Nick, Chip, and Barb on Free speech

(I,NU) = Inaudible or not understandable

Indent = new speaker

Free speech

Chip and Barb and I are going to talk today about issues of free speech and censorship on the internet. I’m going to start--the first thing I want to try to do is to start to frame this issue in terms of how these issues get talked about, the particular ways in which we talk about and think about these issues in this society. And I think the first thing that I want to point out is that the American view of liberty, which is in some ways unique in the world, has early origins in two different sources. One is a radical view/fairly radical view of political freedom and political liberty, but also pretty radical view in terms of economic liberty. And I think what people don’t always see is that in this society discussions about one often are disguised as discussions about the other, at least so it seems to me. So that when people are arguing sometimes that government should get out of people’s private lives or that the government should stop taxing poor individuals and taking money out of the pockets of individual Americans, those discourses about political liberty often derive from and are closely related to concerns that are really about getting the government out of the economic market, out of the operations of businesses. Out of the operations of small businesses and of course for example their taxes, their rights. I think one way in which we see this issue related to the issue of free speech is the way in which free speech/issues of free speech, which are certainly partly issues of political liberty and free political discourse, are also issues of free commercial discourse. And often in this society we have unusual coalitions or surprising coalitions of for example commercial and business interests and various political groups--the press, the media--all of whom are supporting certain rights of free speech. But for very very different reasons. Some more political in nature, some fundamentally commercial in nature. I just want to mention a couple of examples of how these issues get blurred. One is the way in which advertising discourse, commercial/I’m sorry, political promotion like ads for campaigns or candidates and other forms of individual free speech often get blurred. For example attempts to restrict the content of political advertising is often blocked in this society not on the basis/I mean for example like Presidential candidates’ ads that utter half truths at best about the other candidates’ positions. Attempts to regulate this are often challenged not primarily on the grounds of free speech, but on the grounds that this is free advertising and that like other advertising you should allow people to say what they want and then let them market decide whether people are going to "purchase that product or not." So even in the art of political discourse people often bring in commercial metaphors comparing for example politicians’ ads to commercial advertisements. And since, among other things, the people who produce these ads often are also the very same people who produce the commercial advertisements, the political consultants that are often working also for other agencies like tobacco companies, is not too surprising that discourse about politics often becomes discourse about commerce and vice versa. A second area is to remember always that the press and the media, the so-called fourth estate although they have an important social and political function and sometimes at least take that function seriously. They are also profit-making commercial entities. And that profit-making endeavor as I think all of you realize often shapes/has as much to do if not more to do with shaping what they do and don’t talk about. So here again their rights of free speech or the rights of the first amendment to freedom of the press often become also rights about the unrestrained business activity of these profit-making corporations, which they are at the same time that they’re also instruments of the press. And a third area I just want to touch on, one of our favorite topics in this class is the issue of pornography. And I want to again sort of nudge peoples’ ideas about this because as to paraphrase a supreme court justice, we all know pornography when we see it. I think it’s important to see that in fact this society has an extremely ambivalent, if not to say, inconsistent, if not to say, hypocritical attitude about so-called pornography. I think everybody here is familiar with activities of Larry Flint and others, the so-called obvious pornography. But I want to point out if you haven’t noticed it recently, I’ve seen it about 10 times, an ad in a variety of publications, especially technology publications for the new palm pilot. It features a woman who is for all appearances totally naked, holding the palm pilot in a strategically located way, that covers up any obviously private parts. And that along with her posture and the way that she’s sitting shows that there’s no of the sort of normal TNA contact that’s revealed but she’s obviously naked or at least we’re obviously supposed to think that she’s naked. Now why an actual picture of a person who’s naked is pornographic and that ad that’s run in I’m sure hundreds of different publications, isn’t pornographic, is an issue I think we ought to think about. Why naked breasts in a particular movie is not seen as a particularly troublesome activity/(hang on a second) (sorry we’ll pick that up again). Why nudity in certain kinds of pictures is acceptable and not seen as pornographic in another context it is, should make us think about pornography not as a distinct category, but as a way of describing certain kinds of nudity that we find troubling. Whereas other kinds of nudity that we don’t find troubling sort of go past us. I heard somebody the other day say well Stephen Spielberg has never used nudity in any of his films. Well if you’ve seen Shindler’s List, there’s a considerable amount of nudity. It’s in a very grim almost documentary format but it’s just as much nudity as any other picture of nudity is. One can argue that in the context of this story it serves an important even necessary purpose and in other contexts it’s gratuitous. But those sorts of distinctions aren’t bout the image or the picture itself. So we see that on the one hand images that may not be full scale total frontal nudity may be in fact every bit as much exploited and pornographic as things that are. Conversely things that are the same sort of physical image maybe in other contexts not seem as pornographic. This begins to raise deeper questions about not pornography versus everything else, but why we call certain things pornography and other things not. I’ve got more to say but I’m going to pause now and let Chip and Barbara talk.

