Re: VOTING: rec.arts.ascii ( MODERATED )

>From: gve...@ucsd.edu (Gabriel Velasco)

>Moderation is censorship.


Is it really ?

Let's assume that you and I are in the newspaper business.  We
receive hundreds and thousands of news pieces every week, but since
we have a limited budget and since we cannot print everything
anyway, we define a set of rules that help us reduce that huge
amount of information down to a more manageable size.  By reducing
the amount of information, we are choosing what we think is
representative of what our clients like to read.  Of course, the
clients' input is welcomed.  Is that moderation or censorship ?  To
me that's moderation.

Now, let's assume that before we are allowed to distribute this
information to the public we are forced, by law for example, to
have it approved by an organization of some sort.  Non compliance
could mean that we would be put out of business, so we reluctantly
submit the information we selected for approval.  This organization
also has a set of rules that it uses to reduce the amount of
information.  In this case though, the organization is purposefully
eliminating information that we think our clients would be
interested in seeing.  Furthermore, the clients' input is totally
irrelevent to them.  Now, is that moderation or censorship ?  This,
IMO qualifies as censorship.

I don't have a clear cut definition of what moderation is or what
censorship is, but I agree that they both eliminate something.  IMO
though, they do not eliminate the same things and they do not
eliminate them for the same reasons.  Hence, moderation is not the
same as censorship.

BTW, what do you call it when a site cuts access or refuses to
grant access to a particular Usenet group ?  Moderation or
censorship ?  Why is it that some people allow _entire_ newsgroups
to be unaccessible without complaining, yet _vehemently_ protest
when someone proposes to eliminate even a _small_ portion of the
information that circulates in a newsgroup ?

Are those people just overreacting or what ?  Don't they realize
that moderation is all around us _today_ in our free society ? 
Every newspaper, radio station, magazine, TV news program, etc,
serve their clients by "filtering" information with their own set
of rules before distributing it.  This enables them to guarantee
their clients a high level of cohesiveness among the various pieces
of information contained in their "products".  We then choose the
products or "packages" of information that we feel will meet our
current needs.

Notice that this process of information distribution automatically
takes care of labelling the information and ensuring that it gets
distributed only by channels that have clients that are interested
in seeing that particular type of information.  Some of you might
be saying, "well, that's exactly what the Usenet does too."  Not
so!  In the case of the Usenet, anybody can post anything in any
newsgroup they want, at anytime, whether the "information" belongs
there or not (with the exception of moderated groups of course). 
_Quite_ a difference!  In the case of the "regular media", there is
a high level of order because of inherent controls, while in the
case of the Usenet there is a continuous motion between order and
disorder due to the free-for-all approach.

Moderation is a tool by which order can be ensured in a newsgroup,
irrelevant of whether the attitudes and behaviours of the set of
users present were conducive to order or disorder prior to
moderation being applied.  Many people fear moderation in
cyberspace, yet they don't appear to mind it at all in real life. 
Why ?

-- 
Normand Veilleux                As a "long term" contributing artist to
nve...@emr1.emr.ca            alt.ascii-art, I hereby declare that
----------------------------    rec.arts.ascii (MODERATED) has my support.

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