6 ms·

Why I banned a book: How censorship can impact a learning community

86 points by jparishy 13y ago

iamthepieman 13y ago
This reminds me of what many popular websites did during the SOPA and PIPA discussion. Though most sites simply displayed some mock warning or announcement stating "This is what you could see if SOPA was passed". Instead of or in addition to fighting NSA surveillance operations and requests I wonder if sites could instead display a message or page detailing what the NSA would be provided with if they ever came asking for your information. records maintained on your account: search: "Funny pictures of cats" IP: 192.168.0.1 account: johndoe5555@provider.com date: 01/01/2013 12:00:00.000 referrer: www.example.com etc . . .
- lukejduncan 13y ago
  I love the idea. Unfortunately, I think the average use would be more scared of the website than the NSA =/
- rdw 13y ago
  That's a clever idea, but I think that most users would be disconcerted by the sheer amount of information that's collected by most web sites already. It would raise the question, "why do you need to collect all that?" before anything else. Which is a good question to be sure, but probably not the one that most companies want to be answering.
  - iamthepieman 13y ago
    You're probably right about the web site getting the wrong kind of attention from this. I can almost see a government organization doing this instead, either as a public service or after some open information law is passed in reaction to public opinion on NSA surveillance. The U.S. government might just be bureaucratic and fractured enough.
danso 13y ago
> Our unorthodox (okay, heretical) experiment was very successful in highlighting how a simple bureaucratic decision can curb our freedom to read. Huh? Isn't the lesson more like, "People react very badly when a bureaucracy tells them what they cannot do"? Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."...or, in the OP's case: "Better to be censored than to be ignored" Did anyone else in junior high/high school actively seek out the books on the Banned books list just to see what the hell was so interesting about them? ---- A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. However, the percentage of a community that will read any one book in a year is so small that you wouldn't be able to discern any overall negative effect from hiding it.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  >A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. How could you distinguish between a book being hidden, and the library simply not having said book, or having said book but it is accidently in the wrong section.
  - danso 13y ago
    Well, yes, that's the thing, right? The best way to censor something is to disappear it without anyone noticing. The OP asserts that censorship is something that we can inherently discern and that the announcement of the book-banning proves it. No it doesn't. If the library were to just remove the book, people would just read some other book or do something else. I'm not philosophically opposed to the OP, I'm just pointing out that the most dangerous censorship is the kind you aren't aware of
- hrktb 13y ago
  I guess the "very successful" part was really the 8 people trying to understand the reason the book got banned, and the (few ?) other constructive responses to the announcement. Especially if the other years' banned book weeks got no measurable reaction at all. People on facebook reacting shallowly to some announcement should not be news.
ballard 13y ago
And the favorite lists and references to Godwin's law ensue: * Steal This Book * Anarchist Cookbook * Uncle Tom's Cabin * Mein Kampf * Das Kapital * The Satanic Verses * Captain Underpants (for the kids, obviously) Feel free to criticize or bust out some better titles. :)
- ballard 13y ago
  And replying to myself... Fahrenheit 451, of course!
- eksith 13y ago
  The AC wasn't really a "book" per-se, but a collected volume of snippets, wasn't it? I'd hardly call that a "banned" book though. I mean, it contained illegal activities which would have been verboten in most places. When I was in high school, there were kids who would frequent online forums (and a myriad of ad-heavy free hosts including GEOCITIES!!!!) that would put up The AC, using the library computers. They used Websense to filter content, which was about as effective as a sieve since they hadn't contemplated open proxies. 10 - 20 New ones which would pop up from time to time and the IPs would get traded on those forums. From the copies that got passed around on floppies (aaah, floppies. Remember those?) I'd say The AC was a collection of (mostly bad) texts assembled from various authors who posted these on Usenet and the like previously. I remember there were multiple versions; nothing really "official" since many were edited and compiled by independent authors and all are guaranteed to get you in hospital or jail. I think a couple of idiots in our school accomplished both.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook No, it was a book, published in hard copy. And it's probably older than you are. The best story I've read on the Internet about the Anarchist cookbook was a guy who claimed that he accidentally blew up his middle school with home made dynamite in Ireland, and only got away with it because the government blamed it on the IRA. (I can't seem to find it right now though.) The fastest way to falsify that story is if the recipe for dynamite in the Anarchist cookbook is wrong. (Which it may very well be, as the book is full of wrong information IIRC.)
tlb 13y ago
Book banning used to be scary when printed books were the only way of conveying long-form information to the public. Now authors can release the contents on the internet, which isn't perfect (less pleasant to read, no royalties) but good enough to protect freedom of speech. After hundreds of years of the tyranny of book burners, technology has routed around the problem.
