Reforming the Internet
I am all for freedom of speech, but the www is a perfect example of what freedom of speech is NOT meant to be.
Recently in the Daily Telegraph Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, gave an interview where he said that the Internet needed some levels of decency placed upon it, and he suggested a rating system as a starting point. The bloggers quickly laid into him; the nice ones laughing at his ignorance about technical possibilities, the nastier ones basically telling him to get lost and leave their precious little World Wide Web alone.
The problem is, Andy Burnham has made a good point based on a very straightforward day-to-day ideology that vast numbers of people can relate to.
In the very early days of the web, the days when the Geeks that set up Slashdot thought they had all the power and the rights, child pornography was rife on usenet and other chat and sharing systems. It grew exponentially, unchecked by any, including the ISPs who let it pass through their newsgroup interfaces without a second glance.
Although it horrified many, its existence was defended on some strange principle that with freedom you take the rough with the smooth.
Some of us simply objected to its very existence, let alone the home it was making in our communities. And as more ordinary people joined the Internet and the selfish first exploiters of this system lost their privilaged position, the horrified started to outnumber the so called defenders of freedom.
To those pundits who fight for freedom of speech and expression on the internet, the game is mostly a selfish one. To hell with anyone else, they want to be able to watch and broadcast anything they like – however sordid, horrific and abusive it may be.
The Porn industry used to claim that without them there would be no Internet as they were the largest grossing sector. Complete rubbish of course, it was a wonderful myth peddled out to those who did not understand how the Internet worked; the money gained went straight into the pockets of the pornographers – no where else.
The problem with the Internet is those who wish to draw lines somewhere are often silenced through the ridicule of bloggers.
Whether Andy Burnham’s ideas are practical or not, his ideology is sound. And I am with him in refusing to pander to zitty, script kiddies who in between writing computer software, go round searching for beheading videos and wrecking online communities because they are a-social nobodies.
And before people think I am some old wrinkly without the foggiest, I am involved with running an online game – I know what I am talking about.
The Internet is full of the most horrific junk. Not a little bit of it in some hidden corner, but tons of it.
My kids, despite the fact that I run good filters on my network have been exposed to stuff put on the semi-private free bulletin boards run by kids that has horrified them.
Some of this is from spammers who leave their vile trash everywhere for no other reason than they can. The rest is from the kids themselves.
As the Lord of the Flies tried to show, a leaderless society without common rules will tend to default to the lowest common denominator.
The Internet is a society completely devoid of leadership and example, it is a headless being with no direction or agenda. And rather than becoming a hot bed of idealism, it is simply a cesspit of that which is least desirable in the human being; a swap shop of the hideous.
I still use the Internet because I must – the media world that I inhabit for my living has sold it soul to Internet communication and I have no option than to put up with it.
But I question the mire that it has become, perhaps has always been, and I find trendy pundits on the BBC and in blogs and Newspapers defending it because they see themselves as cutting edge and bohemian somehow inept and pathetic.
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