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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > Censorship
In 1964, Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign to fight what she
called the 'propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt' being poured
into homes through the nation's radio and television sets.
Whitehouse, senior mistress at a Shropshire secondary school,
became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement for censorship:
the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now
Mediawatch-uk. For almost forty years, she kept up the fight
against the programme makers, politicians, pop stars and
playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer
of blasphemy and obscenity. From Doctor Who ('Teatime brutality for
tots') to Dennis Potter (whose mother sued her for libel and won)
to the Beatles - whose Magical Mystery Tour escaped her
intervention by the skin of its psychedelic teeth - the list of
Mary Whitehouse's targets will read to some like a nostalgic roll
of honour. Caricatured while she lived as a figure of middle-brow
reaction, Mary Whitehouse was held in contempt by the country's
intellectual elite. But were some of the dangers she warned of more
real than they imagined? Ben Thompson's selection of material from
her extraordinary archive shows Mary Whitehouse's legacy in a
startling new light. From her exquisitely testy exchanges with
successive BBC Directors General, to the anguished screeds penned
by her television and radio vigilantes, these letters reveal a
complex and combative individual, whose anxieties about culture and
morality are often eerily relevant to the age of the internet. 'A
fantastic read . . . I can't recommend it highly enough.' Lauren
Laverne, BBC Radio 6 Music
What does censorship do to a culture? How do censors justify their
work? What are the mechanisms by which censorship - and
self-censorship - alter people's sense of time and memory, truth
and reality? Thomas Bass faced these questions when The Spy Who
Loved Us, his account of the famous Time magazine journalist and
double agent Pham Xuan An, was published in a Vietnamese edition.
When the book finally appeared in 2014, after five years of
negotiations with Vietnamese censors, more than four hundred
passages had been altered or cut from the text. After the book was
published, Bass flew to Vietnam to meet his censors, at least the
half dozen who would speak with him. In Censorship in Vietnam, he
describes these meetings and examines how censorship works, both in
Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. An exemplary piece of
investigative reporting, Censorship in Vietnam opens a window into
the country today and shows us the precarious nature of
intellectual freedom in a world governed by suppression.
This book is about Freedom of Speech and public discourse in the
United States. Freedom of Speech is a major component of the
cultural context in which we live, think, work, and write,
generally revered as the foundation of true democracy. But the
issue has a great deal more to do with social norms rooted in a web
of cultural assumptions about the function of rhetoric in social
organization generally, and in a democratic society specifically.
The dominant, liberal notion of free speech in the United States,
assumed to be self-evidently true, is, in fact, a particular
historical and cultural formation, rooted in Enlightenment
philosophies and dependent on a collection of false narratives
about the founding of the country, the role of speech and media in
its development, and the relationship between capitalism and
democracy. Most importantly, this notion of freedom of speech
relies on a warped sense of the function of rhetoric in democratic
social organization. By privileging individual expression, at the
expense of democratic deliberation, the liberal notion of free
speech functions largely to suppress rather than promote meaningful
public discussion and debate, and works to sustain unequal
relations of power. The presumed democratization of the public
sphere, via the Internet, raises more questions than it answers-who
has access and who doesn't, who commands attention and why, and
what sorts of effects such expression actually has. We need to
think a great deal more carefully about the values subsumed and
ignored in an uncritical attachment to a particular version of the
public sphere. This book seeks to illuminate the ways in which
cultural framing diminishes the complexity of free speech and
sublimates a range of value-choices. A more fully democratic
society requires a more critical view of freedom of speech.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time
adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to
which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other,
coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary
censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive,
even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after
the opening of the USSR's spekstrahn, those enormous collections of
literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine
censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars
describing the centralised control of East German print
publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the difference
of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of
speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid
censorship and book banning in colonial countries also demonstrates
censorship's formative role in the institutional structures of
literature beyond the metropole. Censorship and the Limits of the
Literary examines these and other developments across twelve
countries, from the Enlightenment to the present day, offering case
studies from the French revolution to Internet China. Is literature
ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a
globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final,
failed version of national control?
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media
platforms police what we post online-and the large societal impact
of these decisions Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook
page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn.
Whether faced with "fake news" or livestreamed violence, "content
moderators"-who censor or promote user-posted content-have never
been more important. This is especially true when the tools that
social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and
censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear. In
this revealing and nuanced exploration, award-winning sociologist
and cultural observer Tarleton Gillespie provides an overview of
current social media practices and explains the underlying
rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In
doing so, Gillespie highlights that content moderation receives too
little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and
creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and
the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators,
creators, and consumers, this accessible, timely book is a
must-read for anyone who's ever clicked "like" or "retweet."
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