In Soviet China, novels read you!
In his 1979 masterpiece “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” the prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote about the sad fate of former communist apparatchiks who often saw their faces erased from all public photographs the very moment they fell out of favor with the party (it was in that context that Kundera blurted out ...
In his 1979 masterpiece “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” the prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote about the sad fate of former communist apparatchiks who often saw their faces erased from all public photographs the very moment they fell out of favor with the party (it was in that context that Kundera blurted out his wise observation that “we fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history”).
Well, the Chinese seem to have mastered this art of retouching to perfection – at least, in the digital world.. A post over at the China Digital Times points to instanenous keyword filtering found in Chinese ebooks!
On his blog, est electronixtar posted his recent discovery of the Chinese authority’s control over electronic readings.
est’s roommate had a strange experience while reading a chm-formatted novel on his computer. In the novel, there was a line of words with the phrase “????” (which roughly means the same as “dammit” in English) in the end. The magic happened a few seconds after he first read this line as the phrase suddenly changed to”??**” with “xx” replacing the curse word on the screen.
With his computer programming background, est tried to explore what happened. First, he suspected that it was due to the government’s control over the internet. However, the phenomenon did not change after he unplugged the Internet connection. Then, he tried to decode the chm file and surprisingly found the corresponding javascript on his local hard drive…
est writes:
“never thought that river crabs are also crawling all over local hard disks… keyword filtering now is also in chm e-books. Imagine that when you read novels, big brother is also watching you… In Soviet China, novels read YOU!”
Yes, that’s right: even electronic books can now be retouched, with words and pictures replaced with a government-approved set of characters. Unless I misread the post, it also seems to be happening almost on the fly.
A technology skeptic speaks in me again: hasn’t the digital world make such instaneous “retouching” much easier and quicker than it used to be in the analogue era? All you have to do right now is to click “Ctrl+F” and you’ll find any string of text in almost any files without ever having to read it. I still cherish the thought that the Soviet censors actually HAD to read Akhmatova, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and others; now, it’s all automated…
Photo by oxborrow/Flickr
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