{"id":4113,"date":"2015-03-28T22:41:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-29T02:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/?p=4113"},"modified":"2015-03-29T09:29:37","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T13:29:37","slug":"who-decides-whats-clean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/28\/who-decides-whats-clean\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Decides What’s Clean?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Christian couple with good motives and the best intentions in the world wrote an app to \"clean\" dirty words in ebooks by replacing them with \"clean\" alternatives. \u00a0They named it \"Clean Reader\" and they made it available for free for iOS and Android devices.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0They created a book catalog for the device<\/a> from work supplied by @Inktera and Smashwords. \u00a0It sounds like a feel-good kind of story, right? \u00a0Wrong. The clean device did a dirty deed - it rewrote authors' words without obtaining permission from the authors.<\/p>\n

The app had three settings that downloaders could select from to decide how \"clean\" they wanted their books. \u00a0Depending on the setting,the app picked out words and changed them. \u00a0The \"Daily Mail\" article by Jenny Stanton\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0gives an example of how this process worked with passages from some well known books:<\/p>\n

\n

Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover by D. H. Lawrence<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Before: \u2018I don\u2019t want to f*** you at all. My heart\u2019s as cold as cold potatoes just now.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After: \u2018I don\u2019t want to [freak] you at all. My heart\u2019s as cold as cold potatoes just now.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before: \u2018It was not woman\u2019s fault, nor even love\u2019s fault, nor the fault of sex.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After: \u2018It was not woman\u2019s fault, nor even love\u2019s fault, nor the fault of [love].\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before: \u2018She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2019After: \u2018She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his [groin].\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first problem with the app is that it changed the words of authors without their permission. That is always, always, always wrong. The second problem is more basic - who decides what is clean and what is dirty and who picks what words get substituted for the dirty ones? \u00a0It's like walking into a neighbor's house - you might walk in and think \"This place is filthy. Jane is a lazy bitch.\" \u00a0I might walk into the same house and think, \"I wonder how Jane keeps this place so clean and still keeps her daily word count so high.\" Dirt\u00a0is in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n

A reader is always free to skip a passage he or she finds offensive or to imagine a different word in the place of one that bothers her. It might be that the reader is mortally offended by any reference to sex or the human body. \u00a0It might be that the reader was once hit by a black car and can't bear to read about black cars. \u00a0Perhaps the reader was bitten by a dog and prefers the pets in her stories to be cats. \u00a0We are all the product of our own experience. \u00a0Mr. Duck is a computer programmer, so he'd be one of the people making those decisions about which words to replace. \u00a0Mr. Duck has a wicked sense of humor, a sharp intellect and is married to an insane duck lady. His choices for those words would likely NOT be the ones made by the great bulk of humanity. \u00a0Lord knows, my choices would likely not be made by even the smallest sliver of humanity. \u00a0The choice of what to read and what to replace and what to skip - those are decisions by the reader who always has the option to close a book he finds offensive.<\/p>\n

Authors outraged by Clean Reader's mutilation of their work took to blogs<\/a> and Twitter, \u00a0and created such a backlash that their book suppliers<\/a>\u00a0pulled out and \"Clean Reader\" folded<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 The couple claims they intend to rework the app and will release it again. \u00a0I hope they don't because no matter what they do, the couple can not create an app to replace each individual reader's sensibilities. \u00a0Books are as individual as art. \u00a0A painting or statue that could make me marvel for hours might make you sniff and move along in an instant. \u00a0But we both have the right to look at the same painting and stare or sniff.<\/p>\n

I suspect that devoted readers would never download an app designed to keep them from reading a book the way it was written. People who love words will be just as upset as authors at the notion that some programmer's judgment should ever be allowed to re-write a book. \u00a0\"Clean Reader\" is a digital bonfire and it is every bit as dangerous as the vigilantes who remove physical books from a library's shelves and feed them to the flames.<\/p>\n

If programs like this one are allowed to exist, \u00a0museums must change their rules, and allow offended patrons to bring in spray paint and chisels. \u00a0So the world would lose a few Titian's, Cezanne's and Ruben's and Michelangelo's David might lose something even more personal - but the offended would be appeased. \u00a0That's what matters, right? \u00a0Of course not.<\/p>\n

Yet, that is exactly what programs\/apps like \"Clean Reader\" are - they're chisels and spray paint inside your phone, iPad or digital device. \u00a0They've done their work before your eyes arrive and have removed any risk that you might be moved by a love story with a sex scene or that curse words in the right place might make you share a character's anger. \u00a0What hands do you trust to hold the paint and chisels?<\/p>\n

Buy or don't buy. \u00a0Read or skip. But never put the spray paint and chisels into the hands of someone who hasn't lived your life or walked in your shoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Christian couple with good motives and the best intentions in the world wrote an app to \"clean\" dirty words in ebooks by replacing them with \"clean\" alternatives. \u00a0They named it \"Clean Reader\" and they made it available for free for iOS and Android devices.\u00a0\u00a0They created a book catalog for the device from work supplied ...continue reading \"Who Decides What’s Clean?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4113"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4127,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4113\/revisions\/4127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}