Censorship - Book Burning and Banning

I'm currently in the process of catching up on posts and I didn't really feel like this was completely relevant to any of the prompts, but it's still a topic that I feel strongly about and wanted to post about.  While it's not relevant to any particular prompt, it is relevant to the class; especially in relation to the printing press.  As we saw in the video on Tuesday (it was also touched on during our discussion yesterday), the printing press made it a) easier for people to spread their ideas, b) allowed those ideas to spread rapidly, and c) lowered the prestige associated with owning a printed work; this allowed book burning to become a somewhat regular practice.

I find it really interesting that we went from what might be considered information-deprivation (by our standards at least) to suddenly having a seemingly overabundance of information... and then we try to restrict it.  What I find even more interesting is that we still try to restrict material which we find controversial; earlier this week I shared a pamphlet that I created which discussed book banning (the video linked below is something I did about a year ago which discusses the same topics in more depth), on that pamphlet I included a small list of books that are banned in schools throughout America.  

To tie these thoughts back to our current topic of discussion: I'm certain that these forms of materials were censored before the invention of the printing press, but it would have been much easier to restrict; ideas relied on people copying by hand, which slowed the spread of information.  If caught early, only a few copies of the unwanted message would need to be ceased and destroyed; with printing, it would have been much harder to track the spread of information.

Banning Books video: https://youtu.be/CRYAGAIZoyE

Comments

[Dr. M]

This is very relevant and you may consider this as your "effects of the printing press" post. You are going to be very interested in the readings in WOW, especially chapter 5, "Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple" where Standage discusses battles over censorship and the emerging arguments for freedom of information. I will post the YouTube video to the front page. Thanks.

Grade: 2