Censorship is often thought of as the strict suppression of certain ideas in various forms of expression from entering into the public sphere of society. This method of censorship is much more visible than others because it entails the hard policing of these often controversial ideas in order to eradicate their circulation. The actual definition of censorship is a broader one, that is simply the control or regulation of information and communication. The alphabet can be thought of as a form of censorship because it regulates thought into a system of a language therefore shaping or controlling thought processes.

An increasing economic investment in media and information combined with technologies that make it incredibly easy to transmit, copy and store massive amounts of information creates a world where culture is controlled through forms of censorship, consolidation, copyright and surveillance.

In order to grasp the influence of mass media that has emerged today, we must first understand what the implications of mass media are, and what our relationship with it is. What is the power of media and how does it control culture? Marshall Mcluhan believes, "Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act- the way we perceive the world" (Mcluhan 41). Every character is defined by its environment, in its entirety. Whatever a person senses will have an effect on their identity. As media's sensual abilities develop so does its engagement with its audience. As technology allows media's capacities to reach us to grow larger and faster, so does its influence on culture.

"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments" (Mcluhan 26).

Homer's poem, The Odyssey was created in order to communicate a set of cultural values delivered through voice. After the Greek Alphabet was created so was the school of Rhetoric which shaped and expanded the creation of Greek character and culture. Plato discusses the importance of shaping culture through the censoring of myths, which at the time were the most sensory form of media. The printing press allowed language to be mass produced, expanding the field of information access. The television set allowed media enter into the home, as well as stimulating both visual senses with moving images and streaming audio. All of these inventions changed culture significantly, "The family circle has widened… Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage" (Mcluhan 14). The classroom and the dinner table are losing their influence to a wider sphere of media as technology enhances its delivery systems. This allows less room for people to escape or shut out influence. Its regulation is therefore the regulation of identity.

Media now enters our lives in every aspect, every surface is a catalyst for media, websites, urinals, coffee cup holders, sides of buildings if not already inscribed have the capacity to be. Robins describes this cause of inscription and institutionalization of media, "This development is rooted in the new consumerism of post-Fordist times, with its culture of fashion, advertising, design and display. It may however, be the case that this mobilization of spectacle and display can, at the same time, function as a form of social control" (Robins 310). Robins describes a city where public space, saturated by media and display governs our attention. The function of these spaces is to connect its audience with products. This claims that the insertion of mass media into the public space and people's interaction within it are driven by the market. Almost every space is now owned by private enterprises. Public space, one important for the freedom of cultural discourse is being commercially regulated and replaced with the shopping mall.

Public space still exists but it is endangered. More and more "Shopping has reached a new saturation. For instance, what Chuihua Judy Chung calls 'Disney Space' – the copyrighting of familiar things and public spaces as commercial icons and private zones – is now pervasive: 'Starbucks' refers to high-octane coffee, not the good officer of the Pequod." (Foster 56) This hard branding, and franchise by commercial enterprises, erases the cultural history and meanings of spaces and now replaces them with brands. This shrinks cultural management to a small number of commercial interests. Language is losing its meaning to brand recognition. "Today it has reached the point where not only commodity and sign appear as on, but often so do commodity and space: in actual and virtual malls the two are melded through design." (Foster 23) This is first step of censorship that takes place when consolidating culture into a product.

The digital revolution has created a new environment flooded with media. Media now inscribes almost every surface of our physical and digital lives. "The general 'mediation' of the economy. I mean by this term more than 'the culture of marketing' and 'the marketing of culture'; I mean a retooling of the economy around digitizing and computing, in which the product is no longer thought of as an object to be produced so much as a datum to be manipulated – that is, to be designed and redesigned, consumed and reconsumed."(Foster 21) The nature of this new media environment is so vast and distorted that it is almost invisible America is no longer in the business of manufacturing products but bottling culture into products. "The apparent product, the object attached to the transaction, is not the actual product at all. The real product has become culture and intelligence." (Foster 20) Due do these new economic interests in information, media and ultimately culture in combination with new technologies that change the nature in which media is absorbed. Culture is first commercialized and consolidated then in effect lost in the redistribution, leading to the tighter filtering through surveillance and targeting. Each one of these step impose a level of censorship on cultural production and the implications of this system leave us in a much more terrifying state.

