Read and weep

It’s the middle of Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s annual celebration of free speech through the freedom to read. Their Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIC) compiles a list of the most Frequently Challenged Books, which is the basis for the event.

So far this century, the OIC has recorded 3,736 challenges, of which 1,225 (32.7%) were due to “sexually explicit” material, 1,008 (27%) due to “offensive language”, 720 (19.2%) due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”, 458 (12.2%) challenges due to “violence” and 269 challenges (7.2%) due to “homosexuality”. A further 103 (2.7%) were challenged because they were “anti-family,” which is coded language often—even usually—used to mean something that is positive about gay people or issues.

51% of all challenges were made by parents, which doesn’t mean they weren’t part of organised or coached campaigns by religious fundamentalists. However, not all challenges come from the right. In fact, many challenged works—such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird—face opposition because they’re deemed to be racist in a modern context. Liberals, in other words, also challenge materials that don’t fit their values.

The question is, do parents have an absolute right of veto? One could argue that they should be allowed to determine what their own minor children are allowed to access, but hardly anyone would agree that they have the right to decide what everyone’s children will be allowed to read, nor what adults may access.

Some things are banned by governments without much dissent—child pornography, for example. Many countries have an official censorship regime that controls what’s not allowed (Emma Hart wrote about Banned Books Week and New Zealand’s censorship regime on her blog at Public Address).

The problem for those who love to censor—individuals, churches, governments—is the Internet, where almost anything is available. Many governments have attempted to restrict access to “objectionable” material, but that’s met with limited success (so far…).

The commercial marketplace is the big new battlefield in the war against censorship. This includes media conglomerates’ attempts to exploit copyright laws to block access to materials, as well as other businesses imposing their own rules.

Recently, Amazon was sued when it deleted two e-books from users’ Kindles (because the media conglomerate that controlled the copyright changed its mind about offering a digital version). While refund were given, and an apology issued, Amazon’s power to do this means they could also easily delete anything for any reason. They can also replace purchased books with changed versions, something they’d claim allows them to correct errors, but which makes me think of the official revision of history in Orwell’s 1984.

And now comes a report that Apple Computer declined to authorise a free application for the iPhone/iPod Touch because it was “politically charged.” The App advocated a single-payer healthcare system, but such advocacy speech is legal in the US and one would think that Apple ought to allow it (unauthorised Apps void the device warranty and in the past have been deleted by Apple when the operating system software was updated).

With written expression increasingly digital, the censorship war may move primarily to that environment. While that’ll be easy to track, the pity and shame is that we’ll have a whole new set of opponents to take on, opponents who are fighting not for ideological or religious reasons, but for money—to protect and enhance their profits.

Fighting off the zealots of the right and the left is hard enough; fighting off the power of wealthy corporations may prove impossible. Changing the way publishing is done, and authors are paid, may ultimately be the only way to overcome the banning of books.