Freedom for media : How much is enough

Online media is currently the main mode maintaining the information flow in the society. Attributing to it's highly complicated form and uncensored content it gives the publisher a unique attribute of easily achieved anonymity, i.e. a person can express himself while remaining hard to track down.

This phenomenon in new media is interesting as it has both a positive and negative aspect. While giving complete freedom of expression to people can be advantageous for exposing the truth to the society, it may lead to release of influential and dangerous content that effects the collective consciousness of the society in a negative way and endangers it's stability.

Discussing this concept in the context of governments and public offices is a bit tricky, while the government is supposed to be transparent in it's working, releasing some information to public is plain dangerous. The government like any other organization has some levels of information secrecy for it's proper functioning.and if this structure of information is not maintained it can lead to major threats to the society.

It is important to understand that every country exists as a political entity and has some secrets to protect for the sake of it's security and social stability. Such information released to public in the highly connected world of today can spread very fast, threatening the security concerns of the society.

Total transparency can work in a utopian society where every person is aware, responsible, logical and thinks for society as a whole i.e. if the society exists as a single organism with no conflicts between it's members but in a imperfect world such as ours some information is better left hidden.

Having stated the above fact it is essential to note our starting point that is is practically impossible to censor the new media. In today's day and age where the central piece in any society remains it's information network it is evident that information is power, and new media has distributed this power in many hands and for this to turn out in our favour we need to understand that "with great power comes great responsibility". In absence of proper censorship all media needs to understand what it is capable of and what implications it's actions have on society and use it's best judgement in the good of society.