The larger, more successful websites on the internet have many things disturbing in common. One of these is the ability to flag 'inappropriate' material.
This is actually snitching, and this snitching is anonymous. At least to the person who posted the flagged material (the websites themselves know who you are, that you're a snitch, that they can't sell certain ('inappropriate') material to you). But the rest of us lose out. The rest of us are snitched upon. The rest of us get censored, with very little effort on the corporation's part, and very little evidence that it ever occurred. And there's nothing we can do about it, except re-post the 'inappropriate' material.
For example, the video "Censoring Cunt" is a piece of art that shows some of the art that has been censored over the years. It was originally posted on youtube, but ironically it was censored and removed. It is now hosted on google video (owned by the same company), and hasn't yet been censored.
So stop snitching, stop censoring, stop flagging.
I'm guessing that material that encourages the murder of students from, say, Liverpool, should be discouraged then? Would this be preferable in a free society?
ReplyDeleteC'mon, Stu. Your thoughts were slightly more organized back in college, if I recall.
Btw, Stu, it's perfectly legit for any company, privately/publicly owned, to bar/ban certain materials. Pro-Nazi material, for example, or child porn, are both popular targets for banning, for good reasons.
ReplyDeleteOther times, it's just taste, or bad PR.
Say if I have a blog or website. Apart from the host's ads, I have a right to block stuff I think doesn't mesh with my contents.
The logical end of your argument says that anyone should be able to put anything on anyone else's website. Basically, you're wanting control when you can't have control. That's not logical or mature.
Censorship is a matter of fact, since we all do it to a degree. I censor certain things from my 14-month old daughter. Since I'm prone to certain sins, certain things need to be censored from me.
The same for you. You're censoring certain things automatically on your blog, simply by your perspective. It's inescapable.
I absolutely agree to certain forms of censorship. Freedom of speech is something used to distract people who defend that rather than defending more important things. Don't get me wrong, freedom of speech has its good points. But it's not the best thing since sliced bread, and there are problems with it. Indeed, a lot of recent 'art' has simply been people pushing the lines of the cultural taboo. How is that art? It's (often) just childish boundary pushing done on a societal scale.
ReplyDeleteBut snitching, that's not good. It's valued in certain sub-cultures, but is almost always seen as a betrayal. A snitch-based culture is how Institutes like Moody Bible Institute survive - and from experience I can tell it's not nice. It breaks down trust, makes you suspicious of everyone around you, beats you into the submission of cultural norms. And once you'd submissive to the norms, those norms can be engineered (like in Nazi Germany) or psychologically altered (like in USA today) to become the very plague of evil on the earth. Submission can be good, but submission out of fear (of snitches) is wrong. Internet corporations that train us to snitch are just part of the problem.
My thoughts appeared more organised to you back in my undergrad because my thoughts were more in line with yours. Now they've changed, they may appear less organised to you, but to me and my present communities they are a whole lot better. And more able to do good in the world.
Well, Stu, here's hoping that thought organization and transformation is the result of maturity and growth rather than rebellion and seeking approval in others' eyes.
ReplyDeleteChesterton's "Orthodoxy" does a good job of describing why a certain level of submission is required...else we'd get ourselves into loads of trouble. If we seek to impact other circles, just make sure that the fundamentals (what's most important) don't get changed, 'cause otherwise you'll lose who you are.
Trust me, I know Godwin's Law. I used Nazism purposely, because certain people (esp. Moody-influenced, evangelical-influenced, fundamentalist-influenced, naive-worldview) do not see snitching to be a problem. Likening snitching to the snitching in 1930's Germany was used as a shorthand to show an example of how snitching is bad.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it does dampen the overall effect of invoking Nazism to support an argument. But (un)fortunately that's how history goes - as we get further away from an event/time period, the horror of the event diminishes. Not mentioning it won't stop that happening.
The following comment was emailed to me for posting by D. Kennedy on 9/1/08.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be helpful to define the issue a little more precisely.
First of all, are you primarily concerned about the content that is snitched upon, or the process itself?
If your concern is exclusively about the process, then it follows that people snitching on their neighbors for the Nazis is no different than people snitching on their neighbors to the FBI, and that snitching on decent people to an evil government is no different than snitching on, say, Mafia criminals to the FBI (if one allows that the FBI is good. You might of course argue that the FBI is evil and the Mafia is benign, but let's grant the premise for the sake of the argument.) To say that all snitching is bad is to say that all snitching is bad.
On the other hand, if your concern is primarily for content (is it right to put a lid on those things that we consider evil, or is it bad to infringe on freedom?) then the issue is different, and the question becomes "which things ought to be limited by societal pressure, and which things ought to be allowed or ignored? (Which activities should the Neighborhood Watch report, and which things are none of their business?)"
To further clarify: if the process itself is bad, then flag buttons should be eliminated from web sites. If content is the issue, then the discussion is about which flags the web administrators act on, and which ones they ignore, and their reasons for making the distinctions. (After all, a person can flag anything for any reason. It is up to the webadmins to decide whether or not the flag has any merit.)
So, which argument are you making?
I'm actually quite embarrassed I ever wrote this post with its accompanying comments. Of course content has to be regulated, and when there is so much content, it makes sense to make the users the regulators (probably as well as internal regulators).
ReplyDeleteIs censoring always bad? No. Is snitching the same as censoring? No (hence we have different words so the difference may be discerned).
I was probably just raging without much cause when I wrote the post. Oh well, we can be forgiven the follies of youth, right? ;)