What is censorship?
What is censorship? This question seems to imply the question, "What is too much?" Through history censorship seems to have been some kind of limit, something that should never be crossed. censorship has plagued us in many forms for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Books from Copernicus, to today’s Harry Potter have seen the effects of censorship (“Tolbert”). My definition of censorship is the restriction of information. This is not fairly applicable for children, because I believe that parents can raise their child as they see fit. However, I am afraid that censorship may have different effects on many different types of society. For instance, in the United States, which is an open society, censorship has an inverse effect, actually boosting the popularity of a book. In a closed society, like the USSR, for example, the effect would actually be what we would expect. This particular essay will try to find the effects and history of censorship to better define the concept.
First, if censorship is the attempted restriction of any information, then why are minorities not included? This is because parents are allowed to raise their children however they see fit. Once the children become adults at age 18, any restriction thereafter would be censorship. Parents must decide how to raise their children, and how to instill their children with the ideal decision making processes. When I say ideal, I mean along the lines of the parents thoughts. I believe that children should be allowed to make their own choices, but the parents have the final say in the matter.
Next, censorship has been involved in many societies and have restricted things such as Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which contradicted the geocentric theory, where the sun is the center of the universe, up to and including witchcraft and wizardry books in the near past. Radical mathematicians have even had books banned because the mathematics in the books were considered nonsense and ridiculous. The effect of this censorship was different from the effects from censorship that we have in the United States. The effect of the censorship that has occurred in history was usually the delaying of the book becoming released to the public, not including a few black market copies and through word of mouth. However, in the United States it is nearly an inverse effect.
The effect of censorship is one that has been measured over the years. Many point at the effect and say that this is ruining our societies, this is what is wrong with us. However, censorship has many different effects depending on the society that it is being used in. In the United States, censorship would actually raise the popularity of a book, because many people would be intrigued, and buy it to see what’s so bad. However in closed societies, much like the former USSR and other communist states, censorship actually works in the ways that we would expect it to. In these countries it reduces the amount of books, because the penalty for having the book is usually very high. There are many literary examples of this in print today. George Orwell’s 1984 is a perfect example of a communist or socialist state attempting to censor the media and literary world.
Overall, censorship has many effects, but it has only one definition. However, both the effects and the definition need to be looked at to ascertain a full meaning of censorship. Censorship has been around for centuries, but only in a relatively open society, does it have an inverse effect. This is actually what we have been striving for, and I believe that censorship could even be used as an advertising or publicity tool.
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