[Nettime-nl] Add BLOCKERS & LOCKERS: is filtering always censorship?

[Tjebbe van Tijen via Chello <t.tijen@chello.nl>]

(Only) today a small Internet war came to my attention between Add  
Blockers & Add Lockers

A certain mr. Danny Carlton has started a campaign against an add-on  
utility for the web browser Firefox called ABP (Adblock Plus) that  
gives the user of the Firefox web browser almost complete control on  
what part of added advertisement to block or not on a web page....

Denis Carlton has even established a web site to fight his cause  
http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com on which we can find a manifesto that  
starts of with:

"You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit  
now blocks the FireFox browser."

The first sentence of the manifesto then explains why:

"The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla  
Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that  
BLOCKS advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from  
blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is  
an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers."

and the conclusion of Carlton  is a (proposed) direct action by  
calling upon web providers to counter-block all Firefox web browser  
users:

"Since the makers of Ad Block Plus as well as the filter  
subscriptions that accompany it refuse to allow website owners  
control over their own intellectual property, and since FireFox  
actively endorses Ad Block Plus, the sites linking to this page are  
now blocking FireFox until the resource theft is stopped."

Carlton (who must be a front for some bigger interests groups) wants  
to LOCK the user to the advertisements on a web-page and sees that as  
his kind of "freedom" (of trade) ...

The action against Adblocker inspired me to download and install the  
software and test it... and I must say it is a great tool and also a  
great improvement for on-line reading as nothing is so annoying to my  
letter reading eyes than flashing, blinking, scrolling and other  
optical effects that try to draw my attention away from the text or  
the images I had chosen to read or view on a certain web page ...

The Adblock utility can be switched on or off from the toolbar of the  
browser and filters can be downloaded that prove to be most effective  
(even on numerous pages of Dutch dailies that were before a horror to  
the eye...).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10?id=10

lets you take part in the war of  BLOCKERS & LOCKERS which seem -  
from my side as someone who likes to be able to BLOCK certain  
advertisements - a sunny affair, though - as always - more dark  
consequences lurk in the background ...

Dynamic and personalized filtering techniques of electronic  
communication  do create new forms of  censorship. What used to be  
forms of filtering/censorship that were located between the producer  
and consumer, will now become auto-censoring devices on the consumer  
level. This last thing is of course not new in itself. One could even  
say that perception as such is based on 'discrimination', that what  
is perceived, comes to us by our decision what NOt to focus on... we  
never take in all what is possible to see, smell, feel, read, we  
constantly make a selection ... or in other words: selection implies  
de-selection.

A less theoretical example:l in the old days on monday my hands would  
know that the second part of the newspaper was "only sports"  so  
would drop it ... while others may do it the other way around. We may  
browse through a book and only look at the pictures or happily  
download a personalized selection of single songs in mp3 format from  
the Internet and sift and order them into a long sequence of music  
that fits our own taste and does not follow the imposed order of the  
music market with its old style albums in CD or gramophone format...

When does filtering & selection become censorship? Whose FREEDOM is  
at stake?

For some time already - with the right investment and ability to get  
through the manuals - one can filter out all advertisement from  
commercial television stations (simply by time lapsed digital  
recording and playing; or more advanced by a program that blocks the  
advertisement intermissions). Speaker independent voice recognition  
can be combined with such digital television display or recording and  
a de-selection list of words or phrase elements can be entered in an  
attached database, allowing the blocking from whatever person or  
event that has been voiced in a television broadcast or on video  
played. Such devices have been or may be still on sale in the USA  
propagated by religious communities that have decided to BLOCK  
certain words, scenes or combinations thereof, that do not fit their  
faith.

Certain things are obvious and clear: the contract between Google and  
The Chinese State to filter Internet content, and all kind of smaller  
initiatives in this field are clear cases of censorship, but at the  
other end of 'the rainbow' of options is the Firefox Adblocker. One  
can see that these two examples are not in the same ideological  
'color area' of my metaphorical rainbow'. What needs our attention  
are all the fine shadings of color in between. An example is my  
enthusiasm trying out the Firefox Adblocker, just on the optical  
level, because it enhances my reading of  many web-pages that I had  
stopped reading before because my eyes do not want to be distracted  
by moving objects on a screen while reading a text, or looking at a  
still picture with some attention, while a bouncing texts distracts  
me. So in My case I started to "censor" certain web-pages because of  
the way in which the real information and the added advertisement  
have been mixed ... I did not block them by a piece of software, I  
simply stopped going to these web pages (one wonders whether or not  
advertisement agencies and commercial web providers are doing  
sufficient user-research to support their actual visual strategy with  
added advertisements).

Content censorship and perception based on visual discrimination  
combine here. In my case it is first of all the amount of effort it  
costs to constantly ban certain (moving) areas on the screen from my  
view that brings me to install an Adblocker, the actual irritation  
about the content or intent of the advertisement comes (mostly) second.

I do not know about Internet user-statistics that elaborate this  
question... but it is hight time that the inter-linkage between  
visual and content irritation because of additional advertisement on  
web pages becomes an issue for both consumers organizations and  
corporate information suppliers ... in the mean time my good advice =  
once more to download this:


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10?id=10

(nb a pity that the certificate of this add-on causes the browser to  
give a warning about the content... it is safe... believe me; or is  
that warning maybe part of the little war of Denis Carlton)



Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects
Dramatizing Historical Information
http://imaginarymuseum.org




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