Censorship? Probably just overzealous filters…
It has come to my attention that in at least one large European bank, access to The Park Paradigm is blocked. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. After the initial 5 seconds of paranoia, it dawned on me that (despite my ego wishing it was otherwise) this was most likely due to my blog running foul of some generic web-content filtering software that the bank in question is running. Although my direct experience of such things is now a couple years old, these filters were pretty dumb / blunt and needed to be over-ridden continuously.
As a (somewhat geeky) MD, I (a) knew of this problem and (b) wouldn’t give a second thought to firing off a quick email to IT security to get whatever website I needed to see ‘unblocked’. (And no this did not include dodgy non-work related sites…) The problem is that the vast majority of (non-IT) employees (a) don’t know that the filters are known to be blunt/fallible and exception requests are perfectly reasonably, and (b) if they do know, are put off by overly-complex (ie more than 60sec) form filling and/or time-lags for unblocking. As a result, it is not surprising that most bank employees when faced with a (I might add usually very scary) message stating “ACCESS DENIED. THIS WEBSITE MAY CONTAIN INNAPPROPRIATE MATERIAL”, fail to pursue the issue further.
Why does this matter? It means that they can’t access information and opinion that is outside the mainstream ‘channels’. It means that serendipity is unlikely to pay them a visit. It means that they are at risk of being flatlanders in a 3-dimensional world. It means that they are cut-off from a rich stream of ideas, data and opinions. This is pure conjecture, but I suspect that the probability of The Park Paradigm (or any other blog) being blocked at a hedge fund is much much lower than the probability of it being bocked in a big bank… Just saying. Draw your own conclusions…
“All of this because they can’t read your blog???” (I hear you groaning.) No, not my blog. All blogs. All non-traditional infomedia? It would be nice (for my ego) to think in this instance that I had been singled out, but sadly I doubt that is the case; I’m sure this site has just been generically lumped into some undesirable category or another, probably algorithmically. (Love the irony.)
So in the interests of some market research, please let me know if access to The Park Paradigm is blocked where you work (no not oxymoronic, assuming you read this at home) or where you used to work, and if you know why that is/was. And thanks for reading, although I’m sure you’ll enjoy it even more now that you know you are reading ‘banned’ material! (Getting that meme around will do wonders I’m sure for site traffic!)
