"The censorship guy". Homage to Manuel L. Abellán

Manuel Abellán (Barcelona, 1938-2011) was a professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam when in the late seventies, early years of the Spanish democracy, he managed to enter into the archives of the Francoist censorship and started his endeavour of reconstructing what had been purged and of identifying those who had been responsible - many of them still respected politicians, writers or scholars who had slipped through the nets of the Transition's imposed amnesia.
The following piece was published in the special issue of the electronic journal Represura, homage to Manuel. My title comes from one of the anecdotes of Manuel's research and his contacts with the former Francoist esteblishment when, after being introduced to former Franco minister Fraga the latter recognised him as "the censorship guy", to which Manuel replied "No, no, the censorship guy... that would be you".
Besides my professor, Manuel was an admired and beloved friend until he passed away in December 2011.

“El de la censura”
Jeroen Oskam

         Empecé a trabajar con Manuel Abellán en los años ochenta, en la Facultad de Letras de Amsterdam. Acababa de salir su primer gran estudio sobre la censura franquista. En Amsterdam daba clases, principalmente, sobre Historia Contemporánea de España, una asignatura cuyo atractivo era una visión coherente que vinculaba sucesos dentro pero también fuera de España con la evolución del pensamiento político y cultural – superestructura, decíamos hace tiempo –, de tal manera que no era raro que una clase sobre la Primera República terminara tratando de la actualidad política holandesa. Para el estudiante que yo era entonces, eran oasis de lucidez en un ambiente donde se confundía romanticismo y palabrería con erudición.

A Big Data Police State?

If you look at the long term future of social media, I do not believe that privacy is the main concern. It is of course not the best place to share those things you would not want to be public. But the larger part of 'posts' will be hardly compromising for its users.
That is, if taken separately. The long term trend in social media appears to be building search algorithms that can make sense of all these posts, and attach a meaning behind them to individual users. As Facebook developer Rasmussen explains in a BBC-interview about the value of newsfeed posts:

"It's by far our biggest data source. The engineering challenge of building a search index that can manage that volume of data is big. We're well underway to making the system scale that far - we just aren't there yet."
It means a friend searching for "Friends who like football" could identify you if you had once written something like "Come on United!" in your feed.
[...]
"There are really interesting techniques around sentiment analysis," Mr Rasmussen says, "where people try to take text and figure out whether it's someone saying they like something or don't like something.
(See: BBC News - Technology, "Lars Rasmussen: the brains behind Facebook's future")

 A few months ago, when we started an ETFI-project on the future of social media, I spoke of a scenario in which both industries and governments would adopt a more repressive attitude. The fact that social media as Twitter have created temporary openings of free speech in totalitarian countries is a matter of technical unpreparedness rather than a feature which is inherent to the new media. On the contrary: indepth indexing of newsfeed posts will be an unprecedentedly powerful tool for repressive organisations.