In my subject on Resourcing the Curriculum we were asked to creatively demonstrate what we have learnt about censorship.  This was my response:

I had to explain the concept of ‘redacted text’ to my eighteen year old daughter.  What followed was a conversation that highlighted the blind faith that teenagers have believe they are getting the full story when they find information.  They believe that all the information is available you just have to find it.  The concept of search engines tailoring their results to what you may be interested in going by past searches and how this ‘filtering’ is in essence a form of censorship is going over most internet users’ heads.

Do this experiment – google ‘buttons’. Now open DuckDuckGo (a search engine that does not keep prior search history) and do the same search.

Interestingly, my google search returned a myriad of ‘buttons’ related to education (guess what I’ve been doing lately!!), whereas DuckDuckGo returned sites about sewing type buttons.

Censorship is inherent in our lives, we just need to be able to recognise it.