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

[tlb]

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]

In locales where access to higher technology is limited, I imagine that book banning could still be quite effective.

[alecdbrooks]

You raise a good point, but we can't get complacent. While the Internet makes it hard to cut off access to a book altogether, the technology exists to make books harder to find. Imagine slow- or errorbanning[0], but applied to authors and books rather than users and comments. There have been strides toward securing net neutrality, but it remains an issue. [1]

[0]: If you aren't familiar with these terms, Coding Horror has a good introduction: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h.... Most people here know of these techniques already because Hacker News uses hellbanning.

[1]: See https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality

[eCa]

But: If you can get your hands on a banned (physical) book, you can still read it in relative safety.

[pessimizer]

Everyone who reads a controversial book on the internet can be (will be) tracked. Poor excuse for samizdat.

[bbtlk]

Book banning online could become easier as governments get more control over the Internet. (at least for the masses)

[iamthepieman]

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: [email protected] date: 01/01/2013 12:00:00.000 referrer: www.example.com

etc . . .

[rdw]

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.

[lukejduncan]

I love the idea.

Unfortunately, I think the average use would be more scared of the website than the NSA =/

[wac]

>...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]

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

[JoeAltmaier]

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.

[ballard]

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. :)

[eksith]

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.

[ballard]

And replying to myself... Fahrenheit 451, of course!

[protomyth]

I would add Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Man:_A_Technical_Manual_for...

[derleth]

When is the last time any of those books were banned in the USA? (I chose a country where I know Mein Kampf is available to purchase and legal to possess.)

[dietlbomb]

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.

[6ren]

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

[readme]

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.

[johndavidback]

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/t...

[fnordfnordfnord]

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

edit: Oooh, I'm guessing the reference to H a ckaday?

[danso]

> 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.

[hrktb]

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.

[gizmo686]

>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.

[hawkharris]

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

[mathattack]

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.

[lsc]

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.