Consider the merits and demerits of censorship and state your reasons why you think it is un/necessary.

Censor when bring used as a verb as quoted from Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: "to remove the parts of a book, film/movie, etc. that are considered to be offensive, immoral or a political threat".
And censorship is " the act or policy of censoring books, etc "

The merits of censorship:
1. Protects general audience : as seen from the above definitions, censorship will protect the public from seeing images which are gruesome like a headless corpse or a person whose body is being tore apart. Immoral images which are linked to taboo issues are also removed to prevent negative influence.
2. Protects national security: this is especially true in Singapore which is a multi-racial country because if images or even speeches that promote discrimination among the races are shown, riots and conflicts among the races are bound to occur. As Singapore is a small nation, we cannot afford to be fighting among ourselves. Thus censorship serves to protect the national security.

The demerits of censorship:
1. Narrow one's learning horizon : by leaving out certain parts of information or even facts, we are restraining the amount of information portrayed to the general mass which they have the right to know. Also in the process of censoring information or images, we are giving the general public a biased view and a limited chance to know the truth.
2. No transparency : by not showing the truth to the public, we are not being transparent. And what is democracy without transparency. We are depriving people of the right to know the truth and with the raging concerns about human rights in our generation, there will bound to have many conflicts about the issue of censorship.

Other than the merits, censorship is necessary in the sense that it helps to shield the young from negative influence such as violence, unnatural sex and polities in certain extent. Professionals have said that under long exposure to such negative influence, one will have a higher possibility to carry out the acts that he/she sees. Thus with censorship, we are in one sense or another helping to reduce the crime rates. Also, by having censorship will also ensure that terrorists who have the thought of using the media to arouse the people's anger and cause riots and chaos to happen in a country to not get their way. Thus censorship also helps to maintain peace and stability.

However, censorship is unnecessary as it is to certain extent promoting ignorance. If people are not exposed to the reality, wouldn't their general knowledge be limited or to some extent biased? How would other country think of us if our people cannot converse with a wide scope of facts? Also, by blocking out images or information to our young, wouldn't they be even more curious? As the saying goes, "curiosity kills the cat”. When the young especially the teenagers are curious, they will stop at nothing to search the "truth". Especially in our generation, where anything can just be found on the internet, wouldn't it be worse if they were to stumble upon unhealthy stuff and get addicted to it?

To conclude, i feel that censorship is unnecessary IF only there is proper and adequate parental guidance where parents will be able to tell their child how to differentiate between what’s right and wrong and in the meanwhile instill moral values in them. However due to the fact that there is an increased in numbers of families where both parents are working long hours and thus not being able to spend time with their children, i still think that a certain censorship is necessary. However, the government who is playing the role as the censor should always adapt to the changing world and do necessary changes to the censorship and allow the young citizens to be exposed to the reality of life bit by bit. Hence a flexible censorship is necessary.