I’m putting the final changes into a paper which is essentially an argument against censorship but framed in the debates about literacy education.  The point of the paper is that we cannot start censoring the internet because it denies us the opportunities to develop the skills needed to assess all information. But with efforts to keep out the offensive stuff, where offensive is being reformed so that it precludes offending anyone over 15, means that we potentially never get our ideas challenged, we never see the other sides of arguments.  This kind of tactic has been used with some success by the censor advocates by equating freedom of speech with desires to see child sexual abuse images[1].  This directly impinges upon the ways we can frame arguments against censorship as the majority of us are offended by child ‘p0rn’, and by majority, I mean the 99.9999999% of people who don’t look at it [2].

I’ve been trying to reformulate traditional ideas about literacy and how we learn to read, and by read, I mean make sense of, information on the World Wide Web.  There seems to be different skills needed that help us develop ways of processing information.  Forget the old ‘information overload’ crock.  If we feel overloaded with information, then we do not have the kind of literacy that I think we should be developing.  For that, we need ways of connecting ideas, ways of assessing it quickly and yes ways of assessing it deeply, all at the same time.  That shows how hard it is to develop these skills.  There is a whole heap of knowledge that you need to facilitate sense-making, a whole heap of skills you need to find information, then assess it both quickly and deeply.

This is one of the problems with censorship and one of the ideas that I don’t see discussed much, if at all.  If we take out all the stuff that could potentially offend us, then we are never challenged to find a position that shifts our understanding.  We keep the same understanding – ever more shallow in a world of deep knowledge, and deep understanding needs.  But it also has a contextual aspect to it.  We need the skills that work in our own environment.

UNESCO uses the concept of ‘functional literacy’ – the ability to function in one’s own society.  This means that anyone who engages in so-called ‘virtual’ societies needs the kinds of skills to really make sense of multiple frames of knowledge.  Anyone who professes to work within technologically mediated contexts needs to understand them in toto.  Many of the people involved in the current censorship debate, demonstrate that incredibly nuanced understanding of the potential of mediation and yet, the very people advocating the censorship – our politicians – take reductionist positions that over simplify the arguments[3].

A while ago, I came up with the notion of flitteracy – the ways we make sense of information in an information-rich environment.  I’m not sure whether that encompasses all that we need to think about, but I notice that many people appear to be highly flitterate – they can bring together diverse concepts quickly and deeply.  Similarly, I don’t think I am as flitterate as others, but partially because my work requires that I engage with ideas at a considerable deeper level than the average person.  I suppose I am flitterate within some areas, and, in some ways, the objective of this blog was to help me develop those skills, but my demonstration of flitteracy has not yet been fulfilled.

To be precise, I am probably vicariously flitterate.  I see the trends, I read the arguments, I shift my position.  I suppose, knowing that knowledge will allow me to shift positions means that if I commit a thought to this blog, and then disagree with myself, I may feel silly[4].

So getting back to the inital point, I find myself arguing against censorship/filtering because it denies us the potential to develop sound arguments for and against all areas of our lives.  Whether or not we need to develop in ways that allow particular standpoints is entirely dependent on our context.  As *groan* citizens of the web, we do need a deeper appreciation of the interplay of knowledge and technology.  But if we are not engaged in that social framework, then perhaps we don’t.  However, we all need to understand the contextual value of information.

Now, to reformulate this in ‘academic’ style with supporting evidence.

1. think also of accusations of being ‘un-Australian’, ‘un-American’, un-whatever group wants ascendancy [↩]
2. yes – a made up statistic, but one I’m sure is close to the ‘truth’ given how infrequently we seem to catch the other .0000001% of the population breaking the current laws [↩]
3. see above where freedom of speech = wanting to see porn [↩]
4. there are deeper fears at work here, but let’s not go too deeply there – at least not yet [↩]