Technology, history and the limits of free speech

By Bill Kovarik

Back in the 60s, the movie Easy Rider's portrayal of two guys on the loose caught the imagination of a restless generation. When Dennis Hopper expressed himself by giving the finger to a pair of shotgun toting rednecks in a pickup truck, he followed a host of other American icons and died on the road.

Now days, road rage incidents happen all the time, especially if you commute by car in a big city. Its hard not to notice that people are constantly honking and making rude gestures.

So I was wondering ...What if technology made it possible for us to ** really ** express ourselves?

Imagine "point and dial" cell phones that would let you call people in other cars. Imagine Bluetooth ID systems that let you find out about anyone, anytime on your personal digital assistant. Imagine programmable billboard-style messages rolling across the backs of cars and trucks.

"Hey succa you cut me off."--- "Did not you weenie" --- "Oh yeah, wanna fight about it? " -- "Pull over and we'll see whos da man"

None of this is on the market yet, but it's got to be just a matter of time. Imagine the reaction.The anger. The carnage ...

So here's the real question: How much free speech can people actually handle? Do we really want to know what that trucker thinks of our driving? If technology makes unlimited free speech possible, is that necessarily a good thing?

Most Americans don't know much about free speech. They fear it because they havnt learned how to use it and they certainly cant use it in grammar school or high school or at work.

For most Americans, the Bill of Rights is an abstract doctrine with no real meaning.The two main exceptions are politics and universities.

In politics, people are free to support whichever candidate they like, but of course the choices are limited to mush-mouthed upper class lawyers who have nothing real to say to middle and working class people. Just try to get an actual political discussion going at a candidate "event." You'll be ejected by "security" guards.

	In the movie Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson tells motorcycle riders Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper that people in his small Louisiana town are not afraid of them, but rather: Theyre scared of what you represent --- freedom. Its difficult to be free when youre bought and sold in the marketplace
Lorenz was famous for his theories about aggression and animal behavior. Here a group of ducks have "imprinted" him as their mother.	In a book called Man Meets Dog, Vienna scientist Konrad Lorenz tells the story of his dog's behavior when he would go for walks in his neighborhood. When the dog came to a yard with another dog, the two dogs who would always run up and down a picket fence, barking at each other fiercely. One day, an auto wreck took out part of the fence. The two dogs ran, barking as usual, until they arrived at the newly open area. They stopped barking and for a moment they stood looking at each other. Then they ran back down the fence and continued their argument where the fence was still standing between them.
Robert Frost, 1945 (AP)	Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall has the often quoted phrase, "good fences make good neighbors." But it wasnt meant literally. Here is a larger part of the poem: ... My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down!"...
People seem to need fences in order to communicate. The higher the fence, the more they can communicate. Improved communications technology, even though it seems like just another superflous "overtech," like leaf blowers or electric forks, has a more serious purpose. New communications technologies are a way to talk over high walls, which, in effect, keep your apple trees from eating your neighbor's pine cones.	So, like any other technology, we have to ask whether the human condition has attained a maturity capable of handling the power of the technology. But it's not as if we have any way to slow the speed or spread of the new technology. Communications technology itself is specially protected. To limit access to it is to limit free speech, which is inherently unacceptable.

Free speech in universities is not exactly encouraged either. Students come into the university with no personal conception about their rights. Despite the many classes they have had in political science and history, if you tell the average student that the university wants to approve everything the student is going to write about the university, the reaction is meek acquiesence.

At my small university in the Gothic American South, we have seen the First Amendment trashed so often that a numbness sets in after a while. For example, during the 2004 election, a campaign poster was ripped down as "inappropriate," with a matronly aplomb that gracefully defied generations of American history. Students and faculty aren't supposed to use the university email system to promote political candiates according to the "acceptable use policy." Students and faculty can't make "disparaging comments" on cable TV. Everything going onto a bulletin board has to get a stamp of approval. No demonstrations are allowed except in the "free speech zone" or following a five-day permitting process. Student fraternities and sororities have to put up and take down their identifying letters at the whim of the university administration in a process enforced by local building inspectors/ The list just goes on and on...

So you can talk about the First Amendment and Constitutional rights, and you can still win in court, most of the time, because at least the judiciary still understands the law (most of the time).

But people don't really want free speech. Even if communications technology would let us express ourselves with infinite freedom, our social and political conventions do not.

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UPDATE: With a week to go before the 2008 election, editors at the Beaufort Gazette in Beaufort SC shut down reader blogs, saying:

"The reader blogs on beaufortgazette.com are shut down at least until after the Nov. 4 elections. We understand that people's emotions run high this close to the elections, but the passion of many of those on the site has increased to levels that exceed the boundaries of civility and good taste. We are keeping open the option to comment on individual stories, but the blogs are being disabled indefinitely."