User Generated Censorship 

A strange experience I had yesterday. I was blocked by another user for the first time in all the years on Flickr.
Why? Because I posted a comment on this picture:
www.flickr.com/photos/cosmicsausage/4041230095/
saying that is was indeed a great subject but politely added a statement that in my opinion post-processing a portrait of a person with such a tarnished skin with a 100+ clarity setting and other settings to exploit his skin features was in my view too much. For those of you who don't know these settings: it's the kind of setting that would even make a model look like in need of a dermatologist.

I was about to forget this event, but it has some interesting angels.

I think most of us who like street photography or making portraits in general face dilemmas from time to time as to how far we are allowed to intrude privacy and expose portrayed people, especially when the capture maybe not all that flattering. Debates or exchanges of opinion on this are useful and, with the ever shrinking space of privacy in the online world, inevitable for many years to come.

The second angle, equally interesting to me, is censorship. Not new is that governments, companies and institutions try to limit or control the freedom of speech and freedom of exchange. Living in China, I experience this every day, especially online.

I think most people agree that the ever growing control over our online identities is something to worry about, or at least something to keep a close eye on. This example shows another appearance of upcoming censorship, enabled by features offered by social networking sites. If you don't want to hear certain opinions, you just censor them. Something Orwell could not think of, but social networking sites allow every individual to become a "Big Brother" and exercise censorship ...
In this case it is just a simple user, but I remember having read comments in photostreams of one of the Flickr "stars" were mild criticism was beaten down, while ignoring the points made in the comment, supported with cheers from crowds of fans.

It seems that social networks not only thrive on user generated content. User generated censorship is something to watch for the future ...