The Future of Free Speech

[OneBlueSky]

long article by Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Chicago . . . interesting, if you have the time and are so inclined . . .

The Future of Free Speech
http://www.littlemag.com/mar-apr01/cass.html

My purpose here is to cast some light on the relationship between democracy and new communications technologies. I do so by emphasising the most striking power provided by emerging technologies: the growing power of consumers to “filter” what it is that they see. In the extreme case, people will be fully able to design their own communications universe. They will find it easy to exclude, in advance, topics and points of view that they wish to avoid. I will also provide some notes on the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.

An understanding of the dangers of filtering permits us to obtain a better sense of what makes for a well-functioning system of free expression. Above all, I urge that in a heterogeneous society, such a system requires something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices. On the contrary, it imposes two distinctive requirements. First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quire irritating, are central to democracy and even to freedom itself. Second, many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems; people may even find it hard to understand one another.

A Thought Experiment: Unlimited Filtering

The central puzzle is a thought experiment: an apparently utopian dream, that of complete individuation, in which consumers can entirely personalise (or “customise”) their own communications universes.

Imagine, that is, a system of communications in which each person has unlimited power of individual design. If people want to watch news all the time, they would be entirely free to do exactly that. If they dislike news, and want to watch football in the morning and situation comedies at night, that would be fine too. If people care only about America, and want to avoid international issues entirely, that would be very simple indeed; so too if they care only about New York, or Chicago, or California. If people want to restrict themselves to certain points of view, by limiting themselves to conservatives, moderates, liberals, vegetarians, or Nazis, that would be entirely feasible with a simple “point and click.”

In such a system, the market for information would be perfected in the sense that consumers would be able to see exactly what they want, no more and no less. When filtering is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter. They can design something very much like a communications universe of their own choosing.

- much, much more . . .

http://www.littlemag.com/mar-apr01/cass.html

[athena]

1. I highly recommend his book

Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech