Sunstein is a prominent liberal; the internet is put to political use more by conservatives than by liberals. Hence my sarcastic comment.
However, Sunstein’s thesis is presented as non-political. One can legitmately debate whether it would be better to have some sort of restrictions on political uses of the internet.
I can see the reasoning, as concentrated groups of extremists tend to congeal into political masturbation…but why single out internet discussion for this? What’s the difference between this and some wacko editorial rag?
The internet brought to you by Coke, Barney and his funtime hour, the Republican Party and Yahoo!
Why would we let the governments and big comapnies limit what we see to only that that those not make them look bad. If the internet was brought to you in part by Nike, would we hear about their sweatshops in China? I do not need a techonology encrusted thought police to tell me what is good and bad for me on this newfound ground that is about the only free space we all can have.
Interesting topic, december. (Didn’t read the link though.)
I agree that there are, “Serious dangers” when people bypass general intermediaries. I’m not sure what to do about it.
Nor am I convinced that the internet invariably has this tendency. Yahoo, CNN.COM, and the SDMB are all examples of general intermediaries. And I’m not sure that less general intermediaries such as the Wall Street Journal, Salon.com and the Drudge Report are all that bad (at least insofar as their less general nature is concerned.)
Also, I wasn’t too fond of the opposite extreme in the 1970s, when the news media was ruled by the 3 networks.
On Liberal vs. Conservative: Let’s not forget the vested interest of the 5th Estate, ie the press. They have always made wisecracks about the reliability of internet sources.
I dunno, if I had to make a wager, I would imagine Conservatives being the leaders in the push for internet regulation. After all, they’re traditionally the folks who like to censure or silence things that they dislike. And aren’t they the ones who complain the most about libraries aren’t installing Internet filters “to protect the wee ones from the smut”? And giving control to corporations is definitely a Conservative staple.
Or, as Dubya himself put it, “There ought to be limits to freedom!” (visit http://www.gwbush.com/ for an audio clip)
This statement says more about anti-conservative propaganda than it does about real conservatives. In fact, the push for regulation of political content on the internet has come from a new book by a prominent liberal, which was favorably reviewed by the liberal NYT. To my knowledge, no conservative has supported this proposal. (Althought there are conservatives who want to regulate pornograpy on the net.)
As you are evidently strongly in favor of free speech, I’d like to invite you to look at the other side.
I believe that you misrepresent Sunstein. From the NYT:
Emphasis added. Sunstein’s proposal seems pretty mild to me: encourage web sites to provide links to dissenting views. Indeed, Yahoo’s news pages seem to be consistent with his suggestions.
RE: Conservatives vs. Liberal use of the Internet…
It depends on how you define “conservative” or “liberal”, and also how you define “use”. David Duke, for example… is he conservative? Some would say yes (I say he’s a nut who shouldn’t count, but that’s just me :D). Does he “use” the Internet? Of course.
On the other hand, you can find some VERY extreme pornography on the 'Net. Hell, you can find extreme stuff, period - drugs, porn, methods of building nuclear weapons, etc. - is this “liberal”? It seems like it. Is this “using” the Internet? Yup.
Note: I am not saying that all conservatives, or even basic conservative philosophy, matches routes with David Duke, nor am I trying to imply that liberalism leads to drugs, porn, and nuclear terrorism. They’re just individual examples, people! Carry on.
I had this same discussion about a year ago in a philosophy seminar. Funny how something as contemporary as the Internet can be debated with the words of musty and dusty old philosophers. In this instance we found ourselves referring to John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. In this essay, JSM argues that no idea should be squelched or censored in any way, all ideas should be free to float around and the good ones will persist and live on, while the bad ones will live fleetingly and disappear amid a chorus of catcalls and derisive sneers. Mill’s point, and I tend to agree with him, is that even bad ideas have value.
Mill said this in On Liberty, “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
To use an example with the Internet, consider the number of websites dedicated to racist/bigoted philosophies. While morally disturbing, Mill’s argument might proceed as follows. “Truth has a way of perservering; the only way to make sense of the truth is to allow falsity to exist.” Of course, Mill was arguably overly optimistic about human nature and our desire to search for the truth. As such, one who is committed to a racist philosophy tends not to read counterarguments and thus finds him/herself only re-reading only those arguments that tend to support the original position. Of course this is not a failure of freedom, but rather a failure of critical thinking.
So to answer the OP’s question, jharding and JSMill (with me voting in proxy) opine that no, the Internet is not too free.
Incidentally, filtering software that conservatives wish to see employed in libraries has the fringe benefit of blocking out hard left-wing websites as well. I leave to my gentle readers to decide whether this is intentional censorship or not.
jharding
Chapter 3 of On Liberty has been batted around for years. It still remains nothing more than bankrupt, post-Enlightenment social Darwinism which presupposes some extrinsic idea of truth and an artificial, atemporal, reified notion of reason, concepts which have drawn fire from philosophers for the past forty years.
Since I don’t think anyone really wants me to rehearse the basic arguments made by postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophers, I’d suggest that you pick up a Foucault Reader. Maybe you’ll even come across it in your philosophy class.
This is interesting, if correct. I haven’t seen this point made in any conservative sources.
I’m trying to imagine how the filtering software would be programmed to recognize hard-left politics. Do hard-left web sites use dirty words? Maybe the filtering software would knock them out for that reason.