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  In locales where access to higher technology is limited, I imagine that book banning could still be quite effective.
  - eksith 13y ago
    It's still a problem in places where the primary means of accessing the internet is the library or cyber café (which might have some sort of filtering installed). It's not all that uncommon that books popular around most of the world are often unheard of in outlet-controlled places. Note: Outlet control is often the holy grail of censorship (though that may be leaky as well) in that not only is content redacted, but knowledge of the content is also absent.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      You can always hide usb pens and memory cards somewhere, but it might be a dangerous thing to do if one gets caught.
      - Wingman4l7 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet If you wanted to get fancy, you could probably load TrueCrypt onto a removable media to have plausible deniability via a hidden volume, or some sort of "bad password? wipe contents!" setup. However, in a country that forces you to resort to such approaches, I would bet that their human rights record is such that they wouldn't mind tossing you in jail because you were "obviously hiding something".
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
hawkharris 13y ago
This reminds me of a similar story about how creative messaging can make people appreciate books and free speech: http://vimeo.com/35758683 http://vimeo.com/35758683
6ren 13y ago
The modern way to ban books is steganography-like: hide them in a sea of information.
- readme 13y ago
  Imagine this: services like amazon take over all the dead-tree book market. The government cracks down on piracy, and eliminates that way of getting books. A few big players end up controlling all the books on drm'd electronic devices. The future could be an easy place to ban books.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    "The hardcore flying saucer cultist, on the other hand, is a very special personality who has thus far escaped close scrutiny by the scientific community. Contrary to Buckner's finding, a poll of 250 hardcore "ufologists" in the United States in 1969 determined their median age to be 31. Teen-agers and house-wives constitute the most active groups, collecting clippings of sightings and issuing amateur newsletters and magazines, usually mimeographed. The classic search for identity plays an important role. The teen-aged ufologist is most often isolated on a farm, or separated from his peers because of his eccentric personality." The Flying Saucer Subculture, John Keel (1973) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph I'd always wondered how you produced a zine before personal computers.
wac 13y ago
>...on a campus of 3,000, only eight people actually asked for a meeting with me to discuss the reasons I banned the book I think this is really the most interesting part of the story- people are willing to complain but not take reasonable actions to remedy the situation. I think this is a symptom of a deeper problem in our society.
- sbhere 13y ago
  YES! +1k. > Some used Facebook as a forum to make rude comments from the relatively safe distance social media provides. This is the sole purpose of facebook, as far as I can tell. Give a loudmouth a microphone and then try to ignore them as they shout as loudly as possible. ... and I reference the "Facebook experiment" article a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  That comment was terribly meta. Yet I strain my brain trying to come up with something to do about THAT that isn't 'post a comment on HN' and I can't come up with anything.
lsc 13y ago
that's funny... it looked to me like one of the better promotions you could have had for the banned book in question. In fact, the whole thing seemed, well, like an unsubtle advertisement, unsubtle to the point where it became less effective.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Internet content filtering is the new book banning. My local library filters Hackaday, and lots of other innocuous things. The excuse for banning Hackaday is that it is allegedly a "hacking" website. The content filter is one of those canned IT solutions that governments love to patronize. It's here to keep The Children safe, and because vagrants would obviously come to the library and masturbate if there were no content filter. I guess it works because I've never seen a vagrant masturbating in the library. There is no person at the library who has any direct control over the unbanning of content. Anyone may submit a link to be banned for any reason and it will probably be banned. Getting a ban removed is a more complicated process. I find it ironic that even among librarians who think book banning is abhorrent, there are some who do not bat an eye at their Internet content filter.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Is there something about this post that got it killed automatically, or did I just get banned or something? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755 edit: Oooh, I'm guessing the reference to H a ckaday?
johndavidback 13y ago
Scary still and somewhat related is: instead of banning books, just change the content to fit your needs. Like Nineteen eighty-four. Oh, and like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/twains-classic-loses-the-nword-for-modern-age-2177172.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/t...
mathattack 13y ago
It's a great experiment. Sometimes you have to shake things up to keep the importance of an issue alive. Of course things take a life of their own on the internet and Facebook.
dietlbomb 13y ago
Librarian activists use the word 'ban' differently than everyone else. To most people, to ban something is to prohibit it. To librarians, to ban a book is to keep it out of stock. This may still be morally wrong in some situations, but it is dishonest of these activists to conflate such an action with book burnings and other more radical forms of information suppression.

