Streisand Effect

Yeah I copped out and did a couple of six-word flash fiction pieces, but they took a surprising amount of effort to pull off. I am sort of proud of the wordplay in the first piece, and the second one was a bit more icky. But I just felt like trying something new. Ultimately, I think I will stick with the usual types of prose we are used to, and so we'll be back to the regular programme tomorrow.

There is one thing that has been stuck in my head for the past few days that was literally trying to scream itself out loud (which explains this out-of-season post). The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that traditional power players don't seem to ``get'', a simplified description would be that the more one tries to silence a piece of information, the harder the information fights back by being even harder to silence. It is a side effect of the cheap replication powers of the World Wide Web.

News on the Web is like noise---there really isn't a significant difference between the two. News and noise are always generated and cooperate with burying each other through sheer volume. But when censorship is attempted on a piece of news, indignant information ``warriors'' will see it as a civic duty to point out the censorship attempt, hereby guaranteeing that attention would be drawn to an otherwise innocuous piece of information (no matter how damning it may be in context).

In short, it is almost never prudent to take the high-handed approach to any dispute, especially in this time of cheap information replication. The rebound will often be hard and fast, and will likely to make the original cease-and-desist step seem tame.