Tuesday 3 September 2013

Should society limit people's exposure to some kind of information or forms of an expression?

As seen in George Orwell's 1984, censorship (aka limitation of people's exposure to some kind of information or forms of an expression) in the society limits growth and keeps normal citizens in the dark. This is clearly wrong. But, are there types of information and expressions that should be kept away from people? I believe there are such information. For example, in the web, there are many information that should be kept away, especially from under-age people (i.e. teenagers and children). This is why I believe that limiting people's exposure to some kind of information or forms of an expression is good, if used wisely. Now I will discuss some examples where censorship has a had a positive impact and in others I will discuss how censorship may not have a positive impact, but actually do the adverse.

Since the birth of the web in CERN, Geneva Switzerland, people have been uploading contents that may corrupt people minds, especially minds of young adults and children. Governments have long since tried to restrict access on these type of material. Recently, the British government launched a plan to permanently enable safe-access on the web and censure some type of searches. But censorship is not only limited to government internet-security schemes, but censorship is used by large companies like Google and YouTube. In Youtube, there are certain videos that are inappropriate to be see by under-aged people, and so YouTube enables such videos to be seen by only people over-age. BBC iPlayer applies the same restrictions in their website too. So, here we can see that censorship is beneficial and a wise thing to do.

However, censorship was portrayed completely differently in George Orwell's Novel 1943. In the novel, Orwell portrays a government that feeds only information that they approve of to its citizen. They hide crimes committed by the government and keeps their public in the dark. This technique was also used by dictators like Stalin and Hitler. They censored immoral and unjust termination of people (in Stalin's case the killing of opponent and Hitler the same with the addition of the grave genocide the Nazi party carried out on the Jews) Such censorship is morally wrong because the public should never be deprived of the information they ought to know.

Some type of language and signs, such as the Nazi salute and racist expressions are censured by the government. This censorship is good because it stops people hurting anther citizen, even though the person who posses such expression are being oppressed. This is why a child is punished accordingly if they express a expression that may be hurtful to another in school. Similarly, a leader who preaches about the righteousness of displaying hurtful expression can be rightfully condemned for his/her actions because they may hurt someone. History has proven that such form of expression lead to greater consequences, and so censorship can act as a stopgap.  

In conclusion, I reaffirm my statement that limiting people's exposure to some kind of information or forms of an expression is good, if used wisely. We have seen in the case of the web that some censorship must be used for greater good of the common people, whereas other censorship, for example Hitler's censorship of the Holocaust are immoral and completely wrong.      

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