Quote:
Originally Posted by Nergal
I voted 'Other' because I think books should be rated, but not by a institution paid by publishers or government - if on free terms or forced. This is the task of parents, grandparents, teachers and every member of the society, booksellers as buyers to prevent children or adolescents from reading content not designed for their state of maturity.
[. . .]
Children are not at the same maturity with the age of 12 or share the same fears. All readers are individual human beings, not machines.
I use now a very harsh German word for what this partly leads to in my opinion: 'Gleichschaltung'. Not in the special historical sense it is sometimes meant, but a in a meaning of narrowing the possibilities of creativity and how creative output of the one may be consumed by the other.
And I think this fits for everything: movies, books, pictures, music - art in general.
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Nergal, I find I agree very much with your view. However, I'm still sceptical that ebooks, as an Internet medium, could be even "socially" regulated with any effectiveness: should the would-be users of this rating system be interested in what their national society deems appropriate, or is the scale of the Internet as a whole, or of their most immediate local communities (virtual and geographical) more important? It's often noted that North Americans are very tolerant of extreme violence, but very sensitive to nudity and sexuality, while for their European counterparts (these broad strokes are giving me hives) the reverse is generally true. Alternatively, one may live in a tremendously conservative local community by the standards of the rest of one's country, and additionally may move in Internet circles which would be culturally liberal, relative to both one's local and national community. When one speaks of ratings to support the good of society, which scale is most profitable to consider, let alone most justifiable to enforce?
Without abandoning the system of ratings altogether, it occurs to me that Internet technology allows this sliding of scale in a much more efficient way than might otherwise be realised (by strictly political agencies and bureaucracies, for example), so maybe a more useful system could try to use distinct criteria (like presence of death, scales of violence, scales of (locally pertinent) illicit drug use, presence of fantastical or pseudoscientific elements, etc.) rather than a single, maturity-based quasi-metric which generalises unto uselessness.