86 points by jparishy 13y ago

This reminds me of what many popular websites did during the SOPA and PIPA discussion. Though most sites simply displayed some mock warning or announcement stating "This is what you could see if SOPA was passed". Instead of or in addition to fighting NSA surveillance operations and requests I wonder if sites could instead display a message or page detailing what the NSA would be provided with if they ever came asking for your information. records maintained on your account: search: "Funny pictures of cats" IP: 192.168.0.1 account: johndoe5555@provider.com date: 01/01/2013 12:00:00.000 referrer: www.example.com etc . . .

lukejduncan 13y ago
I love the idea. Unfortunately, I think the average use would be more scared of the website than the NSA =/
rdw 13y ago
That's a clever idea, but I think that most users would be disconcerted by the sheer amount of information that's collected by most web sites already. It would raise the question, "why do you need to collect all that?" before anything else. Which is a good question to be sure, but probably not the one that most companies want to be answering.
- iamthepieman 13y ago
  You're probably right about the web site getting the wrong kind of attention from this. I can almost see a government organization doing this instead, either as a public service or after some open information law is passed in reaction to public opinion on NSA surveillance. The U.S. government might just be bureaucratic and fractured enough.

danso 13y ago

> Our unorthodox (okay, heretical) experiment was very successful in highlighting how a simple bureaucratic decision can curb our freedom to read. Huh? Isn't the lesson more like, "People react very badly when a bureaucracy tells them what they cannot do"? Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."...or, in the OP's case: "Better to be censored than to be ignored" Did anyone else in junior high/high school actively seek out the books on the Banned books list just to see what the hell was so interesting about them? ---- A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. However, the percentage of a community that will read any one book in a year is so small that you wouldn't be able to discern any overall negative effect from hiding it.

gizmo686 13y ago
>A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. How could you distinguish between a book being hidden, and the library simply not having said book, or having said book but it is accidently in the wrong section.
- danso 13y ago
  Well, yes, that's the thing, right? The best way to censor something is to disappear it without anyone noticing. The OP asserts that censorship is something that we can inherently discern and that the announcement of the book-banning proves it. No it doesn't. If the library were to just remove the book, people would just read some other book or do something else. I'm not philosophically opposed to the OP, I'm just pointing out that the most dangerous censorship is the kind you aren't aware of
hrktb 13y ago
I guess the "very successful" part was really the 8 people trying to understand the reason the book got banned, and the (few ?) other constructive responses to the announcement. Especially if the other years' banned book weeks got no measurable reaction at all. People on facebook reacting shallowly to some announcement should not be news.

ballard 13y ago

And the favorite lists and references to Godwin's law ensue: * Steal This Book * Anarchist Cookbook * Uncle Tom's Cabin * Mein Kampf * Das Kapital * The Satanic Verses * Captain Underpants (for the kids, obviously) Feel free to criticize or bust out some better titles. :)

ballard 13y ago
And replying to myself... Fahrenheit 451, of course!
eksith 13y ago
The AC wasn't really a "book" per-se, but a collected volume of snippets, wasn't it? I'd hardly call that a "banned" book though. I mean, it contained illegal activities which would have been verboten in most places. When I was in high school, there were kids who would frequent online forums (and a myriad of ad-heavy free hosts including GEOCITIES!!!!) that would put up The AC, using the library computers. They used Websense to filter content, which was about as effective as a sieve since they hadn't contemplated open proxies. 10 - 20 New ones which would pop up from time to time and the IPs would get traded on those forums. From the copies that got passed around on floppies (aaah, floppies. Remember those?) I'd say The AC was a collection of (mostly bad) texts assembled from various authors who posted these on Usenet and the like previously. I remember there were multiple versions; nothing really "official" since many were edited and compiled by independent authors and all are guaranteed to get you in hospital or jail. I think a couple of idiots in our school accomplished both.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook No, it was a book, published in hard copy. And it's probably older than you are. The best story I've read on the Internet about the Anarchist cookbook was a guy who claimed that he accidentally blew up his middle school with home made dynamite in Ireland, and only got away with it because the government blamed it on the IRA. (I can't seem to find it right now though.) The fastest way to falsify that story is if the recipe for dynamite in the Anarchist cookbook is wrong. (Which it may very well be, as the book is full of wrong information IIRC.)

tlb 13y ago

Book banning used to be scary when printed books were the only way of conveying long-form information to the public. Now authors can release the contents on the internet, which isn't perfect (less pleasant to read, no royalties) but good enough to protect freedom of speech. After hundreds of years of the tyranny of book burners, technology has routed around the problem.

