Topics: Weird & Humorous, Insights, Privacy & Liberties, Comics, Censorship

Simple but profound insight in the May 2nd Frank & Ernest comic strip.

It depicts a medieval king and his aide. The king says to the aide:

"The literacy rate is going up? --- I suppose we better start thinking about censorship."

I love it! (The comic strip, not censorship.)

Although there can be censorship in oral cultures, it was the powerful traits of textual literacy that were met by new levels of censorship. Also, low literacy also made it easier to hide information from most of the population.

I believe that general lack of textual literacy was a major reason the Caesar's Cipher worked for many years. Most people would not have been able to understand the writing even in plaintext.

Even with textual literacy, the choice of language was another factor. In European history, the use of Latin usually required a person to not only learn to read but also learn another language.

These days, the global communications present their challenges of information access. Phil Zimmerman, the developer of the PGP cryptography tool, once commented "Perhaps you could think of Arabic as a form of cryptography." (Figuratively speaking, of course.) This applies to other languages as well. Computers have been "speaking" mainly English for many years. But this is changing rapidly. In a decade or so, a large portion of the Internet might be "speaking" Chinese. 你好 (Ni Hao; Hello)

J.D. Abolins