The blog platform (and, for that matter, the structure of the web itself) allows for a certain amount of freedom, both for the blogger and the reader(s). The question becomes how much freedom particular bloggers or websites want to allow.
I wonder if Mill's concept of freedom of speech/the press still holds in an arena like the internet. He was a proponent of allowing all in a society to express their ideas, no matter how extreme or deviant. Mill believed that only when all ideas were out in the open could the truth of each be tested against the others, making space for the "best" of them to wade their way through criticism and emerge victorious (best for whom, is what I want to know). Anyway, Mill preceded blogs by a pretty substantial period of time, so I digress . . .
In a New York Times article The Trolls Among Us, Mattathias Schwartz writes, "Today the Internet . . . is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and others." If this is true, do users get to pick a) who they are defined as and b) who they are defined to? The first questions seems like the answer should be painfully obvious: you are who you define yourself as. In a space full of "trolls," however, this truth becomes less absolute. Instead, there is the possibility that I could be defined by anonymous strangers/hackers who may or may not have the same sense of ethics and morals I do. I could, of course, block them from viewing my blog/Facebook/whatever - as Professor Dean says she did to Bill White (Bad Subjects: Blogging Theory), but this is literally no obstacle when all a troll has to do is create another identity (or several more, you know, just in case) to continue harassing whomever they please.
The second question has no obvious answer, and is even more unsettling because of this. In the age of the Internet, we have little to no control over who can see our information - or how it is used. Some may be as harmless as marketers who simply want to know what we like, so that they can better shape products to our preferences (or shape our preferences to their products - I often wonder how much of this already happens on the Internet, which is to say, how many pop-ups, flashy banner ads and corporate websites have I seen, and what part they have played in the creation of my online consumer-persona). On the other hand, how would we feel about the government having complete access to all of our most personal information hidden away in "secret" files on our computers, or being able to keep tabs on every word we write to friends on AIM? If this information is never used, the illusion of privacy persists.
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2 comments:
your gesture to Mill is interesting; in my experience with blogging, folks who leave nasty comments think that they have a right to say what they want where ever they want. Would Mill agree? Also, do you think Mill would have included harassing, nasty speech as part of free expression?
I would say that it would depend on the interpretation of both Mill's "harm principle" and his concept of freedom of discourse. He did seem to believe that almost anything goes as long as it doesn't cause harm to others. It was clear, however, that trolls do have the potential to cause harm when the repercussions of their actions go beyond words on a screen. On the other hand, Mill also says that offending someone is not "causing harm." So there is a line somewhere, it just depends on where individuals draw it. What this means for an overall idea of online ethics, I'm not sure yet.
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