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Who are you?

You’re a writer?

No you aren’t. You can’t write. You just type things and they end up on this screen here. That’s not writing. In this day and age of the Internet and blogs, anyone can do what you’re doing.

You’re not special.

Anyone could do it.

Even her.

Who are you?

You’re a photographer?

No you aren’t. We’ve got digital cameras, anyone can take a photo. No skill necessary. Everyone gets lucky occasionally and gets a good photo.

What’s that you say? It does take skill to take good photos? Even with the digital medium?

Bullshit.

No it doesn’t. Take a hundred photos, one of them will be good. You’ll see. Go and try it, come back and report.

You’re not special.

Anyone can take a photo nowadays.

Even her.

Who are you?

You’re a journalist?

No. You aren’t. Thousands of people are doing your job on twitter, you’re outdated and useless. What need do we have of printed material when everything is on the Internet for free? Go and search twitter. The blogs.

It’s a digital world, you’ve got to move along with it.

You’re not special.

Anyone can report the news.

Even her.

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Who are you?

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You’re nothing special.

Except when you are.

Because it does take skill to pull together a blog post. Sure, anyone can do it, but not anyone can draw an audience and make them laugh and cry. That’s writing.

It does take skill to take a photo. A baby can push a shutter button and capture a moment, but it takes skill to snap a photo that make people see what you saw and feel what you felt.

There is skill involved in reporting the news. Anyone can tell you what they saw, but can they tell the whole story from both sides?

The Internet is changing the way we view things, skills that were once out of our reach are now being brought down to earth where we can capture them for ourselves. Things that were once the realm of only the specially talented are now there for anyone to practise. You’d think that this would water down the talent pool, but instead we’re discovering untold talent in hidden places.

Mothers, fathers, anyone. Everyone.

Anyone.

We can do this.

And we can do it well.

Even her.

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I don’t get political very often. Especially not here.

HOWEVER.

The Australian Government, namely Senator Stephen Conroy has given the green light for a ‘Clean Feed’ to be applied to Australian internet.

News posts here, here and here.

In laymens terms, this means that come next August, MANDATORY ISP filtering will occur on all internet.

It’s not up to the Government to say what I can and can’t look at on the internet. I am an adult and so long as my activity isn’t illegal (ch*ld porn) then the Government should have NO RIGHT to filter my internet.

It is up to me to keep my children safe on the net. Not the Government.

See NoCleanFeed for more details and if you agree with me, sign the petition.

SIGN PETITION AGAINST CLEAN FEED.

As a web publisher, this scares me senseless. Officials have admitted that the filtering, while effective against the kind of sites they are wanting to filter (a blacklist, if you will. who knows what exactly they will be deeming ‘not suitable’) there are also plenty of false positives, ie: sites blocked that shouldn’t have been.

Does that mean I could ‘accidentally’ have Sleepless Nights blocked, what about Veronica Foale? Or what about you. What happens if your website gets blocked?

I don’t agree with it. It is censorship plain and simple.

Sign the petition against it. Please.

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Feel free to copy/paste this entire post to your blog if you like. Just remember to give credit to either http://somedaywewillsleep.com OR http://veronicafoale.com

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