by Rifhan RasuliIt has been a while since my summer holiday started. Leaving Dublin, I head to my homeland and then to the place where I live – it is called as Felda Chini Timur. Yes from its name, one can surely deduct that it is a Felda territory. Situated approximately an hour journey from the nearest town, Pekan, Pahang, it is an outlying, quite isolated area.
One of the shortcomings living in such an area is the difficulty to access the internet, thus making it hard to gain information. There is only one cyber café in my place, which is open inconsistently and when it is open, most of the time it will be filled with school students playing games – an abnormal atmosphere, sadly, if seen by a Felda generation of my time (you know, when I was young, we were really typical village boys – fishing, bathing in the river, melastik burung etc).
Back to the point I would like to talk about – information. It feels like living in a fortress here, protecting us from the ‘attacks’ of information from outside, except from the so-called mass media such as television, radio and newspaper. And of course when it comes to these kinds of media, the information seems to be quite, to be politically correct, one-sided.
Imagine the moment I had to stay and be dormant in this territory for about three months after my IB examination last year. For that three months without knowing anything but what the ‘ruler of the fortress’ tells you, even a sceptic like me had somehow almost been managed to perceive that anyone but the government is scum. Blogs? Hell no! What can you expect from a place in which internet is hardly available?
While in Dublin, every time I called home and had a conversation with my father who does not know how to use internet, it seems that I know more about Malaysia than he does.
Well, when we contemplate about the inability of the people from the rural areas to be critical about the current economic, political and social issues, we need to consider their limitation to access these materials due to lack of alternative media. They are not stupid; they are just under-informed. Listening to mere ‘legal’ airtime, they are the likely targets who perhaps, can be convinced by anything told to them.
Really, it does feel like living in an isolated fortress here, where all people believe only in one ideology – that diminishes all differences between us, doesn’t it? This way of life, they say, is the only way to maintain peace and unity.
Hmm, think about it.
‘We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.’
-John F. Kennedy-
One of the shortcomings living in such an area is the difficulty to access the internet, thus making it hard to gain information. There is only one cyber café in my place, which is open inconsistently and when it is open, most of the time it will be filled with school students playing games – an abnormal atmosphere, sadly, if seen by a Felda generation of my time (you know, when I was young, we were really typical village boys – fishing, bathing in the river, melastik burung etc).
Back to the point I would like to talk about – information. It feels like living in a fortress here, protecting us from the ‘attacks’ of information from outside, except from the so-called mass media such as television, radio and newspaper. And of course when it comes to these kinds of media, the information seems to be quite, to be politically correct, one-sided.
Imagine the moment I had to stay and be dormant in this territory for about three months after my IB examination last year. For that three months without knowing anything but what the ‘ruler of the fortress’ tells you, even a sceptic like me had somehow almost been managed to perceive that anyone but the government is scum. Blogs? Hell no! What can you expect from a place in which internet is hardly available?
While in Dublin, every time I called home and had a conversation with my father who does not know how to use internet, it seems that I know more about Malaysia than he does.
Well, when we contemplate about the inability of the people from the rural areas to be critical about the current economic, political and social issues, we need to consider their limitation to access these materials due to lack of alternative media. They are not stupid; they are just under-informed. Listening to mere ‘legal’ airtime, they are the likely targets who perhaps, can be convinced by anything told to them.
Really, it does feel like living in an isolated fortress here, where all people believe only in one ideology – that diminishes all differences between us, doesn’t it? This way of life, they say, is the only way to maintain peace and unity.
Hmm, think about it.
‘We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.’
-John F. Kennedy-
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