In an increasingly on-line, wired world, societal paradigms for everything from the definition of a nation state, to concepts of legal jurisdiction, seem to be headed for the same rate of planned obsolescence as a new model personal computer. A recent gathering of the on-line, new media industry provided a variety of intriguing examples of the effects of instantaneous communication on our perceptions of ourselves. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, delivered an impassioned discourse on the inability of politicians to grasp the significance of the electronic revolution. Their cyber-ignorance, in fact, prompted Barlow to write a Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace after attending the World Leadership Forum in Davos, Switzerland. For the last 200 years, we have been building something called the nation state. People think it has been around forever, but it hasn’t. It arose during the Industrial Revolution to serve the interests of industry, to regulate trade and control currency. In terms of all of the products it has created, it has been a good thing, but from a political point of view, not such a good thing. Auschwitz and Hiroshima, those are its real political gifts, he said.
Tea Tax
Calling politicians everywhere cyber-illiterate, Barlow likened the cyberspace situation today to that of the colonists who rebelled against the Tea Tax. A bunch of clueless old men in Peking, Washington, Paris, etc, think they have a right to govern a place they have never been. I understand why they think so; it used to be called colonialism, he said. But they have no tools to control this. It’s very difficult to take down the Net, very difficult to control the nature of its conversations, because they are all connected seamlessly to the whole. Thus, it is with some enthusiasm that I welcome the end of the nation state. I do not expect it to go down silently or slowly. It will fight, as will all of the creatures of the Industrial Era, because it wants to survive, Barlow said. One of the survival tactics of such politicians, he declared, is to create fear among those people who don’t know the Net. He recounted an interview with a television reporter who obviously had never been on the Net but who repeatedly asked him But what about all of the violence in cyberspace? This guy thought the Net was nothing but violence, hate speech and pornography, Barlow said. I wanted to tell him that I see more pornography when I go to buy milk at the corner convenience store than I do on the Net. When I want pornography on the Net, I have to look for it, and I usually can’t get in because it’s too crowded!
If the Internet is not full of what most would consider pornography, some of its materials nonetheless generate controversy when cultural differences come into play. Big-time new media guru Nicholas Negroponte related some of the sociological problems such conflicts create. He set out to illustrate, for example, how the Internet is blowing holes in accepted legal definitions and, at the same time, raising questions about how easily the fundamental right of expression can be infringed from unexpected quarters. First he noted the instance where a Muslim cleric in Pakistan demanded the extradition of Michael Jackson and Madonna for behavior offensive to Muslims worldwide. There was ever-so-slight a ripple of nervous laughter. Some of you in the audience suppressed a giggle, because this seems so ridiculous, he said. Then, however, he recounted the case of a Mr and Mrs Thomas, who were successfully extradited from California and prosecuted under morality laws in Tennessee for erotic content that they had put on their Web site. Of course, we didn’t send Michael Jackson and Madonna to Pakistan; that seems such a ludicrous idea. But we did send the Thomases to Tennessee! Mr Thomas is still in jail and Mrs Thomas is only out on bail. If that doesn’t worry you… I mean, what is going on here? he demanded. He also cited the Jake Baker case from the University of Michigan, whose sexual texts offended a university alumnus in… Moscow. The court dismissed the case after he spent 35 days in jail, but…, Negroponte said. Why is this happening and why is it so entwined with the Internet as a phenomenon? In the US, if you violate local decency laws, it is a federal offence. Cyberspace is anything but local, which is the root of the whole problem. Where is local? All of a sudden, locality is gone, and so this problem will be on the front page every other day in some form or another for the next few years, he concluded. Precisely, said Richard Heller, a partner in the California law firm of Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein & Selz. Taking the most recent issue of New York City’s newspapers, he said if there is any doubt in your mind as to how much impact The Net has on us today, just take a look. On the same day, you had stories about three 13-year-olds boys arrested for trying to plant a bomb in their school, and they got their plans from the Internet; a New Jersey man who filed for divorce on grounds of on-line adultery; Telecom 96 law; Microsoft and the Black Entertainment Network setting up an entertainment service; and a major magazine said it was prepared to share on-line publications revenues with freelance writers. Heller admitted that so far, legislative efforts to establish rules of behavior [on the Net] have resulted in uneven application of moral and ethical rules and often with severe infringement of personal speech. Fecundity For instance, noted lawyer Jerry Birenz, America Online Inc’s attempt to eliminate vulgarity from its online chat groups, caused an uproar when users began complaining they could no longer discuss breast cancer on-line because their messages were sent back. Certainly, says Barlow, managing the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be difficult. The transformation to the Industrial Age brought civil war to the US, he notes. Despite the upheaval, he asserts, this is probably the greatest moment in human history. We are in the process of creating a consciousness that covers the planet, we are hardwiring it now. Less than 1% of human race is on-line today, but if it continues to grow at its present rate, everyone on the planet would have an electronic mail address by the year 2003. I believe that in the next 500 years, each synapse of that consciousness will be connected to every other synapse and will create an ecology of mind that will make a rain forest look like a desert by comparison for its fecundity, he said.
By Marsha Johnston
