Mathematics is the language of science. Music is the language of emotions. And now English is becoming the language of problem solving…”
Above presentation is a good case study on the Power of social media … Gone are the days when you can do “whatever” in real world and escape. Watch out! there’s a conversation happening in the virtual world which is so very well connected and word spreads faster than you can think of … What are people talking about your brand?
Seems like governments and legal bodies around the world are onto blogs and social media. Earlier it was Facebook Debate in Australia and this time it is India, where a boy is facing criminal charges for starting an orkut community against a political party (Times of India reports). He landed up in this situation for there were hostile comments from anonymous users. Court denied protection to him saying -
…You are a computer student and you know how many people access internet portals…
Other than the usual debate of freedom of speech and expression of thoughts , interesting thing to note is that while in Australia Facebook was held responsible for a similar case, In India its the individual who is facing the heat. I feel they have simply caught the easy bait and got him scared. This also reminds me of 2004 MMS case when ebay CEO was arrested for sale of Porn CD on ebay. Google officials beware!! By the way I am wondering if there are any comments from Google. At the time of posting this blog I could not find anything either on orkut blog or Google Blog. It would be nice to hear something from them.
Who is really responsible? The Journalist or the newspaper? The user or the Orkut? The founder of the community or the anonymous commenter?
That Debate will go on … Its difficult to decide who should be held responsible for this, if it would have been a blog and his personal thoughts then it would have been easy to point fingers on him, however these cases of un moderated online groups present a complicated case.
I haven’t seen the community nor the comments however I personally dont believe in this argument of defaming somebody through online blogs and comments, is there a real example of defaming a genuine person or prodcut through blogs? Would really like to know such an example. This web world is unique in its sense of self regulatory system. Try blogging or posting bad about something which is really genuine and I am sure it will be followed by greater number of positive comments proving the genuineness. So instead of reacting and initiating a criminal case against the boy, political party could have entered into positive debate and shown some courage to prove those comments to be wrong (If at all…!)
This article on Techtree covers Indian Bloggers’ comments on the issue.
