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Censorship In Jennifer Haley's The Nether

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The Nether is a science-fiction procedural written by Jennifer Haley; a playwright recognised for her work which discusses the ethics of the arising moral dilemmas surrounding the rapid progression of the internet. Haley sets the play in the near future where the internet, now called ‘the Nether’, has progressed into ‘a virtual wonderland […] provid[ing] total sensory immersion.’ The Nether opens up in an interrogation room where Morris, a young female detective, queries Sims, a successful business man, about his server: ‘The Hideaway.’ The Hideaway is a confidential domain for ‘guests’ who have the proclivity for children. The virtual realm provides them an escape to exercise this proclivity freely and, perhaps naively held, without consequence. …show more content…

Just as in how modern society is controlled with laws and ‘social facts’, and just as how Haley controls the audience through the narrative structure of The Nether, as shown through Morris: Morris: (Reading from a report) And in those moments, standing in the carnage of her small body […] I lift the axe and do it again. And I do it again. And I do it again. Morris censors the audience’s viewership which emphasises the notion of personal freedom. Haley recognises the difficulty in censoring virtual reality. By censoring a person’s virtual world, one censors the imagination’s facilitator of expression, also known as personal freedom – a basic right. The narrative structure of Morris’ voice reading from a report is therefore substantial to the debate as she removes the audience’s freedom of viewership. However, is the audience’s personal freedom restricted through the structure? One side of the argument the play puts forward is yes, however as Steve Waters argues in his book The Secret Life of Plays: ‘Playwrights have other reasons for choosing to have action narrated rather than witnessed directly. …it may be […] (say, a murder or a rape) should not be shown, lest alarm or perhaps excite an

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