Administration of censorship in Singapore has been performed in a typically methodical manner with guidelines developed through experience. [8] First, materials going into the home are more heavily censored than those going into the corporate world. The Singapore authorities have drawn a distinction between information for business uses, which should be as free flowing as possible, and information for non-business uses. Information for the home is seen to be of a less critical nature so censorship of such information is regarded to have not as deleterious an effect.
Second, materials for the young are more heavily censored than those for adults. This is an admittedly paternalistic principle of protecting the weaker members of society from the possible harm of the materials in question. Third, materials for public consumption are more heavily censored than those for private consumption. This is a corollary of the second principle as it is assumed that the public includes those who are “weaker. ” Also, regardless of the level of censorship those who are determined can always get their hands on them. Hence private consumption can only be oliced to a limited extent.
Further, it is more efficient to police public instead of private consumption. It should be noted that private consumption of censorship materials is still policed in that those found in private possession of censored materials can be convicted in court. Finally, materials deemed to have artistic and educational merit are less heavily censored. This is a recently articulated principle and has been applied to movies, which now have an R(A) or Restricted (Artistic) rating.
In sum, censorship in Singapore has an element of differentiation: home vs. siness, children vs. adults, public vs. private consumption. Further, materials that can be shown to have some tangible and wider benefit–such as for business, art and education–are censored with a much lighter hand. On the other hand, materials deemed to have less tangible benefit–such as “pure entertainment”– are censored more heavily. To be sure, some of these principles come into conflict in the administration of censorship. The concession to artistic materials is an admission of one such conflict. On the Internet, however, the conflict is magnified.
Problems in Censorship of the Internet As a new technology, the Internet defies censorship because of characteristics such as information explosion, de-massification, convergence, computer culture and globalisation. First, the Internet has the ability to explode information onto every user. More information can be gathered and distributed at a faster pace, meaning that the flow of information in circulation increases at an exponential rate. In Singapore, however, the number of censors at work has not kept pace with the explosive growth in the amount of censorable materials.