Ellul on forgiving and forgetting

“there is more mercy in the heart of the individual than in the memories of society or its information systems.”

SOURCE: Jacques Ellul, Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 73.

Ellul’s comment is true in an era like ours where the state captures and stores our data and records in massive databases. But this was a comment before the internet, and social media where we store things ourselves and often emails and posts which we would rather people forgot.

 

Bloggers’ Rights

Bloggers’ right are under threat across the world it seems. I’m pleased to re-engage with EFF and see that they are raising the issues and defending (and defining through cases) the law around blogging.

There is also this international resource.

The Section 59 Debate and new media

The so-called anti-smacking debate started by the proposal to repeal Sec. 59 of the Crimes Act has begun a new form of campaigning that all political actors should take note of. Reading “We The Media” and this report “Oxford Internet Institute Working Paper: Web2.0 and Citizen Participation” has made me realise that the Sec 59 debate is being conducted in a different ways than it would have only 2 years ago.

The rhetoric and vitriol may be the same we saw in the Civil Union debate, but new use of the web means that political debates will never be the same again. Some examples of these new tools are:

• the tagging of sites like Scoop
• YouTube videos on sec 59

Who would have predicted that home-made videos of talking heads would be a political activism tool.