There are two patterns of the economic integration of cultural production which Lawrence Lessig points out through the development of television, "While the number of channels has increased dramatically, the ownership of those channels has narrowed to an even smaller and smaller few." (Lessig 165) The problems with the commercialization and consolidation of culture into a smaller number of entities is simply that it lacks diversity. Many opinions are censored and tailored to fit the values of a handful of networks. Also, "This narrowing has an effect on what is produced. The product of such large and concentrated networks is increasingly homogenous. Increasingly safe. Increasingly sterile" (Lessig 165-166). The motives of media production companies is to serve their advertisers who provide their funding. This censors material which would oppose products being advertised, or simply offend viewers. The content has no room for criticism, discourse or democracy.

Technology Changes the enlarges amounts of material and increases speeds of distribution and changes the nature of copyright and control of enormous amounts of media and information. "Now that the distinctions between among accessing, using, and copying have collapsed, copyright policy makers have found themselves faced with what seems to be a difficult choice: either relinquish some control over copying or expand copyright to regulate access and use, despite the chilling effect this might have on creativity, community, and democracy" (Viadhyanathan 153). Because digital copying and recording technologies provide so much freedom, in order to impose an older idea of property and ownership onto it, one needs to create greater restrictions. Information itself is becoming more valuable. This has turned copyright law from a small business to a driving force of the economy tied with cultural production. Copyright is the second method in how culture has been managed, and censored from the public. "Many of our cultural products will soon be 'triple protected' by copyright, contracts or licenses, and code. Therefore, they will be 'closed systems' limited in their ability to enhance the public domain or enrich the public sphere."(Viadhyanathan 178) If censorship is the control of information, copyright is its most enabling tool. It provides legal restrictions on sharing or freely distributing information, and censoring culture.

What is ironic about the nature of copyright is that today some of the worlds most economically valuable information is not protected at all. This is in fact any and all information about the consumer. Viadhyanathan clarifies how large the information industry is. "By the late 1990s, data services were the sixth largest segment of the information industry… Database providers collect more than $100 billion per year for their services- and that's without specific legal protection" (Viadhyanathan 163). The information held in the databases Viadhyanathan describes are anything from "texts of legal cases, government filings, telephone and address lists for direct marketing, voter profile lists…" the list goes on. There was even a database protection legislation in the late 1990s that would allow the legal protection of databases that gather and store consumer information, showings its value. Fortunately Congress did not pass it.

Lessig points out that the consumer perspective is lacking, "It is the recognition that technology can remove what friction before gave us [privacy] that leads many to push for laws to what friction did… it is the pattern that is important here. We must take affirmative steps to secure a kind of freedom that was passively provided before"(Lessig 278). Just as new technologies make it easy to distribute information, it makes it incredibly easy to collect it as well. All of a persons actions on the internet are easily recorded by the sites a they visits. Emails are often parsed as well. It is this method of surveillance that allows the third phase of censorship to take place but for what purpose?

Media has brought the market place into every aspect of an individuals life. Every surface inscribed, and sense occupied. Rather than our attention being held at the expense of this media flood, the nature of this new environment negates itself. It all loses its clarity in the battle for volume and is tuned out like an ear tunes out white noise. Very little is received by the audience, "Nietzche describes the birth of character as the moment when the first soloist stepped forward from the Greek chorus and defined himself as a singular persona against the collective voice of his peers... Imagine a chorus composed entirely of soloists, each singing a different song, each one attempting to step forward at once in order to out-sing the other" (Mau 43). The voices all blur into the background and no message is prevalent or communicated instead the audience only receives noise.

This static media state is witnessed at its fullest potential through the internet. Because it is space-less everything from all over the world exists in one place at any given time. Mcluhan claims this technology has transformed the public into the mass audience, "The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead merely given packages of passive entertainment" (Mcluhan 22). The internet has great potential, to accomplish so many new collective events at new scales that were never possible before its time. The reality is that this communication engine is that, like public space, it has turned into one giant shopping channel. Just like an extension of the shopping mall it is designed to capture attention.

Marketing was the strategy created to make a voice more or less prevalent in this media flood, i.e. branding, franchise, buzz, celebrity etc. It is a form of censorship or filtering content that the viewer receives. Even now marketing is not enough to compete with the amounts of information and speed at which it is delivered. The new strategy is surveillance. Surveillance is the fastest growing field, with the intentions of increasing efficiency, to filter out all the information we are not interested in and capture our attention with what we are. The inevitable outcome of this system is a world completely created by our own desires where we are only told about what we want based on our own patterns of consumption.

The internet is not build on any structure like a planned city, if one looked at a graph of the internet it would resemble a giant knot of nodal connections with no order. We depend on certain frameworks for way finding like we depend on maps and signs for driving. These frameworks guide culture because they guide a person's interaction with media rather than space. Google, the world's most used search engine uses extensive surveillance and information collection methods to display pages which it calculates will be most interesting to the user as well as match advertisers with demographics. "Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinary profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as 'Page Rank' systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order its search results." (Markoff) This is of course the logical step to take when sorting massive amounts of information. It sounds almost liberating that a person's identity and taste will guide them through this media and decide what is visible. However other uses of this surveillance have exhibited not so good intentions. "As part of their manipulation of potential purchasers … the Dunhill Company sells mailing lists of eight-to-fifteen year old girls, for 2 cents per name, because the young women "are at a highly impressionable age and … starting to form lifetime buying habits" (Flannery 226). This is a much harder example of new information technology making it feasible to use surveillance for media targeting and not only targeting but creating a market for a specific product.

Bruce Mau claims, "Yet, as the recording systems become increasingly responsive to our interests, as expressed by our purchasing patterns, we may only encounter things that we are told should interest us. Picture a world that rolls out in front of us like a red carpet of our own design, a projection of our own desires." (Mau 51). This world is a consequence of the developments I have discussed, born through electronic technology and mass media and driven by consumption and surveillance, is characterized by censorship. The individual is only defined by what he or she wants and surrounded by the products that fulfill those immediate desires. These technologies are refining themselves and becoming even more pervasive. Less space is available outside of this world.

As both technology and the market advance the next steps in the progression of censorship and filtering of media and information are the following. A more advanced filtering system that not only retrieves content based on user input, but interprets meanings through queries. This is described in the New York Times as Web 3.0 and "Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more like a guide – and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands" (Markoff). This system is designed to disconnect the user from the content by another step of the process. Not only will search engines filtering content based on a users history, the engine will now decide what the users wants based on its own interpretation. The computer understands that all things have many have multiple meanings, implying a level of artificial intelligence,. "All agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable that today's search engines"(Markoff). Whoever controls these systems controls how ideas are interpreted culturally by deciding what materials are linked to what meaning. The machine now thinks for the user and they lose control of what they even thought you wanted and are now told what to want.

This technology also has the ability to create more sophisticated data mining techniquesin the future. Now instead of a computer just knowing someone's patterns of consumption it can analyze and formulate ideas about their personality and what drives their actions. It can be used to circulate subculture trends into mass culture. "Additionally, by mining the "buzz" on college music Websites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks – a capability more impressive than today's market research predictions" (Markoff). Murdoch, here the audience becomes the show for the media. This is roughly Rupert Murdoch's intentions with Myspace, to transform it into a mass audience marketing machine. Cultural appropriation has speed up dramatically stripping different ideas of their meanings for profit at new rates

Data mining techniques, developed in the digital world are being employed into the physical one. Walmart plans on doubling the amount of RFID*-Enabled stores from 500 to 1,000 by the year 2007. Giving anyone who possesses the technology to read data from one of these tags from a range of 5 kilometers. These tags again not only create efficiency but have serious invasion of privacy consequences. This technology is steadily being introduced into commercial products and allows new methods of invading privacy.

But what will the future be for the people who witness this to full circle. This system eventually has a feedback loop, where the consumer actually born and influenced by the products of their own desires filtered down through three or four processes. Half Foster says "Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority." (Foster 25). This cycle taken to its greatest extreme shows that there can be no content left, only eye-candy. A kind of life Gesamtkunstwerk.

"This Gesamtkunstwerk does more than combine architecture, art, and craft; it commingles subject and object: 'the individuality of the owner was expressed in every ornament, every form, every nail.' For the Art Nouvau designer this is perfection: "You are complete!" he exults to the owner… ' The happy man suddenly felt deeply, deeply hunhappy… her was precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring. He thought, this is what it means to learn to go about one's life with one's own coprse. Yes indeed. He is finished. He is complete!'"(Foster 15)