Insert particles or prepositions where necessary. Translate the sentences into Russian/Belarusian

1. A new bill targeting … material “harmful … minors” was passed … Congress.

2. This organization is committed … opposing any censorship … the Internet.

3. There are several different programs available to help parents filter … material that is often considered inappropriate … children.

4. Some people may find it offensive, in part because it belittles … the terrible experiences that many people still alive both lived …, and have to live with the consequences … the rest of their lives.

5. Censoring in this case could be based … the fact that the information could become harmful … certain groups of people, if enough people then proceed to act against these groups … … a misguided sense of justice.

6. The government called … immediate steps aimed at curbing … the tide of racism in the Web.

7. The Board of Censors has found this content offensive … decency.

8. Some acts of violence can still slip/get … the net of censorship.

Speech activities

Answer the following questions. Exchange your views on the issues considered.

1. Why is The Communications Decency Act (1996) considered to be plain silly by the author? Do you share this point of view?

2. What constitutes ‘community standards?’ Are they universal? Who defines ‘community standards?’

3. Are parents really the people best suited to decide what their children should and should not see?

4. What’s your personal view on the program filters that are designed to filter out material that is often considered inappropriate for children? Are they really helpful?

5. Some people complain that censorship violates their ‘freedom of expression’. Should freedom of expression be always intact?

6. Who should act as censors in your opinion, and what should they censor on the Internet?

Group work

1. Imagine that you’ve been set up as a “Board of censors”. Work with your colleagues and decide what TV programs you’d like to cut back on or censor and what new programs (if any) are to appear. Justify your point of view and exchange your opinions with other boards of censors.

2. Censorship has always been a topical issue. Split in 3 groups and decide which form of censorship is really viable:

– extensive censorship;

– limited censorship;

– no censorship.

Make use of the information provided in the supplementary texts (“Defending the faith or a weapon of censorship?”, “A Necessary Evil?”) in order to back up your arguments.

Writing

Write a free essay on the following issue: “Are we protected or harmed by censorship?”

Section 2. Media and Communications

Reading one

Read through the following text and state its main ideas

Is Television Destroying our Society?

At the start of the Fifties, hardly any U.S. homes had a television set. By the end of the decade the nearly all did. It was much the same in Britain and across the developed world.

Freed from the austerity and pessimism of the war years millions of ordinary families saw the technological miracle of TV as a sure sign that life really was getting better. They were wrong: it was about to get worse.

Emerging in the U.S. is remarkable new evidence of how television has profoundly undermined society’s traditional values and standards. Carried out by Harvard University, the research shows that as TV has become the drug of choice for an increasingly fast and self-occupied world, traditional family activities have disappeared, participation in local affairs and community life has collapsed and a damaging cult of “get-out-of-my-face” isolationism has taken hold.

In just 50 years, say the Harvard researchers, TV has not only stripped away much of our essentially gregarious nature, but demolished the social fabric and common interests that has held communities together for centuries.

Cocooned in their cathodic world, people no longer know their neighbors, friends or even families. They don’t vote, they don’t socialize, they don’t think and most of them don’t care.

Can all this be the fault of television? In a speech to the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, Dr Robert Putnam, Dillon professor of International Affairs at Harvard, argued forcefully that it is. He painted an ominous picture of a society so helplessly glued to, and enslaved by television that it can no longer function in a normal, co-operative way.

Television, he argued, has dammed the natural flow of human contact that builds friendships, neighborhoods and, ultimately, nations. Millions of modern, comparatively well-educated people barely speak to strangers outside work and shopping trips. As a result, one of the most precious resources – simple human trust – has been all but eradicated.

“Trust and civic participation are the cornerstones of democracy,” said Dr Putnam. “Sadly, our stock of social capital has been badly depleted over the past 40 years. The social fabric is becoming visibly thinner. We don’t trust one another as much because we simply don’t know one another as much.” The reason, said Dr Putnam, is just a click of the remote control away.

“Television has made our communities wider and shallower,” he said. “ It enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social benefits associated with other forms of entertainment.”

“The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and of the movies by the video recorder.”

Millions of people, whose parents and grandparents considered it second nature to be concerned with local and national affaires, now display only a tangential interest in life outside their living rooms.

They have become suspicious, reclusive and increasingly disinterested in the way their communities are run. As people have come to depend more on TV’s inevitably superficial coverage of news and current affairs, a semi-institutionalized culture of ignorance has begun to appear.

More then 60per cent of U.S. families don’t buy books. Blissfully moronic movies that celebrate ignorance, such as Dumb and Dumber, are all the rage. 30per cent of population think Bosnia is somewhere in Africa.

From the early seventies to the present day, the number of Americans able to say they have attended a meeting on public, town or social affairs in the past years has almost halved. Participation in parent-teacher associations has fallen from 12 million in 1964 to only seven million in 2007.

“Every year over the past decade or two, millions have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities,” said Dr Putnam.

At every level of education Dr Putnam found a direct, negative connection between the number of hours of television people watch and their willingness to take part in group activities. By the same token, those who watch TV most, are least likely to trust others. Television watchers are suspicious, skeptical, socially inept and inclined to think the worst of others.

“By contrast, the more you read newspapers the more trusting you are,” said Dr Putnam. He found that for those born before World War II, community activity- from joining groups to voting in elections – is a strong and responsibly-held ethic. In 1950, only 10per cent of U.S. households had a TV set. By 1958, it was more than 90per cent and the collapse of trust and participation has been accelerating ever since.

In seeking to establish the cause of what Dr Putnam calls “the profound undermining of civic culture” over the past four decades, many other possibilities were considered, including sky-high divorce rates, the exodus from the cities into the suburbs, the flood of women joining the jobs market and the simple speeding up of modern life.

But nothing, argued Dr Putnam, provides so compelling an explanation as the growth of TV and the strain of selfishness, distrust and isolation that it has bred. “It has “privatized” and “individualized” our leisure time, disrupting the opportunity for social contact,” he said.

For more and more of television’s helpless, captive millions, the message of the age has become: plug in, switch on, drop out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society

Language focus