Using Imagery to Avoid Censorship
“It’s really hard for the government to censor things when they don’t understand the made-up words or meaning behind the imagery,” said Kevin Lee, COO of China Youthology, in conversation at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday. “The people there aren’t even relying on text anymore It’s audio, visual, photos. All the young people are creating their own languages.”
Steve Bennett • February 4, 2013 7:13 AM
Facebook now supports voice and video messaging. Before reading this article, I didn’t really see the point and thought it was just a lame copy of vine.
Published text has always been an easy target for censorship, but non-textual communication, especially if it’s highly idiomatic, is more resilient than that (e.g. Polari).
It makes me think of the saying about the Internet routing around censorship, and really it’s not just the Internet, it’s the whole of human culture that sees censorship as damage, and finds a new solution. Which is kind of reassuring really.