MediaExperiment.org

Students in my new media class have done an installation project that stirred up some discussion about news media and free speech in China. This installation uses all computers in a computer lab to play news from all over the world covering 3.14 Tibet riot. These news media include CCTV, CNN, BBC, and channels from India and Germany. Viewers can choose to watch these different versions of Tibet riot news on different computers. Most of these video clips were downloaded online and of course, they tell different versions of “truths”. Outside the classroom, students who created this project interviewed people about their opinion on these report and the event.

First of all I am impressed by the courage and ambitious of the students on the project. When we were discussing the project planning in class, we have talked about which international event they should picked to make this project. And I didn’t expect them to involve in such timely and sensitive topic.

In class to lead the discussion before it collapses into nationalism, I said this project was not about the political situation of Tibet. It can be any event that these news channels were covering (like 911 as this student group proposed before.) The most importantly is that it provide the possibility of having multiple view points and even conflicting ones to exist simultaneously. We (Chinese) are so used to the fact that our media is censored and controlled. To the point that we have accepted this fact and feel it’s a logical thing to do for everyone and our nation. What’s happening even is that people are self-censoring and self-policing on media and speech without government.

We all grown up in the media censored environment, including me. I still remember watching Hongkong news at home during dinner hour when I was a kid. Every once in a while, the 6:30 news would disappear and went into noise for a few minutes. And my parents and I would just switch to other channels and keep having dinner. Now it’s pretty much the same with those sensitive news except the blanks were filled in with commercials. So the interruption is less apparent. Minds of lot of Chinese citizen has been shaped in the age of media controlled. So even if there is freedom laying in front of us we won’t know what to do with it, because we have never used this tool before.

I believe in people should have the choice on receiving information from different media. There is no ultimate truth but there are different stand points. I believe people have and should have their own judgments. There were students expressed anger after seeing western coverage on Tibet. That’s why I raised the question in the title: How many opinions can we listen before We get mad?