Blogging and censorship

So starting a blog currently feels like a pointless pursuit. My nineteen year old esteem cries ‘who would want to read about what you think’ but I guess that is, perhaps, the paradox of blogging. Today, as students on a prestigious new course, at an even more prestigious university, we were asked to contemplate ‘Censorship’ for a group presentation. For me censorship is a difficult but interesting topic of debate; there seems to be many things people are happy for the government or the media to censor, like hard pornography or excessive violence which harms the minds of young boys finding their sexuality or indeed, adults not wanting to see the new level of shock factor for a desensitised nation. However, I seem to have an innate and adverse reaction to the core idea in cencorship. This may be the far-left-socialist in me talking, but the thought of some suit making the decision to censor the information I am consuming makes me feel positively ill – who gave them the bloody right to decide? I feel strongly especially with the news I want (demand) to get as unbiased representation as possible, as I am sure most of you will agree with. This hot topic in my head lead me to consider how censorship will cope with the current and future surge of internet broadcasting, especially (to reference Clay Shirky’s ‘Cognitive Surplus’) from ‘amateurs’ with mobile video cameras and constant live twitter streams. Are we on the edge social media usurping international News channels? What will life be like with our continuous (possibly uncensored) information stream on our google glasses in five, ten, fifty years time?