Australian Women Online: ISP Filtering Reaction
When we peel back the layers, “But I don’t want it!” appears to be the underlying catch cry and quite frankly it’s as predictable from this scaremongering minority as it is from a two year old presented with broccoli at dinner time. This way of communicating needs to remain as unproductive in the virtual world as it is in the real world. Unfortunately, because they are just as noisy, it is easy to fall under the assumption that they are the voice of the majority. Let us not equate noise with reason.
Oh dear. This was the initial reaction to Australia’s Twiterati changing their avatar pictures to reflect their position on the move to ISP filtering from Australian Women Online.
Needless to say, some of my female counterparts in the industry were outraged. I mean, they were seething. With a blog name like that it certainly does come with big responsibility: being the voice for Australian women online (or as they define it: key demographic is Australian and NZ women over 30) isn’t something to be taken lightly.
Being treated like children.
Basically, this shoved a finger in the face of those men and women who had used the service to express their anti-filtering feelings, and said ‘grow the fuck up and be sensible about it’. One particularly shouty friend of mine even protested further with a picture of broccoli in her Twitter avatar.
A one-sided conversation.
Reports indicated that many, many comments were left after the incident and soon enough, the comments were disabled on this post. As they were for the other posts regarding this topic, including their Statement on Mandatory ISP Filtering from Australian Women Online and Archive of Mandatory ISP Filtering — so what’s this saying?
According to them:
We are not in a position to provide a forum for this debate on our website. We do not have the available manpower to handle the high volume of comments we could expect on this issue and it is for this reason we have closed the comments on this post.
It seems that even though they have a negative position on ISP filtering, they don’t mind user filtering. Even if the site had become too crowded, why couldn’t they at least leave the comments up that had been made so far?
Why silence the voices of all your users?
@servantofchaos I love someone who want to be the voice of ‘Australian Women Online’ and yet wants to put their opinion up as the only POV
The voice.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I generally enjoy reading AWO — but creating a one-sided, opinionated, subjective point of view is a very poor way to represent the voice of such an important part of the industry. And if you don’t want to do it — then don’t. I didn’t.
Yell, scream, dream, create noise, throw a tantrum. And give anyone trying to stop you the middle finger.
It’s your perspecive, and this is just mine.
5 Comments
Many online “magazines” typically just use blogs as a way of managing their content. They are not necessarily open to the discussion and conversation that comes along with robust debate. It is a shame that AWO claim openness and representation and yet reject any point of view that doesn’t align with their own.
And the discussion *on* AWO happening here and on blogs everywhere proves again that the conversation will about you will happen anyway, either with you or without you. AWO chose for it to happen without them.
@Gavin: All too true! And we all know slapping one medium on another seldom works — and you’re right it is a shame.
@Tom: Fabulous point and a good lesson for all companies engaging in open mediums.
AWO went from actively and directly lobbying the Minister in favour of restricting Internet access and inviting others to lobby – to cravenly hiding behind the excuse that departmental processes had not been completed so that it would be presumptous of it to comment.
Hilarious!
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