Censorship as / and Social Good
Leaving in place the assumption that 78 % of turtles in the simulation have an interest in keeping up with current events , I will now turn my attention to seeing how the introduction of an appetite for Twain ’ s text influences conversation patterns in the model .
The percent-twain-readers slider controls the percentage of turtles in the environment that will take up an interest in Twain ’ s dictations when they are available . Unlike the news topics , which potentially change every day , Twain ’ s dictations in January are intermittent . He produced 12 dictations in January : Jan 9 – 13 ; Jan 15 – 19 ; and Jan 23 – 24 . In the current model , I introduce his commentary into the environment on those days . As is the case with topics drawn from the news ,
topics drawn from Twain are immediately available to those turtles that are interested in them and are updated every tick . One way to compensate for the intermittent nature of Twain ’ s work may be to give his topics a longer period of activity than topics found in the news , but in the current model both sets of topics are equally transient .
The model shows the number of successful conversations in the environment begins decreasing once even a few turtles become interested in discussing Twain . Figure 10 shows the results obtained when 10 % of turtles in the environment turn their attention to his text .
A similar decrease is evident when 78 % of turtles in the model prefer to discuss Twain instead of current events ( Figure 11 ).
Figure 10 . Results of the number of successful conversations decreasing .
Figure 11 . Results when turtles prefer to discuss Twain instead of current events .
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