How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?

When I was very young, I was enthralled with the song "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window." Maybe I wrote this because I was subconsciously influenced by the fact that the song's singer, Patti Page, just died, on January 1.

You know what? We never did find out how much that little doggie cost.

But I want to ask you something: "how much is that word on the Internet?"

What I'm asking is, how much would you be willing to pay if you had to pay for each word you send out into the ether of the Etherworld, the Internet, cyberspace, you-name-it?

I'm not engaging in a debate over free speech or free Internet. I am asking you to put a value on the words tapped out on your keyboard and transported into and onto and through the digital realms of the planet.

How much would you be willing to pay for each word, if you were forced to do make such a payment?

The great writer Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorites, once commented that censorship imposed in his native Argentina by the regime there forced him to choose his words more carefully.

Would Modern Wordcost Internet Protocols (MWIP) make us act in a similar manner? 

And how would such a "cost" influence what you tapped, typed, wrote, scrawled, whatever-you-want-to-call-it?

corporate email censorship, reconsidered

We know corporations spy on their employees, explicitly or implicitly. It's legit; it's legal. Employers can censor emails and block websites from being visited, etc. Yes, they can.

Companies use software programs that filter out naughty and obscene words. At least I think that's how they do it. I don't think it's Louie and Edith in a back room sifting through everyone's emails. But who knows?

I suggest the attempts at this censorship are misguided. By that I mean the attempts are typically skewed toward George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words [he lost the case, which went to the Supreme Court in 1978; I was working at a newspaper; I recall the Boston Globe printed the words; most papers did not, though the words are in the court documents; British papers freely use such words, more accurately, they use any words they choose to, pretty much, and are not so keen to censor, and I don't just mean tabloids] or variants of words like that. Such corporate censorship has a narrow scope, does it not?

But imagine the censors, or the software they use, expunging these obscenities:

poverty, starvation, hatred, bullying, war, mutilation, rape, bombing, torture, neglect, intimidation, and synonyms too horrible to conjure and many I've missed and others too unspeakable.

Grass-Mud Mutterings

Speaking of censorship, as I did a few posts ago, have you heard about the grass-mud horse?

The New York Times tells us that grass-mud horse in Chinese sounds a lot like an unmentionable obscenity.

Consequently, millions of Chinese have flooded the Internet with blog posts and YouTube videos about the mythical grass-mud horse (which also was called the mud-grass horse in The Times article; is the mud-grass horse just as obscene, or worse?). They flooded the Internet with stuff on this invented creature to test the limits of authoritarian censorship. Censorship had the inadvertent effect of spawning creativity.

I mention this because my previous post discussed a different sort of censorship, one imposed by monetary authority.

In China there's a pro-democracy group called Charter08. The Times article notes that someone wryly suggested changing the group's name to the ubiquitous Wang. Since Wang is so common, like Smith, it would be terribly hard for the authorities to excise all instances of Wang on the Internet.

Incidentally, with Google and Yahoo and other search engines, it would not be hard for you to do a little research and therefore find out exactly how naughty a pun grass-mud horse is, something The New York Times did not touch with a 10-foot Pole (or a 6-foot Swede either).