Ok let me just pick up/I think Chip has made some really good points that build on what I’ve talked about and let me sort of take a few more steps on this path. I think that this issue about the way in which content is affected by context and the inevitable need for an interpretation of a particular item, an image, a word, a statement, in order to really judge it and even understand what it means. I think is one reason why filtering software can never really succeed. You’ve heard me say this before. I think there was a good presentation on this over the weekend by the privacy free speech group. I won’t repeat what they’ve said. But it really does mean that the educational task is often about examining those contexts. The ways in which things get interpreted, the ways that we think about these issues and not only deciding whether image X or word or phase X, remember it’s not just about pictures, but also about speech, political discourse, and other things, is being used for purpose A, B, or C. I’ll actually share with you something about my own view of pornography, which is what’s always bothered me the most about pornography is not the images, although there are some pretty gross things that I find is bothersome as anybody else does, and is upsetting. But the commercialization of it, the turning of human beings into/images of human beings into commodities. And it’s always been that aspect of it that really troubles me the most. That’s judging a particular context and use as much as the images themselves. And I think in many cases, most cases probably, you could exactly the same image as Chip just said, put it in a different context, and you would say oh this serves a really essential educational purpose. So it is complicated and filters however powerful they become are never going to be very good a deciding for us context issues. I want to sort of flip over to the other side of this issue now which is the (I,NU) issues of censorship and again specifically how we talk about issues of censorship. And I think one thing that always strikes me as how issues of censorship often arise out of discourses of protection. That somebody needs to be protected. Sometimes censorship derives from other more explicitly moral judgments. This is morally offensive or politically offensive period. But more often people aren’t up front about those judgments or standards even when they’re applying them and they like to talk in code words, usually in terms of protecting people. And I think one issue to always ask in these contexts is who really exactly is being protected? Is it the viewer? Is it/if it’s an image or something, is it the thing that’s being represented, the person who’s being represented? Either through images or through words? Is it some third party? I think it was JoLynn who sent to the web board her analysis of pornography in terms of the harm that it does not only to the viewer or to the person photographed, but to third parties, women generally. That’s a very common analysis. And I think good arguments could be made in any of these three realms. But they’re often not made explicitly. And I think an issue here is always to ask, well who exactly is being harmed here? Who is it that we’re trying to protect? What’s the nature of the harm that’s being done? And will censoring this thing actually prevent the harm that is supposedly being targeted? You’ve also heard me say before that most often in these contexts in both the cases of pornography or nudity but also in the areas of social and political discourse, in educational context the usual line is "well we’re just trying to protect the kids." I don’t doubt people’s motivations there. I think in most cases it’s probably quite sincere, but a problem with that is that the things that we often do to protect kids often have spill-over effects that also end up effecting other people. And I think it’s a separate question to ask (I,NU) to which that sometimes an unintended effect and the ways in which sometimes it’s quite intended and that the rationale of protecting kids is often used to implement policies like certain kinds of censorship policies that really are motivated by other very different concerns that aren’t being made explicit. But something that people generally agree with like protecting kids is made the apparent rationale. I’m going to give it back to Chip for a while and then come back and wrap up.