Wingman4l7 13y ago
In locales where access to higher technology is limited, I imagine that book banning could still be quite effective.
- eksith 13y ago
  It's still a problem in places where the primary means of accessing the internet is the library or cyber café (which might have some sort of filtering installed). It's not all that uncommon that books popular around most of the world are often unheard of in outlet-controlled places. Note: Outlet control is often the holy grail of censorship (though that may be leaky as well) in that not only is content redacted, but knowledge of the content is also absent.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    You can always hide usb pens and memory cards somewhere, but it might be a dangerous thing to do if one gets caught.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet If you wanted to get fancy, you could probably load TrueCrypt onto a removable media to have plausible deniability via a hidden volume, or some sort of "bad password? wipe contents!" setup. However, in a country that forces you to resort to such approaches, I would bet that their human rights record is such that they wouldn't mind tossing you in jail because you were "obviously hiding something".

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

hawkharris 13y ago

This reminds me of a similar story about how creative messaging can make people appreciate books and free speech: http://vimeo.com/35758683 http://vimeo.com/35758683

6ren 13y ago

The modern way to ban books is steganography-like: hide them in a sea of information.

readme 13y ago
Imagine this: services like amazon take over all the dead-tree book market. The government cracks down on piracy, and eliminates that way of getting books. A few big players end up controlling all the books on drm'd electronic devices. The future could be an easy place to ban books.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  "The hardcore flying saucer cultist, on the other hand, is a very special personality who has thus far escaped close scrutiny by the scientific community. Contrary to Buckner's finding, a poll of 250 hardcore "ufologists" in the United States in 1969 determined their median age to be 31. Teen-agers and house-wives constitute the most active groups, collecting clippings of sightings and issuing amateur newsletters and magazines, usually mimeographed. The classic search for identity plays an important role. The teen-aged ufologist is most often isolated on a farm, or separated from his peers because of his eccentric personality." The Flying Saucer Subculture, John Keel (1973) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph I'd always wondered how you produced a zine before personal computers.

wac 13y ago

>...on a campus of 3,000, only eight people actually asked for a meeting with me to discuss the reasons I banned the book I think this is really the most interesting part of the story- people are willing to complain but not take reasonable actions to remedy the situation. I think this is a symptom of a deeper problem in our society.

sbhere 13y ago
YES! +1k. > Some used Facebook as a forum to make rude comments from the relatively safe distance social media provides. This is the sole purpose of facebook, as far as I can tell. Give a loudmouth a microphone and then try to ignore them as they shout as loudly as possible. ... and I reference the "Facebook experiment" article a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
That comment was terribly meta. Yet I strain my brain trying to come up with something to do about THAT that isn't 'post a comment on HN' and I can't come up with anything.

lsc 13y ago

that's funny... it looked to me like one of the better promotions you could have had for the banned book in question. In fact, the whole thing seemed, well, like an unsubtle advertisement, unsubtle to the point where it became less effective.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Internet content filtering is the new book banning. My local library filters Hackaday, and lots of other innocuous things. The excuse for banning Hackaday is that it is allegedly a "hacking" website. The content filter is one of those canned IT solutions that governments love to patronize. It's here to keep The Children safe, and because vagrants would obviously come to the library and masturbate if there were no content filter. I guess it works because I've never seen a vagrant masturbating in the library. There is no person at the library who has any direct control over the unbanning of content. Anyone may submit a link to be banned for any reason and it will probably be banned. Getting a ban removed is a more complicated process. I find it ironic that even among librarians who think book banning is abhorrent, there are some who do not bat an eye at their Internet content filter.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Is there something about this post that got it killed automatically, or did I just get banned or something? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755 edit: Oooh, I'm guessing the reference to H a ckaday?

johndavidback 13y ago

Scary still and somewhat related is: instead of banning books, just change the content to fit your needs. Like Nineteen eighty-four. Oh, and like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/twains-classic-loses-the-nword-for-modern-age-2177172.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/t...

mathattack 13y ago

It's a great experiment. Sometimes you have to shake things up to keep the importance of an issue alive. Of course things take a life of their own on the internet and Facebook.

dietlbomb 13y ago

Librarian activists use the word 'ban' differently than everyone else. To most people, to ban something is to prohibit it. To librarians, to ban a book is to keep it out of stock. This may still be morally wrong in some situations, but it is dishonest of these activists to conflate such an action with book burnings and other more radical forms of information suppression.