Window-shopping the marketplace of ideas
It's time for more weaving together of seemingly disparate events into a pseudo-entertaining and quasi-rational exploration, so sit back and enjoy, or endure. (They really need to make a game show out of this–I would, quite plainly, dominate.)
There have been all sorts of news reports in recent weeks on the supposed dangers of social networking sites like MySpace, which have become endemic time-wasters for the young'ns among us. Our good, moralizing (and not at all a douchebag) pal David Brooks was among the first to sound the alarmist bells in his New York Times column–apparently (and disturbingly), he either spotted or started a trend.
Soon "experts" were warning teens using these sites were putting themselves at risk. For instance:
His editor said such entries were "extremely offensive and just contrary to what we believe here," and "just so beyond the pale he could not possibly represent us."
That, of course, is profoundly disturbing and perhaps mildly insane. We've all heard of bloggers being fired for publishing insults about their employers, but this is a new one: Apparently, personal views we express in our personal lives now have to "represent" any organizations we work for. What next, they'll have to funnel through the corporate PR office before they can leave an individual's mind?
If they're not affecting how someone does his job, what right does an employer have to even pay attention to an employee's personal views, much less fire him for them? It's not only unfair but illegal for employers to factor in gender, religion, marital status and all sorts of things that are supposed to remain behind some philosophical veil of ignorance in the ideal working world–how is this possibly OK?
When people start suffering sanctions in certain arenas of their lives for statements they make in what are reasonably held to be separate others, that's just creepy.
Now, let me preface this next jaunt by saying I am not endorsing or making excuses for a Holocaust denier–but the recent conviction in Austria of "historian" David Irving, famous for arguing gas chambers never killed people in Auschwitz, to three years in prison for Holocaust denial is also unsettling.
To me, Holocaust denial is much like "intelligent design:" it is an ideological agenda that contains no substance of its own and merely antagonizes legitimate thinkers in the field to drum up "evidence" of a controversy and rile up its proselytizers.
And as much as I'd enjoy it if we started tossing creationists behind bars as well, isn't incarceration for idiocy a tad harsh? Sure, it might set an example, but couldn't it also merely martyr the message and the source, further energizing its carriers?
And what will locking this man up accomplish? Irving does not pose a substantive threat. His ideas were never given credence to begin with, and he admitted during his well-publicized trial that he came to be convinced they were wrong, and that he was wrong to have broadcast them.
Looking at this country's leadership, isn't that something human beings should be encouraging instead of punishing with loss of liberty?
We've currently got an administration that is so averse to admitting wrongs that it is re-classifying documents that have been sitting on public shelves for years and don't endanger national security but do reveal that–I apologize if I'm shattering anybody's ideals here, but it had to happen eventually–sometimes, officials in past administrations were... mistaken.
Silencing private citizens' irrational or trivial chatter is just that much more irrational, reactionary and unnecessary itself.
Still, the free speech banner can only be waved so vigorously before it starts to fray. To see why, one need only return to MySpace.
If you've never seen a typical MySpace page, it's sort of like this blog, but instead of the focus being on the writing, or any originally produced content of substance or interest to a remotely general audience, it attempts to overload the viewer with a bunch of self-aggrandizing tidbits of various forms of sensory offense, from drunken and debauched pictures of one's many "friends" to tasteless animated graphics and sickeningly busy backgrounds reminiscent of migraine visions–all set to lame, hipster emo music that has probably been featured on "The O.C."
(And because this is a fair and balanced space, if you are acquainted with MySpace, here's something you may not know: It's owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which brings us the fine clearinghouse of reporting, analysis and action that is Fox News. It also claims to devote "significant resources" to policing its hosted profiles for "inappropriate content." To decode post-Sept.-11-institutionspeak, that might just mean that's where the "domestic eavesdropping" is going down. And in that case, if the next mortal threat to national security is coming from exhibitionist high schoolers and coed lushes with low self-esteem and the losers who troll for them, we can all rest comfortably assured it's as good as thwarted.)
