The Digital Age: Freedom, Expression, and the Challenges of Our Global City
We are all neighbors now. There are more phones than there are human beings and close to half of humankind has access to the internet!' In our cities, we rub shoulders with strangers from every country, culture and faith. The world is not a global village but a global city, a virtual cosmopolis. Most of us can also be publishers now. We can post our thoughts and photos online, where in theory any one of billions of other people might encounter them. Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression as this. And never have the evils of unlimited free expression - death threats, pedophile images, sewage-tides of abuse - flowed so easily across frontiers.
Since free speech has never meant unlimited speech - everyone spouting whatever comes into his or her head - that entails discussing where the limits to freedom of expression and information should lie in important areas such as privacy, religion, national security and the ways we talk about human difference. As important, it means identifying positive methods and styles that will enable us to use this defining gift of humankind to best advantage, in these conditions of unprecedented opportunity and risk.
Something like human speech probably emerged at least 100,000 years ago, as a result of evolutionary developments in the brain, chest and vocal tract To speak, in this most elemental meaning, is to modulate the airflow from our lungs by movements of the chest, jaw, tongue and lips, producing sequences of distinct sounds with recognizable meanings. When we say of a toddler 'she's talking now', that is what she has learned to do.
Human communication has never been confined to speech. Physical contact, hand gestures and facial expressions must have played an important role even before chest, tongue and brain got their act together.
The digital age brings both acceleration along and convergence of two previously distinct lines of communication: one-to-one and one-to-many. Key advances in the history of one individual communicating with another include the development of postal services, the telegraph, the telephone, the mobile phone, email and the smartphone. The smartphone has given access to the 'mobile internet', where one-to-one converges with one-to-many and all other variants, including many-to-many and many-to-one.
The internet subverts the traditional unities of time and space. It telescopes space, making us virtual neighbors, but it also conceals time. Once something is up there online, it is usually there forever. Whether an ill-advised remark was made this morning or 2o years ago, if it comes up in an online search it is still, in some important and novel sense, part of the here and now. Only with the greatest difficulty can stuff be entirely removed, the published unpublished.
领英推荐
For all the wonders of the online world, the fullest range of human communication is still achieved only in a direct personal encounter. Here, the original power of speech combines with physical signals that we aptly call 'body language. Face to face, subtle variations of vocal timbre, a tilt of the head, a softening of the eyes and a touch of the hand, all complement those modulations of air pumped through the vocal tract. It is in such unmediated human encounters that words come closest to deeds, and sometimes the word becomes flesh.
Being electronic neighbors is more like living in a global city. Most of the time we encounter people from different cultures and backgrounds only superficially, in the subway, bus or shop. We can choose to visit that Indian, Chinese or French restaurant down the road, or not. Occasionally, we come together for a big shared occasion: a football game, perhaps, a concert or a rally. Some-times, however, a more or less chance encounter can lead to a life-changing interaction, be it a business partnership, an exhilarating romance or a traumatic assault. So it is online. This is the world-as-city.
Put most simply: it is easier to make things public and more difficult to keep things private. The first affordance has a great liberating potential, especially for free speech; the second harbors an oppressive potential, including a threat to free speech. If a state or corporation knows everything that we express to everyone, we will be less free. That includes things we don't even intend to say, but reveal through our online search histories.
A plethora of international organizations, national governments, parliaments, companies, engineers, media outlets, celebrity tweeters and physical and virtual mass campaigns through social networks all now compete in a multilevel, multidimensional game. The outcome often hinges on intricate intersections between business, politics, law, regulation and rapidly developing technologies of communication.
Source : Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash