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Reviewed by:
  • Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control
  • Paul Swann (bio)
Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control. By Raiford Guins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. xxv+242. $22.50.

Raiford Guins's Edited Clean Version examines the Foucauldian prospect of digital censorship without a personified, centralized group of censors. We are used to thinking of censors as those in authority, holding covert or open power over us, controlling access to media and/or media content—but what if we are our own censors? What if domestic safety extends to controlling what our family plays, what it watches and hears? The computer screen has become the new front door, carefully guarded by protective parents.

Our media culture can increasingly be managed by hardware and software default settings. A parent can control which television programming to make available to her family, or subscribe to a service to edit or re-version material on the basis of content. Profanity, blasphemy, graphic sex, and violence can all be excised at the touch of a computer setting. Video-game authors, professional associations, and big-box retailers—none of them appointed by us—also participate in this super-panopticon process, deciding which items they will carry or demanding changes in content that often trickle down to smaller outlets.

For some, the ability to self-censor digital content gives a comforting but perhaps illusory sense that we determine what our children watch, play, or hear. Hardware and software systems enabling users to control access to digital media constitute a new kind of censorship. This transference of governmentality from the official and public to the individual and the private is a central part of this book's thesis. But as Guins discusses, have we really entered an era of self-regulation, where we have become "experts on our-selves"? [End Page 1053] Perhaps the sense of control of content is just that—a sense. Default settings do not transform us from media users into coproducers of meaning since our media choices and default settings have already been predetermined for us.

The most interesting part of this discussion is the analysis of versioning, where multiple versions of what was the same initial text circulate and compete for our attention. Christian and family values–type bodies like CleanFlicks offer sanitized versions of motion pictures that compete with those already sanctioned by the film industry's own self-regulatory body, the Motion Picture Association. The chapter on David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, illustrating how a heavily reedited 83-minute version of this film is radically different from the full, "official" 94-minute version, is particularly telling. Ironically, editing makes the film's violence at times even more violent and much more unmotivated than in the original. Digital touch-up technology allows a new level of virtually seamless versioning.

Guins asks us to imagine a time when all texts are similarly contingent, and there is no possibility of a definitive text. This is already happening, whether it is blocking software that controls access to certain websites or is connected to keywords that control access to certain television programs, or versioning.

Will the powers that be—or we self-censors—be able to keep up with technology? Online access makes the issues governing content and access control all the more pressing. How, for example, does online content delivery undercut the policies of Blockbuster, long notorious for its unwillingness to deal in NC-17 material? Or might new online behemoths like Amazon.com and Netflix now find themselves in the censorship business?

This insightful exercise in censorial studies examines the elision between the watched and the watchers, the censors and the censored. Guins concludes that the cleaning and sanitizing process is quite ambiguous, controlling behavior as much as content, and much less straightforward than a simple rating or a default setting implies.

Paul Swann

Dr. Swann is professor of film and media arts at Temple University in Philadelphia and Fulbright professor at Eszterhazy Karoly College in Eger, Hungary.

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