Cyberculture:The Censorship Debate.
I previously indicated that content control of the Web had so far evaded all attempts of governments and corporations around the world. However these attempts continue -the US Governments 1996 Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms.
But to quote directly from Wired Editor Louis Rossetto , this is "as though the illiterate could tell you what to read."
Our own dear leader is on record as having admitted that his children were more effective citizens of CYBERSPACE than he. Governments have in any event no jurisdiction in CYBERSPACE- we the citizens of CYBERSPACE to quote from the Declaration of Independence of our World "have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."(see www.eff.org- John Perry Barlow "A CYBERSPACE Independence Declaration")
It is also of interest that, as is the case in other media the attempts at content control are approached by an appeal to protection from corruption and that this appeal has only surfaced as the Web has grown to the point where it can be truly described as a Mass Media. It is claimed that for example in 1996 83.4% of all photographic images on the Web were pornographic. By whose standards is obscenity defined?
The power of the mass communications industries in shaping the consciousness of populations has long been recognised, in the English speaking world at least, press censorship and control has existed for as long as the print industry had a literate audience to reach. The governments of the Third world were also quick to realise that the mass media had power to influence and affect the attitudes and behaviour of their own populations, but for a variety of historical reasons related to the imperial past have found that economic control rests outside the boundaries of the Nation State. In the case of the Web there is no direct ownership or control that can be effectively used to restrict the content by any single Nation State Government. The use of the Web by peadophiles, drug dealers, pornographers, train spotters and others whose activities we may find distasteful, is caused not by the existence of the Web but by the societies that validate routinely the abuse of power in all it's forms.
In any, event filtering software exisists that will, at the request of the user disbar access to "unsuitable material". However this software operates to the most restrictive standards barring access for example to web content that includes articles on Gay rights or Information on Birth Control.
Additionally as Robert Hamman points out in Cybersociology issue 3:
"It is often said that the Internet is a global network, available world-wide, and accessible to all. Journalists, politicians, and perhaps most famously the editors of Wired magazine, make all kinds of extraordinary claims about what the Internet will do for us: participatory democracy, online duty-free shopping, education delivered into our homes, communities of interest not just geography, the creation of one borderless nation, etc.
What most of the people extolling the virtues of the Internet don't say is that, for most of the world, the Internet is entirely irrelevant. The reality is that the Internet is only accessible to 50-100 million of the world's 5 Billion people. In other words, less than 2% of the World's population is online. For the most part, those who do have access to the Internet are located in North America, Europe, and other highly developed regions.
Across all regions of the world we see that Internet users have a higher than average personal income, and a high level of education and literacy when compared to their offline neighbours. It can be assumed that this gap between users and non-users is greater in the developing world than it is elsewhere, and also that in a few places a lack of infrastructure may keep some of those who have the will and means to go online from actually doing so.
Accessing the Internet requires a fairly modern telecommunications infrastructure. It also requires political freedom, and a number of countries have done their best to outlaw the use of the Internet by their citizens. Once these two requirements for access are met, as they are in most Western nations and in many urban areas within democratic nations of the developing world, there remain economic and educational barriers."
The West has an almost complete monopoly of the Global information flow and content can only be understood if this first recognised. Indeed over 90% of all Internet traffic passes over the equipment of one transnational corporation- Cisco systems. The potential for corporate domination of content is at least as great as it was in the early days of television.
Read John Naughton on the dangers of near monopoly in the Operating System software HERE
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