People have an empirically demonstrated tendency to greatly overestimate the extent to which others, even strangers, pay attention to them and want to consume every dull detail that aggregates to from their dull lives.
People also have a tendency, as to which anyone who has ever had to deal with the city Parking Division can attest, to exercise any capricious authority they wield to make themselves feel important and validate their otherwise unfulfilling vocations.
These two tendencies can, quite obviously, cause problems when they converge. It is just plain dumb to slander your employer, teacher or other authority figure you somehow depend on for basic elements of your livelihood in a public forum where you can reasonably assume they could see it, identify themselves, take offense and take corresponding action against you. That is not "free speech" worthy of protection, it is practical stupidity. You can say it, but because its only apparent purpose is irrational or malicious, no one else is obligated to accept or respect it.
If someone ever tried to fire me for this collection of binary prose, I would be proud and duty-bound to stand up for my First Amendment rights to comment on the political and social conditions around me. (And I would also whore my tale of injustice and woe out to any media outlet that would have it and use the ensuing uproar and my photogenic physiognomy to land a position getting paid to keep commenting, but that 's beside the point.)
Somehow, if the content I was transmitting took the form of a MySpace page full of trashy self-portraits and inane, un-funny, acronym-infested chronicles of everything that happens to me and my entire circle of acquaintances on each given day, I just couldn't turn around and argue that without feeling like a phony little lump of whining scum.
Free speech is a lot like clearance shopping–many of the offerings are discounted for a reason. If you're going to don the mantle, you'd best be saying something you can justify as something, if only to yourself.
And honestly, if you have to live through life's daily micro-dramas once, isn't that enough? If not for yourself, think of your audience, even if it is hypothetical.
There have been all sorts of news reports in recent weeks on the supposed dangers of social networking sites like MySpace, which have become endemic time-wasters for the young'ns among us. Our good, moralizing (and not at all a douchebag) pal David Brooks was among the first to sound the alarmist bells in his New York Times column–apparently (and disturbingly), he either spotted or started a trend.
Soon "experts" were warning teens using these sites were putting themselves at risk. For instance:
Police in Middletown, Conn., are investigating recent reports that as many as seven local girls were sexually assaulted by men in their 20s who contacted them through MySpace pretending to be teenagers.My first thought was, oh man, if that were Middleton, Wis., I would have to pause and seriously wonder whether I knew who a few of those guys were. Then I read on:
Many schools have responded by restricting Internet access from school computers. One private school in Newark, N.J., ordered students to remove all personal blogs from the Internet, even if accessed from home, to protect them from online predators.Well, isn't that nice of them. Those silly things called "individual rights" are overrated, anyway. I then spotted an AP Wire story carrying this lead:
DOVER, Del. (AP) – A reporter and copy editor for a weekly newspaper was fired after his editor objected to comments posted by the reporter on his personal Web log, or blog.Apparently this fellow, on the blog on his MySpace page, made "many sexual references, along with a complaint about [his] black neighbors partying late into the night Jan. 15 because they didn't have to get up for work the following day: Martin Luther King Jr. Day."
His editor said such entries were "extremely offensive and just contrary to what we believe here," and "just so beyond the pale he could not possibly represent us."
That, of course, is profoundly disturbing and perhaps mildly insane. We've all heard of bloggers being fired for publishing insults about their employers, but this is a new one: Apparently, personal views we express in our personal lives now have to "represent" any organizations we work for. What next, they'll have to funnel through the corporate PR office before they can leave an individual's mind?
If they're not affecting how someone does his job, what right does an employer have to even pay attention to an employee's personal views, much less fire him for them? It's not only unfair but illegal for employers to factor in gender, religion, marital status and all sorts of things that are supposed to remain behind some philosophical veil of ignorance in the ideal working world–how is this possibly OK?
When people start suffering sanctions in certain arenas of their lives for statements they make in what are reasonably held to be separate others, that's just creepy.
Now, let me preface this next jaunt by saying I am not endorsing or making excuses for a Holocaust denier–but the recent conviction in Austria of "historian" David Irving, famous for arguing gas chambers never killed people in Auschwitz, to three years in prison for Holocaust denial is also unsettling.
