Lecture 9 Censorship and the 'truth'

Censorship and the 'Truth'

There were many interesting topics raised in this lecture, as uncomfortable as some of the images were it did provide an insight into a bigger issue than I had previously knew.

Five years before coming to 

power in the 1917 October 

revolution, the Soviets 

established the newspaper 

Pravda.  For more than seven 

Decades,until the fall of 

Communism, Pravda, which 

Ironically means “truth”, served 

the Soviet Communist party by 

censoring and filtering the news 

presented to Russian and 

Eastern Europeans

as you can see, censorship was happening well before the modern notion of censorship, but it was used predominantly in a more political sense rather than censoring to not let minors see graphic content.

At that time [World War II], I fervently

believed just about everything I was exposed

to in school and in the media.  For example, I

knew that all Germans were evil and that all

Japanese were sneaky and treacherous, while

all white Americans were clean-cut, honest,

fair-minded, and trusting’

Modern censorship

At this stage of the lecture I was very much disturbed due to the graphic content so I wasn't very involved in the slides, but on that hand that shows that censorship is also causing people to be very easily disturbed! if people were de-censored then we wouldn't be on a constant whirl wind of people being less and less censored causing more and more things needing to be censored. 

Suppose that a picture of a young woman inserting a chocolate bar into her mouth makes one person think of fellatio, but someone else says that this meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture.  This kind of dispute, with its assumption that meaning resides in a text quite independently of individual and group preconceptions, is depressingly common indiscussions on advertising.

Here is a rediculous example of cencorship, the original image was banned but if the image was rotated 90 degrees to the left then that was deemed acceptable, what madness is that!

Banned

Allowed

Over all I didn't really benefit from anything in this lecture other than learning about the history of censorship but it also made me realise how strict the censorship programme can be! and as i'm creating media I will need to bear this in mind.