Friday, March 09, 2007

.: Presentation! :.

Greetings my little mortals! Do you hear something wonderful, something divine?
Yes... its that mysterious holy voice speaking to you from up above, yet again. If you think that this great voice from above is so irresistably sexy and addictive (which i assume must be the case, since my voice is music to even the dumbest of ears), then you must have been ecstatic when i was making that little oral presentation for GP a few weeks ago. Well, as junren has requested it and I feel that most of the jokes i made werent really understood that day because i spoke too fast, and maybe because some of the audience have poor comprehension abilities, so here it is, the original script i wrote. Hope it isnt too lame, but you know as well as i do that its probably going to be as lame as you expected it to be.


"Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Today, I would like to begin my presentation with a fact of immense impact.

Are you aware of the shocking truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that roughly 1 in every 2 persons, I repeat, 1 in every 2 persons living on the surface of this planet we call earth, makes up 50% of the human population?

The fact I am responding to is “The average Briton is caught on camera 300 times a day. With 10 percent of the world’s 30 million CCTV cameras, we are the most watched nation in the world.” As you shall soon realise, just like the first statement I have made, the “fact” I have chosen to respond to be as lame as a centipede with 99 missing legs. Let’s put ourselves into the shoes of the average English dude who would be reading this.

Placing such a fact in a list of 50 facts that should change the world has connotations of itself. It means that whoever placed this fact there feels there is great injustice in the existence of CCTV cameras. It is as if the very act of placing a CCTV camera somewhere is horrendously immoral, and no matter at what cost, it is our duty to entirely eradicate CCTV cameras and wipe them off the very surface of this world like pesky pests off the surface of a piece of wood crawling all over with termites. With the author of the list making such great accusations at possibly innocent CCTV cameras, don’t you think we should closely examine the pros and cons or CCTV cameras in our society?

At first, the statistics truly seems alarming. The idea of being caught on CCTV such a large number of times a day makes us uncomfortable, and the word “watch” implies that people’s privacies are being intruded upon. The sentence puts the meaning across in a clever way such that we fail to realise the cameras “watching” us can actually only catch a quick glimpse of each of the thousands of people it is “watching”.

Secondly, while on one hand it seems that privacy is something fair to expect in a highly cultured society, on the other hand, on closer examination, we would find that it is impossible to achieve what the author of the fact wants. Each and every one of us is “watched” by many people everyday anyway. I, myself, am being caught on 56 different biological CCTV cameras in a short duration of 5 minutes! With 96.5% of the class’s biological CCTV cameras focusing straight into me, I am currently the most watched person in 6k! Clearly, there is no point in arguing for privacy in public.


Furthermore, is privacy really all that important in the first place? Assuming that the cameras used has sufficiently high resolution, the security cameras keep a lookout for terrorists and crooks of all shapes, sizes and colours, such that these devious persons would not be able to do evil as they wish. Not only acting as a deterrent, CCTVs also ensure the unlucky criminals who happen to commit their thievery or robbery or even murder right under the surveillance of the cameras to be brought to justice. Are we really willing to give up safety for privacy?

CCTV cameras not only ensure our safety, but the hygiene of our environment as well! It appears the particular material CCTV cameras are made of, and the particular angles at which the components are fixed together create a curious mechanism which interacts with some part of our brains in some unknown way due to some unknown reason, with the net result being our character improving manifold. The end result is that wherever the magical lens of a CCTV camera points, people suddenly stop doing inconsiderate things such as spitting and littering. Its amazing how the lift at my block became a public toilet, a public rubbish dump and a public smoker’s corner simply because the CCTV camera in the lift was removed. Of course, in the rare occasions that these delightful little toys should fail, we can still grab a rare glimpse of human nature as compensation.

Therefore, we can see that CCTVs work for the good of our society, and the statement we have encountered here is nothing but a few pieces of information cleverly presented to attempt to convert the average layman into freedom activists, to convert the freedom activists who are not already emotional into emotional freedom activists, to make the already emotional freedom activists yet more emotional, and to make the freedom activists of the ultimatest emotional state to think they have a rational reason for raising a great hullabaloo. The educated population should be already well aware of the good CCTVs have done to our society. After all, if CCTVs are not everywhere, how would we be able to know that Jeff Lopez claimed that he said he don’t want tur kwa in his ba chor mee, when he didn’t say he don’t want tur kwa?"

Rejected instrumentality at 9:41 PM