Friday, October 10, 2003

Nearly mind-blowing irony...

I actually had to argue the social benefits of not having censorship during a discussion of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 today. People who had just read the classic anti-censorship novel were arguing for the limitation of access to ideas.

Their theses were something to the effect of "freedom of speech unless the speech is about a nontraditional idea" and "Books, good. Internet, bad." Now, I do not argue that there are vast amounts of absolute dreck on the internet, some of it from this very site. However, there are also no gatekeepers deciding what we can and cannot read by virtue of accepting or rejecting book proposals or articles. Anyone can post any idea they want on the Web, whereas publishers, editors, and booksellers decide what is and is not published and made available to the public in print. Electronic media have made censorship harder and freedom of speech easier to come by. The down side is it puts on the reader the onus of deciding which ideas are worthwhile.

Now that no one is filtering what we read before we have a chance to read it, we must make our own decisions about the merit of the ideas. Technology may be making us physically less active, but it is requiring us to develop previously-unnecessary critical reasoning skills.

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