This blog post was originally written on 31 January 2006. It is reproduced here for archival purposes and your reading pleasure. It is reproduced as accurately as possible with no style, mechanical, or spelling corrections whatsoever.
Current mood:
amused
Recently Dom Camella posted a series of blogs on his myspace (www.myspace.com/arevolvingonob) discussing the addition of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) to NOECA's Global Block List. This has inspired me to discuss my feeling on internet censorship. This will not be the usual teenaged whining about how mainstream rappers can't say the F word on mtv. I will use two main examples throughout this blog: Wikipedia and Goatse. (As a side note for anyone who is looking a good goatse mirror can be found at http://goatse.ragingfist.net/)
OK. I think the internet is a place where people should be able to communicate any information that they want provided it is in a nonassertive manner. What I mean by that is a person should be able to post whatever she wants on the internet as long as other people are not forced to view it. A perfect example is Goatse. The vast majority of people in this world would say that goatse is disgusting. (If you don't know what goatse is please check out the link above before continuing.) However I feel it should be allowed on the internet because noone is forced into looking at it. It is true that someone could easily be tricked into looking at it (as many of you probably just were), but that is an entirely different matter.
I think that most people would agree with this point of view, so the quetion is why are websites like goatse shut down. The answer lies in the very nature of web hosting. If any ultraconservative homophobic Holyer-than-thou types catches a gimpse of goatse the first place they go to whine is the person who is hosting the website. Eventually the host caves under pressure and shuts down the site. Luckily the good people in this world are always working to create mirrors, and the likes in order to keep the internet a place of free expression.
As I said earlier a totally uncensored internet would be perfect so long as it isn't overly-assertive. Unfortunately that is not always the case. As many of us know there are plenty of viruses and spyware and miscellaneous malwares going around the internet. No one wants to be in the middle of visiting her church's website, and all of a sudden see a porn site pop up in front of her browser. There are sollutions to this like having a quality browser, and antispyware software, but that isn't the point of this blog. A much better sollution would be to not have these things be issues in the first place. I am now officially casting shame on anyone who has ever designe a virus, malware, or pop-up ad of any kind. (And I'm sure that they are all very affected my shame casting)
Anyway, there are obviously times and places where looking at goatse would be inapropriate. Some examples would be at a public library or at school, or on a computer at church. These situations are when it is necessary to have web filtering. It is obvious why we can't look at goatse at school, and I think that other than a few anarchist, negative-nancy types you all would agree with me. However I see no reason why it would be inaprpopriate to visit Wikipedia at shool or church. After all Wikipedia by its very nature is an excelent research device.
All of this raises the question 'who is to decide what is apropriate and what is not?' Unfortunately, There is no good answer to that question. One would think that it would suffice to have some kind of administrative democratic board that is large enough and, more importantly, realistic enough to make fair decisions as to what is apropriate and what is not. But that doesn't work. And with that being said I really don't have a solid suggestion for how to solve this problem. All we can do is fight each battle individually. If you haven't yet looked at Dom's blog about the wikipedia issue I encourage you to do so. And also to send his proposed E-mail (the first one, not the stupid one.)
Well that's about all I have to say. As always please post any thoughts or ideas as comments.
OK. Now that I have written all of that I have to confess that a large part of why I wrote it was to trick you into looking at goatse, but also I think I made some good points.
Reading this one five years later, I'm much less impressed with my prose than I was previously with the Mormon blog. I appear to have been in a rush while writing, and I got of topic several times. But as for the content, I still feel largely the same way. I don't believe that general internet censorship is ever appropriate, whether it be for sites as trivial as goatse, or as influential as wikileaks. And to perfectly honest, censoring wikipedia out of a public highschool is probably the worst thing that ever happened to the American public schools. The wealth of knowledge that can be found on wikipedia, is more complete, rigorous, and up-to-date than any textbook I had in all of high school. And the volunteer authors that write, proof, and fact-check the articles are more competent than many of my teachers.
Edit 23 August 2012: The mirror mentioned above finally died this week. They all die eventually. Here is a new mirror.
Feel free to post any thoughts or ideas in the comments.
love, Joshy Woshy
