Now that reading week is over, it’s Freedom to Read Week in Canada—a week intended to celebrate freedom of expression and to remind us that censorship is still a big problem in some parts of the world and, to a degree, in Canada too.
Freedom to Read Week tends to focus on the censorship of literature, which in Canada is largely limited to the removal of books and video games from school and public libraries. That is a narrow view of censorship.
As much as I like having the opportunity to pick up Slaughterhouse-Five or Lolita at the campus library, I don’t think the message Freedom to Read is trying to send is necessarily relevant—or at least it doesn’t capture the entirety of the issue as it exists today.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, you would have had a hard time getting your hands on a copy of something like The Catcher in the Rye, especially as a young person.
In retrospect, censorship during the 20th century is easily understood as the cultural residue of a conservative, often religious, generation that built its own so-called moral high ground by avoiding central issues to human life—identity, sexuality, mental health, and so on.
Nowadays, we have mass media and the Internet. It’s more complicated.
You can’t define censorship with the same parameters anymore, nor can you assume it still has the same agenda. I’m not sure you can separate intellectual information from mass media either.
That’s where I think Freedom to Read Week falls short. It focuses on what kept authors like Salinger and Vonnegut off bookshelves in the 1970s. But that kind of thinking about censorship is outdated.
It has been replaced by what would better be described as attempts to filter content with a particular goal in mind.
The consumption of any information happens through a process of distribution. That process implies someone has decided what you have access to.
Seventy years ago, the filtering of content was about saving young peoples’ souls. Enter neoliberal capitalism and now it’s about what will get them to spend more. Either way, the process is the same.
Knowing this, I used to think a case could be made nowadays for a certain amount of censorship, especially with literature. I used to think bookshelves needed to be kept out of reach from cultural abjection—symbolized by pop-culture moments like Miley Cyrus doing something or the other with a foam finger in front of millions of people.
That shouldn’t happen though—the trade-off isn’t worth it. No group of individuals should have the right to make a decision for an entire culture, no matter how informed they are.
The only option, then, is for individuals to be informed enough make their own choices about what media they consume.
I agree there’s no excuse for censorship of literature on any moral or ideological grounds. I just think that argument no longer reflects the reality surrounding the filtering of information enough to warrant a week of discussion.
The point is, we should be more disillusioned about how media and information is controlled. By the time you or I get to consuming information, someone has already tried to filter that information to suit the interests of the people they’re working for or the ideological group they’re trying to represent.
There isn’t much we can do about that, but there’s certainly a lot we can do in the way of building awareness about how the present day filtering of content works. That way, we can be our own censors as we’re bombarded with an immeasurable amount of information each day, or so that we realize when we aren’t being shown something we ought to have access to.
