On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 10:20 PM PGage <[email protected]> wrote: While I approve of what HBO has done here, there are still legitimate concerns related to your original objections. I do not approve of going through every film and television show and removing the now offensive bits. I would raise holy hell if they put out a censored version of GWTW, and I do not approve of all of the (mostly self) censorship we are seeing now. OTOH, I reserve the right to approve of pulling some things that may just be too much.
We know that there is content that is unacceptable because it crosses a line. And we know that the line moves over time, usually incrementally. So it's no stretch to look at archival content and say it's unacceptable because it crosses today's lines. In our current situation the lines are making big moves quickly and emotions are strong (or raw, I couldn't figure out the better word). So collectively we're undergoing a culture shock and it interferes with good decision making. So I think a call to temporarily pull a movie or TV episode from streaming in order to keep from inflaming passions during the shock period is okay. After the shocks stop coming media companies can reassess the problematic content and figure out what goes back out to the public and what gets locked away. Our current situation reminds me of the premise of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock: technological changes are coming faster than we can adapt to them and we develop permanent stresses as we fail to keep up. In this case it's rapid waves of cultural changes, including but not limited to the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ people, the opening of gender identity, #metoo and the power imbalance against women, and now antiracism replacing tolerance in the framing of race relations. Keeping up bears its own set of stresses and we don't know what's yet to come and how we'll cope. In previous generations there wasn't this abundance of instantly available entertainment and so there wasn't a strong call to go into archives and remove all material now found offensive. There's merit in keeping that approach. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiH%3DD6T1gtF_mJA%3DBALqPwumwvepXW8x4L1Gikzt%2BbbC1w%40mail.gmail.com.
