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A Compendium of Week 4 with Annotations

The following slides represent a compendium from

our discussions on censorship. Your reactions were incredible as was the depth of your concerns and the amount of original research you did to add to the overall conversation.

In the following slides I have included some direct quotes (attributable, of course) from the DB as well as inserting some historical (and startling facts).

Enjoy.

Thoughts Uncensored

Christina writes of one article where the author calls

out how leaving some information in and taking other information out is ‘more dangerous’ because the reader does not know any longer what has been eliminated.

This is akin to the proverbial frog in boiling water metaphor. It is also akin to how freedoms can be slowly stripped away which has been done by many, many regimes.

Frog in Boiling Water

Here are several articles to chew upon. No comment

necessary. This is in response to Kate’s comment about how Japan and other so-called enlightened nations gloss over their own historyhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=0

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/21/texas-cooks-the-textbooks.html

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/11/kelly-shackelford-texas-textbook-social-studies-standards-american-history/

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Consider: Libya, Burma (Myanmar), Egypt, Syria

and to Timothy’s post regarding state control- the grandpappy of all repressive regimes- North Korea.

Amy, too, addresses this with the comment that ‘mere access’ isn’t enough. How true.

On the other hand, civilizations and cultures have often used art to state their opinions in ways that are subtle but harming to regimes.

Backlash

Nope, this is not a rerun from M*A*S*H but in

response to Jeremy’s post regarding censorship of war information. Consider this historical precedent:

ttp://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/lslips.htm

And also our ‘embedding’ of journalists during the Iraq war. Unprecedented.

Loose Lips

While reading Greg’s post regarding his great ‘what

if China dropped out of the Internet” does anyone see a tremendous dichotomy in the fact that China keeps sending students to the US, to England, to Australia where the Internet, as you all have pointed out, is as important today as is breathing.

What happens when they go home. For those of you who can connect with a Chinese student, ask.

Chinese Students in the US

Victoria’s extremely erudite and comprehensive post

has an undercurrent in it of Big Brother.

Who was/is Big Brother.

Hint: the book is amazing considering when it was written.

Further to her post, she writes that if sites violate one’s culture and/or religion, it is okay. Reactions anyone?

Big Brother

Christian brings in the dissemination of information

as a form of censorship. The focus is on women. Once upon a time it was considered dangerous to allow a woman to read – this was in the ‘civilized’ world.

http://theboar.org/media/archive/volume-31/term-2-issue-7/newspaper/39_.pdf

The Little Woman

Evan points to an article where the US State

Department has ‘asked India to respect ‘full freedom of the Internet.’” Is that what we are supposed to do? Shouldn’t the country itself make that determination? Ideas? Comments?

Respect Who or is Whom?

In Rachel’s post she comments on how in history class that we often ‘learn about battles we have won as well as battles we have lost.” The point she brings out is on why we need both sides of the story.

Anyone been to some of the Civil War sites in the South? How biased are some of the plaques?

Civil War or War of Northern Aggression?

During the totalitarian government of Josef Stalin

people were brutally murdered in the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. To the point that Nicole makes, if governments are oppressive, people will find away around it. This man risked his life to smuggle this manuscript out of the USSR:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-gulag.html

It Will Be in the Last Place You Look

Possibly one of the greatest, and that isn’t the right

word- let’s try egregious – examples of censorship was during the rule of Mao in China.

He put into motion the Cultural Revolution http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/11/kelly-shackelford-texas-textbook-social-studies-standards-american-history/

It isn’t talked about today even though the very people who are now part of China’s capitalism revolution had parents or grandparents affected by Mao’s ideas.

Notes from Chairman Mao

Diana writes that in Lebanon ‘the government is

trying to control way too much.’ We won’t argue but do need to point out that our very own government was wandering around in private emails between a four star general and his paramour and her so called rival and their other general and……

No value judgment here; just another way of looking at governments and control in a day of cyber-everything.

Government Control

As many of the discussion pointed out, all of this can be

defined as a solid – it depends. Culture has much to do with social media use. Censorship is nothing new and exists in our own country in many subtle ways.

In my own opinion the issue isn’t so much education or globalization or, for that matter, technology. Globalization is about capitalism or more kindly said, competition and free markets. Technology is about enabling globalization.

Education the ability for people to disseminate ideas freely.

So What Does This Mean for Education?