To me, Holocaust denial is much like "intelligent design:" it is an ideological agenda that contains no substance of its own and merely antagonizes legitimate thinkers in the field to drum up "evidence" of a controversy and rile up its proselytizers.
And as much as I'd enjoy it if we started tossing creationists behind bars as well, isn't incarceration for idiocy a tad harsh? Sure, it might set an example, but couldn't it also merely martyr the message and the source, further energizing its carriers?
And what will locking this man up accomplish? Irving does not pose a substantive threat. His ideas were never given credence to begin with, and he admitted during his well-publicized trial that he came to be convinced they were wrong, and that he was wrong to have broadcast them.
Looking at this country's leadership, isn't that something human beings should be encouraging instead of punishing with loss of liberty?
We've currently got an administration that is so averse to admitting wrongs that it is re-classifying documents that have been sitting on public shelves for years and don't endanger national security but do reveal that–I apologize if I'm shattering anybody's ideals here, but it had to happen eventually–sometimes, officials in past administrations were... mistaken.
Silencing private citizens' irrational or trivial chatter is just that much more irrational, reactionary and unnecessary itself.
Still, the free speech banner can only be waved so vigorously before it starts to fray. To see why, one need only return to MySpace.
If you've never seen a typical MySpace page, it's sort of like this blog, but instead of the focus being on the writing, or any originally produced content of substance or interest to a remotely general audience, it attempts to overload the viewer with a bunch of self-aggrandizing tidbits of various forms of sensory offense, from drunken and debauched pictures of one's many "friends" to tasteless animated graphics and sickeningly busy backgrounds reminiscent of migraine visions–all set to lame, hipster emo music that has probably been featured on "The O.C."
(And because this is a fair and balanced space, if you are acquainted with MySpace, here's something you may not know: It's owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which brings us the fine clearinghouse of reporting, analysis and action that is Fox News. It also claims to devote "significant resources" to policing its hosted profiles for "inappropriate content." To decode post-Sept.-11-institutionspeak, that might just mean that's where the "domestic eavesdropping" is going down. And in that case, if the next mortal threat to national security is coming from exhibitionist high schoolers and coed lushes with low self-esteem and the losers who troll for them, we can all rest comfortably assured it's as good as thwarted.)
People have an empirically demonstrated tendency to greatly overestimate the extent to which others, even strangers, pay attention to them and want to consume every dull detail that aggregates to from their dull lives.
People also have a tendency, as to which anyone who has ever had to deal with the city Parking Division can attest, to exercise any capricious authority they wield to make themselves feel important and validate their otherwise unfulfilling vocations.
These two tendencies can, quite obviously, cause problems when they converge. It is just plain dumb to slander your employer, teacher or other authority figure you somehow depend on for basic elements of your livelihood in a public forum where you can reasonably assume they could see it, identify themselves, take offense and take corresponding action against you. That is not "free speech" worthy of protection, it is practical stupidity. You can say it, but because its only apparent purpose is irrational or malicious, no one else is obligated to accept or respect it.
If someone ever tried to fire me for this collection of binary prose, I would be proud and duty-bound to stand up for my First Amendment rights to comment on the political and social conditions around me. (And I would also whore my tale of injustice and woe out to any media outlet that would have it and use the ensuing uproar and my photogenic physiognomy to land a position getting paid to keep commenting, but that 's beside the point.)
Somehow, if the content I was transmitting took the form of a MySpace page full of trashy self-portraits and inane, un-funny, acronym-infested chronicles of everything that happens to me and my entire circle of acquaintances on each given day, I just couldn't turn around and argue that without feeling like a phony little lump of whining scum.
Free speech is a lot like clearance shopping–many of the offerings are discounted for a reason. If you're going to don the mantle, you'd best be saying something you can justify as something, if only to yourself.
And honestly, if you have to live through life's daily micro-dramas once, isn't that enough? If not for yourself, think of your audience, even if it is hypothetical.
posted by Holly at 1:50 AM
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