Artifact Two

Ronald Bruce Meyer."Nazi Book-Burning (1933):Religion and Censorship".10 May 2006. 29 Dec 2006.http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/rants/0510almanac.htm

Censorship filters out ideas that are seen as obscene, wrong and disapproving of the government. There are also times when the government will force citizens to believe what they want them to. Sometimes the government will take drastic measures towards those who choose not to follow the government's standards. Sometimes, it doesn't have to be a person or a group of people. It can be anything that speaks ill towards the government, like a banner or a poster or even a book.

In the years before America was involved in WW2 and Hitler was just rising to power, the German government wanted the people of Germany to follow his example.

"It was on this date, May 10, 1933, in Berlin that about 20,000 books were burned during a student rally as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The suppression of free speech and ideas was a tactic of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. The target this time was anti-Nazi, Jewish-authored, and so-called "degenerate" books, but suppression of ideas by the burning of books, often culminating in the burning of people (as Heinrich Heine famously observed), is an old idea."

During this rally, thousands of books were burned that had ideals that were not the same as the government. Although most of the books were written by Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, all books that had ideals the government did not want people to believe were burned.

Even in America there have been disputes concerning books. In 1953, author Ray Bradbury published his controversial novel, Farenheit 451. In this book , special government agents called "firemen", are deployed to burn any books that could harm or change people's views about the goverment. The premise itself is ironic because the term "fireman", usually refers to person who helps stop fires and help preserve information as opposed to the firemen in this book who create fires and destroy books. It seems like Bradbury is paying omage to the book burning rally in Germany twenty years before the book was published. Both the German government and the government in Bradbury's novel have similarities that can be summarized in one sentence:

"We know better than you do what's good for you to read."

Artifact One

Network World Staff."Researchers: Impact of censorship significant in Google, other search engine results".15 March 2006. 12 Dec 2006.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/031506-google-censorship.html?fsrc=netflash-rss

When you go on the computer at school, you sometimes notice how the school system blocks certain websites like Myspace and anything that would be distracting and/or detrimental to your education. Schools do this so you'll focus more on your work. But when you get home, you can go any website you wish. But if you live in China, your choices are severely limited.
Researchers at Indiana University have created a site that allow them to compare and contrast search results from country specific search engines. Google China has been formatted to the country's free-speech restrictions.

Many people remember the bloody riot known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China in the late 80's.If you were to look up a image of Tiananmen Square on the U.S version of Google, you would end up with results like this:

Images from google.com

But if you were browsing on Google China, looking up images of Tiananmen Square, you would get very different results:

courtesy of google.ch

Athough I typed the same exact words in both engines, the chinese version shows no images of the riot which killed about 2,000 people. China has also made sure that are text refences to the square direct users to sites that offer hotel and tourist information instead of letting the public read about how the communist government killed hundreds of their own people.

What do I want to learn?

In my personal opinion, I think I know a good deal about censorship. But if there was anything else I would what to know, it would be this: why would a government prevent certain things from being shown? Why do they go to such extremes, like manslaughter or torture just so one newspaper never sees the light of day or a TV program be cancelled because it speaks negatively about how their government is run?

What I Know About Censorship

Censorship? What is it really? Some people believe it's just when they beep out certain words on TV that would be inappropriate. Or other times when they cover certain things with a black bar for a cheap laugh or to prevent mental scarring of this generation's young folk. But others times it's blocking or preventing certain programs from airing. Why? Because some things aren't aired because it could insult certain people like on a radio or is just not ment to be seen on TV: maybe on pay-per-view. On the radio, when they air a song, they blank out the offensive lyrics so that the FCC( Federal Communications Commission) says it's appropiate to play on the radio. The FCC also makes sure that certain programs, like rated R movies, are changed so that it is at least appropriate for a PG-13 audience by bleeping bad words and cutting certain scenes. But the rabbit hole goes much deeper then that. All over the world, censorship affects newspapers, books, movies, shows and many more forms of multimedia that aren't just to protect the public.