Yeah I just want to pick up on the protection point. I think I sent a message or two about this to web board but I’d like to expand a little bit on it. In the fall of 1996 I lived with my family in Beijing at Peking University. I remember when I first arrived there I was interested in how the internet was being used and my first impression as I looked at the use of e-mail, the web, and other new technologies, faxes, telephone, and so on, was that things were much more restrictive than they are in the United States. And again my first reaction was, oh this is terrible and they should be more open like we are. But what was interesting to discover as I went along was that for many of the people I talked with this was not a source of embarrassment. But rather it was explained entirely in terms of protecting, protecting children, protecting university students. So for example all the computers in the library were behind the glass wall where anyone could stop and look over the shoulder of a user and see what things they had on their screen. A justification for this was this was a way of helping to protect university students from seeing things they shouldn’t see. E-mail was monitored regularly and this was again to protect people in general from ideas that would be harmful, ideas that were against the state. One of the major efforts was against missionary groups who were proselytizing in China and they would often use codes in their e-mails so that the censors wouldn’t be able to figure out what they were saying. The people who were doing all of the censoring never said, and probably might not have even ever thought that they were doing some kind of repressive, invasive kind of thing. They in fact saw or they would say that they were protecting/trying to take advantage of new ideas from the west while protecting the population from the negative ideas of the west. They saw many things in western society, particularly the United States, that they didn’t want. They didn’t want the violence. They didn’t want pornography. They didn’t want the pollution. They didn’t want many of the things that/they didn’t want the commercialism, the profit-centered decision-making that seemed to override the interests of people. They didn’t want the greater gaps between rich and poor. And yet many of these things are rapidly entering into Chinese society. So government bodies whether they are university administrators or school people, city province and national bodies, are working very hard there to on the one hand show some element of free speech as a way of ensuring their entrance into the world trade organization. But on the other hand maintaining control as a means of protection. That whole experience I think has/doesn’t lead me to easy answers about what to do here. I want to protect my own children for example. But I/it has led me to think a little more deeply about this relation between protection and censorship that Nick was talking about.

Yeah I just wanted to add a little bit to that. I was thinking about the way that sometimes if you go in libraries, in school libraries, and you might not find the kinds of books that you might be looking for on the shelves, and I’m wondering whether that’s/whether there’s a difference in sort of explicit censorship and whether there’s just things that don’t fall within the realm of someone’s personal world view and the way they look at the world doesn’t sort of include certain categories. I mean the way we think about things is always sort of limited in a certain way and I think that you know censorship/the ideas kind of closely tied up with the way we do think about the world. And so we’re naturally always going to sort of block out certain things that we don’t want to think about or that we don’t have to think about. And so that’s/it just complicates the issue all that more I think.

Ok, let me just wrap up with a couple of closing comments that I think tie together the things that all three of us have been talking about. And it goes back to this issue about the way in which we often see these issues as political issues but not as commercial issues. I actually believe personally that government censorship is not the main threat. Although I think it’s a pretty significant threat. The thing about government censorship is that it’s usually public, usually comes up for votes, it’s usually debated, it’s usually something that is decided by some individual or some body that can be looked at and questioned and argued with. And I think that there’s something about that which is within a relatively open political process like the one we have in this country. I think it’s something that is generally speaking subject to the same kind of political checks and balances that any public governmental decision is. But what I want people to see is that there’s this other kind of censorship often governed by issues of cost. To go back to Barb’s example, it’s the thing that’s just not there. Nobody pulled it, nobody locked it up a way. It just wasn’t there in the first place. It wasn’t there because there wasn’t enough of a budget to purchase those books, or when people had to make decisions about which books to buy they bought one and they didn’t buy another. Or people who can’t afford to get publishers to publish their books. Or publishers that do publish books but they don’t have the advertising revenue to get their books very well known. I mean there’s all those ways and I could list a lot of them. I’m sure you can think of more yourselves, in which commercial factors, cost factors, have a censoring effect also. But it’s not the kind of censorship of taking something that’s there and removing it or hiding it, or locking it away. It’s the censorship of something not being there in the first place. And that censorship of things that aren’t there is I think much more dangerous, much more pernicious because it’s much harder to see. It isn’t always the result of a conscious decision. It certainly wasn’t the result of a decision that was open or political or legislative in some way by a group that’s accountable for it. It’s often a very small quiet decision that gets made in a way that can’t ever be raised for public/very rarely can be raised for public scrutiny. Some of you have probably heard the old phrase that freedom of the press is a wonderful thing for those who can afford a printing press. And for those who can’t afford a printing press freedom of the press doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s a political right that depends upon certain kinds of commercial resources and privileges that not everybody has. I think that idea is a way to start thinking about these issues of free speech and censorship generally and one thing that’s interesting about the internet, as all of you know, is that it is for many people, not everybody; we’ve talked about the access issues. It is for many people a virtually free printing press. And I think that’s what gives it its potential and it’s also what gives it its dangers. Closing comments? Ok, we’re going to wrap this up. Hope you enjoy this talk and we’ve got another one to record. So we’re going to launch into that one now. Bye.