Last Sunday, Rex Murphy’s Cross Country Checkup (on CBC Radio One) explored “Are There Legitimate Limits to Free Expression?”
You can download the program in MP3 format or listen to it using Real Audio.
The program explored the debate on various fronts: human rights commission complaints, campus discourse, government funding of films. I’m not going to contribute to the hyperbole being generated around Bill C-10. I’ll leave it to others to sort out the confusion between withdrawal of taxpayer support and the issue of censorship.
I’d like to look at diversity on the internet. The host’s introduction to the program asked:
Free speech is taken to be many to be the absolute central engine of a functioning democracy. Is it giving way before the pressures of political correctness, or the emergence of bureaucratic bodies under the guise of “protecting against potential future offenses?” Or are there justifiable limits to free speech? …and if there are …who should decide …and how?
A number of callers were concerned that magazines and journals were not giving sufficient space for opposing viewpoints. One caller suggested that a 100 word letter to the editor is hardly a fair response to a 6000 word essay.
One of the points that the host made was that in an internet era, an infinitely wide array of diverse views are possible. But I would suggest that conventional media has often been more effective at presenting opposing viewpoints – especially informed viewpoints.
Let me offer an observation of a possible paradox of internet media: While we have never had greater access to diverse viewpoints, we are also better empowered to restrict our news sources to those channels, blogs, RSS streams that are more likely to align with our current thinking.
A recent piece observes:
Web 2.0 is a mass movement that lends legitimacy to the majority opinion and uses peer pressure as an effective tool against those who disagree with the consensus.
In a Web 2.0 world, information is not usually imparted directly from authority. It either arrives through social networks or is sought out directly by individuals. The search methods in Web 2.0 favor the volume of supporters of a narrative and have little relationship to the degree of truth in the narrative.
Just as the internet empowers increased access to diverse viewpoints, we might wonder if its narrowcasting capability enables increased isolation from such diversity.