Do You Censor?
A while ago I was censored, I think for the first time but who knows for sure.
I did not think that I said anything negative but she thought that I did so she went to the harsh step of deleting my comment and unsubscribed from my blog.
I hated to lose this person as a friend since I do enjoy her blogs and friendship, so I gave her a call and apologized for offending her. Everything seemed to be fine except that the phone connection was rather poor. I asked her to give me a call when she got back to an area with good phone coverage, but a week later still no call. I hope that it is just an oversight and we can resume our friendship soon.
This is not the first time that I have noticed censorship in the rain.
The first was in a rather controversial post, I disagreed with the blogger but remained silent and was happy when somebody finally called the blogger on this one sided blog, since the first 100 comments or so seemed to be patting her on the back. Then one of the comments came through in my email that was clearly in the other side of the issue, finally. But before I could go back to the blog, the comment was gone, then it was back again, and then it was gone.
So I left a comment and asked why this comment kept disappearing, my comment did not get deleted but I did get a very polite private email from the blogger and the commenter. the blogger said she did not want any dissention in her blog and the commenter said she understood and probably should not have been so "snarky".
The next time that I noticed this was when a seemingly neutral comment kept showing up in my email at least a half dozen times, so I clicked on the link to the blog post to see if AR was acting up or something. I was surprised to not see half dozen copies of this comment in the comments section, but rather there were zero comments from this commenter.
So I wrote a comment letting the blogger know that there may be a problem since this comment kept showing up in my email but not in her blog.
This time I did not suspect censorship until I got a nice call from the blogger filling me in on a fued of some sort going on between the two ar members. I was very saddened by this since I had no idea that this kind of thing happened here.
I am not a big fan of censorship, somehow I along with many Americans have been conditioned to think that we should not censor other people's thoughts so when somebody strongly, I mean very strongly criticized me in a later blog (http://activerain.com/blogsview/4193576/i-should-have-done-more- ) I just let it ride thinking that they were just making a fool of themselves the more they wrote.
This happened in a post that I wrote last fall about a homeless person stealing my favorite sleeping bag off of my clothesline and letting her keep it.
Shortly after writing this post I went into the hospital and did not get a chance to read any of the comments until the next night when my wife brought my laptop to the hospital.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that the post was featured and had quite a few comments including several from a fellow who thought that I was a fool for letting someone take my stuff (a $100 sleeping bag is nothing compared to what renters steal on a regular basis, but that is another story).
I was amused not only by this fellow showing himself for the kind of person that he was but I was also entertained by the many people who went after him for being a little harsh.
I could not imagine why anyone would want to censor something like this, I thought it was really cool the way that my friends in the rain expressed themselves and how they cared about the people around them.
So I guess the point that I am getting at is how do you feel about censorship? To me it seems kind of pointless to spend this much time communicating with each other here and in other social media sites if we are opposed to ever really hearing how others feel and afraid that if we let them know how we feel that they will just delete us.
Personally I would rather hear a comment that smarts a little than not hear their displeasure and have them just stop reading or commenting without ever allowing us to discuss the issue.
Communication is good, even when it gives us a few bruises.
picture credits
- Censorship Causes Blindness Andréia Bohner https://www.flickr.com/photos/98943387@N00/42897463
- My Censorship by Marco Bernardini https://www.flickr.com/photos/29635150@N00/1405592515
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Example_of_photo_collage_against_censorship.jpg
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Censorship.png
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