Several days ago, a friend of mine (in China) changed his MSN status to this line:
??????????? ??, ??????????. ???, ?????????. ??, ?????, ??????????????????.
It can be translated as:
Our instructor asked as about our dreams, and I said: My dream is to be a citizen. "It's so easy," he replied. "Well, " I added, "my dreams is, to be a citizen who can browser the Internet freely (free as in freedom)"
You might be curious: why the freedom of accessing information is so critical? To me, it can be explained in twofold.
Human beings, as every living things in the world, have to get feedback from our environment anytime to adjust to it. It's for sure that insufficient knowledge to the surroundings will impair our justifications. Being ignorant to the outside world will eventually meet a brick wall in front. Moreover, insufficient information would be misleading too. I have a friend who helps high school students go abroad every year. He told me that, rather than lacking of money or ambition for a child to study abroad, the biggest problem why so few students can get the opportunity to study abroad came from the ignorance of the policy and the procedure of higher education systems abroad. Therefore, if you have such a dream, please try to get necessary information and don't let the environment confine you. Actually your environment will never be a restriction if you can get outside information constantly and thereby decreases the entropy of the environment.
This brings another question: what kind of information you need to get to achieve your goal? My answer is : be an independent thinker and get the key yourself. I can understand that one in the early 20s is eager to explore the unknown world and trying to syndicate all the useful information for him/herself. To my experience, two frequent questions used by them are "which book should I read" and "where can I find that information". My suggestion for them is almost, if not always, the same: "think about it twice, and you will get the answer". In my opinion (maybe sort of paranoid), if you haven't known what kind of information you should take to help make decision, you are not prepared for success. There might be someone in the world that can answer the question about "should I do..." or "how can I do.." for you perfectly, but you have to be the one that have a full sense of the outside world with respect to your own situation. In U.S., people usually say: "Do some homework first", which means you have to gather some necessary information yourself. Be brave, nobody can help you in figuring out what kind of information you need, even they can help you in making decision in when you are in labyrinth. So don't panic, dare to know the outside world, even it's painful.
Free accessing to information is important for self-development. Sadly, in China, mainland, this pre-requisite is not true. For some reason, some useful websites such as Wikipedia are not accessible. Moreover, the network infrastructure is not so developed. Nevertheless, those shortages have now been partly resolved via some not-so-hard techniques. Thus, I encourage my readers to explore the wonderful unknown world via your browser and search engines. Your future is on your hand.
