Clean Reader App — self censorship for babies

Part of the benefit of living in a democracy is that every person has the right to choose. We exercise that right every moment of every day. Tea or coffee? Bus or train? Free to Air TV or Netflix? Liberals or Labor? A book or a movie?

What we choose does not matter, only that we possess that right.

But rights are not bestowed like magic, they have to be earned in some way. We have earned our right to choose by defending other’s right to property. When I go out and buy a book in whatever format, I am buying the ‘object’, not the words and ideas in that object.

Thus I can choose to buy or not to buy that object, but I cannot choose to copy all the words and pretend I wrote them. By the same token, I cannot snip out the bits I don’t like and substitute something more palatable for them.

Yet that, apparently, is exactly what Clean Reader App is doing. Because the medium of the book is digital, this app can come along, hoover up the words and replace them with ‘clean’ words.

Unfortunately, as D.V.Berkom points out in her post, this computerized CENSORSHIP changes the meaning, intent, pace, flow and music of the prose. That is just not

on.

I’m all for choice. In fact, I’d like to see even more choice in our lives, but this is not choice, this is censorship pure and simple and by a ‘machine’ no less.

Are we truly such babies that we can’t trust ourselves to close a book that contains content we think we shouldn’t read?

-makes rude noise-

Meeks