TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Censorship: Let my people think!
When I was a boy, Sunday morning was my favorite time of the week
Change Size
W
span>When I was a boy, Sunday morning was my favorite time of the week. Effortlessly, I would wake up earlier, not to eagerly go to church because a cartoon marathon was on. On weekdays, my siblings and I fought over which station to watch. Back then, TV was fun.
Nowadays, everything seems to be too serious; you can even be given a penalty for being funny. Comedian Tukul, for instance, got a warning from Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) in July, because one scene in his show showed a man being possessed. And such a penalty was issued in the name of child protection.
The problem with Netflix arose using the same pretext. It is silly that the KPI wants to supervise a streaming digital media provider. From a legal perspective, Netflix, the object itself, is not under Indonesian jurisdiction and nothing in Law No. 32/2002 can be matched with Netflix. Basically, Netflix is like an online version of old video rental kiosks, where you can rent any DVD or VCD of your favorite movies. If the KPI or any other bureaucrat cannot understand this simple fact, how can they provide a solution? It’s time to rethink the state’s role in intervening in someone’s life.
Countless times, the reasoning of child protection is used to justify KPI intervention, a poor excuse that has become very troublesome, lacking real proof of its effectiveness. Instead, we seem to see stronger impressions of intolerance among Indonesian children.
The Jakarta gubernatorial election, for instance, brings back the memory of children singing to the tune of long-time popular song “Menanam Jagung” (Planting Corn) but with chilling lyrics about killing former governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.
Children are being poisoned by hatred while television stations bombard us with tons of religious preachers, soap operas full of religious themes and censorship everywhere. But all the efforts of the KPI to create a “utopian” world by supervising the TV seem useless.
Let everyone in Indonesia use that often forgotten but most precious [..] organ, the brain.
Penalizing or warning shows, which leads to self-censorship, is not helping. The idea of protecting children by dictating values is not working. Unwittingly, this practice of supervision by the KPI has led to the monopoly of values and intellectual protectionism.
Unfortunately, instead of a good sign, intellectual protectionism is dangerous, especially for youth. In her 2001 book Not in Front of Children, Marjorie Heinz concluded that intellectual protectionism frustrates rather than enhances young people’s mental agility and capacity to deal with the world, and censorship has the effect of teaching authoritarianism, intolerance for unpopular opinions and erotophobia — generally phobia of anything related to sex — among youths. And I couldn’t agree more with her argument that censorship as an avoidance technique that addresses adult anxieties and satisfies symbolic concerns does not resolve the social problems.
Will we learn that this practice of censorship championed by the KPI is actually supporting the intolerance that we are fighting? As long as censorship exists, tolerance is just a castle in the sky. It has impaired our ability to discern differences in a positive way. Intolerance always finds a subtle way to seem like a justified action.
It’s time to review the KPI and the 2002 Broadcasting Law. The state is not a daycare where someone leaves their children to be tended. We cannot pass something that is supposed to be parents’ duty to a commission.
First, this commission knows nothing about you and me, let alone our children.
Second, we are all free citizens, guaranteed by the Constitution to not only speak our minds but to think for ourselves, so let everyone in Indonesia use that often forgotten but most precious God-given organ, the brain.
We must not let any commission, no matter how independent it claims to be, monopolize values. The duty of the state is to ensure its citizens can access information accurately and as cheaply as possible, instead of dictating what type of information they can consume. We must focus on empowering people’s capacity to process information instead of sorting what is good or bad for them.
The world we inhabit is not ideal. Thus, it is not how the world should react to us that should be the focus but how we train ourselves to react to this far-from-ideal world.
When Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, Moses delivered the message, “Let my people go”. If Moses rose from the dead and saw how we are enslaved by this unnecessary form of state intervention, he would probably shout, “Let my people think!”
