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Catcher In The Rye Censorship

Decent Essays

“Somebody'd written ‘Fuck you’ on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy.” This is a line from the classic novel The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, which has been both praised as a contemporary masterpiece and banned from schools and libraries alike for foul language. If this book had never been censored, if it had been accepted for the story and realism within it, then it is possible that other works of art would not be censored today. Limiting expression has been done since leaders discovered that they could exercise such power. Censorship is detrimental to most people around the world’s well-being because it limits the free flow of information and can inhibit mental maturity.
In a 2012 New York Times article, journalist Julie Bosman …show more content…

Johan Pouwelse, a professor at Delft University and a technological company founder, has written several articles (Pouwelse) that stress the dangers of filtering the internet. One such article is “Moving Toward a Censorship-free Internet,” which was published in the Internet Engineering Task Force Journal (IETF). In this article, Pouwelse references the Arab Spring, which was a set of revolutions that took place throughout the Arab world in 2011 and 2012 and resulted in overthrows of oppressive governments. In nearly all the affected nations, dissenters used Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests and planned outcries (Heins). These two social media platforms are easily accessible and allow their users to post any information that they please; this served as both a benefit and a drawback during the protests. “During the 2011 Arab Spring,” Pouwelse writes in in his article for the IETF, “Egyptian authorities demanded that telecommunication companies sever their broadband connections and mobile networks—both local and European operators were forced to comply, and, as a result, digital Egypt vanished.” The world stopped receiving tweets from their Egyptian contacts, stopped viewing videos posted to YouTube by Egyptian vloggers. Online entertainment halted, which was a victory for the government. However, this blackout did not put a stop to open criticism, as the Egyptian government intended. The …show more content…

Scott R. DiMarco, head librarian of Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, is an active supporter of free speech and democracy (DiMarco). He noticed that banned books, books like “The Catcher in the Rye” and “50 Shades of Grey,” sell better, because people are curious as to why they were banned (DiMarco 1). He brought this up to his friend and colleague Dennis Miller, who also works at Mansfield University and is a successful author with a strong following (DiMarco 1). Because of this observation, when Miller’s next book was published, the he offered to DiMarco an idea for them to perform an experiment. They would ban it from the college campus. “He was joking,” DiMarco wrote, “but his statement emphasized that as long as one book can be banned, any book is a target.” DiMarco wrote about this fact in his article “Why I banned a book [sic]: How censorship can impact a learning community [sic]” for the College and Libraries News Association (CLNA). When DiMarco and his staff announced that Miller’s book would not be allowed on school grounds, eight students came forward to discuss why it was banned (DiMarco 2), which DiMarco writes was unsatisfying considering there were three thousand students in attendance. “Some used Facebook,” DiMarco writes, “as a forum to make rude comments from the relatively safe distance social media provides.” In the rest of the article, DiMarco goes on to

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