Disemvoweling

New to me… disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum. In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, eitherĀ “G*d”…

Print as a Thought-Control Device

From Orwell’s 1984, which I’m teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein. By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient.  The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal…