Technological Turf Wars: A Case Study of the Computer Antivirus Industry (review)

1054 selves”? Perhaps the sense of control of content is just that—a sense. Default settings do not transform us from media users into coproducers of meaning since our media choices and default settings have already been predetermined for us. The most interesting part of this discussion is the analysis of versioning, where multiple versions of what was the same initial text circulate and compete for our attention. Christian and family values–type bodies like CleanFlicks offer sanitized versions of motion pictures that compete with those already sanctioned by the film industry’s own self-regulatory body, the Motion Picture Association. The chapter on David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, illustrating how a heavily reedited 83-minute version of this film is radically different from the full, “official” 94-minute version, is particularly telling. Ironically, editing makes the film’s violence at times even more violent and much more unmotivated than in the original. Digital touch-up technology allows a new level of virtually seamless versioning. Guins asks us to imagine a time when all texts are similarly contingent, and there is no possibility of a definitive text. This is already happening, whether it is blocking software that controls access to certain websites or is connected to keywords that control access to certain television programs, or versioning. Will the powers that be—or we self-censors—be able to keep up with technology? Online access makes the issues governing content and access control all the more pressing. How, for example, does online content delivery undercut the policies of Blockbuster, long notorious for its unwillingness to deal in NC-17 material? Or might new online behemoths like Amazon.com and Netflix now find themselves in the censorship business? This insightful exercise in censorial studies examines the elision between the watched and the watchers, the censors and the censored. Guins concludes that the cleaning and sanitizing process is quite ambiguous, controlling behavior as much as content, and much less straightforward than a simple rating or a default setting implies.