In the beginning was speech. The human development of the power to communicate through speech happened so early in the evolution of homo sapiens that we know next to nothing about it.[check] Because the power of speech is universal across all human cultures, because each normal human acquires speech so early in life--we call babies who can't speak, "infants" (from L. infans, without speech) thus differentiating them from other humans by what they lack-- speech seems native to us: hard-wired into our body, our brains, our tongue, and thus not a system of communication homo sapiens may have once lived without. The centrality of speech to humans may explain why speech has become a metonymy for human expression, as in the phrase, "let me have a word, please." In the early modern period, the English political activists Trenchard and Gordan align speech with the body, property and the self: "...in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call any thing else his own." Cato's Letters (#15, Saturday February 4, 1720) Within the party politics of the first half of the 18th Century in England, speech became the central weapon against tyranny.

The Declaration of Independence--written and signed in fair copy, signed, printed, and spread through the colonies, to be read aloud--began as an unruly act of speech, and became the origin of the American nation. It is also an object lesson in the seditious effect of media. The right to claim freedom of speech as a natural right acquired legal force through the Enlightenment revolutions and the Constitutions framed in their wake. The First Amendment to the US Constitution has had the practical effect of seeding American political culture with free speech incidents: those occasions when those who feel their freedom of speech has been stifled appeal to the courts to protect their right to "freedom of speech." But what is freedom of speech? In the writings of Milton, Locke and Jefferson, and in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, this freedom is often defined in negative terms. For example, the First Amendment reads "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech or the press..." One scholar goes so far to claim that "there is no such thing as free speech."[Stanley Fish] First Amendment legal scholars avoid the problem of defining free speech by distinguishing it from speech that is unprotected by the constitution: sedition, libel, obscenity, or 'fighting words'; that remainder of speech "protected" by the First Amendment is therefore "free." Does freedom of speech function within our civic discourse as the opaque kernel of our secular spirituality? as a theater for a heroic transgression of boundaries in the name of "Truth"? as the means by which any plain speaker can prove they are "free?" Is freedom of speech therefore a romantic illusion? In spite of these skeptical questions, freedom of speech is the implicit positive term in attacks upon censorship, and a guiding ideal for libertarians who dream the future for new media like the Web. If free speech has been one of the main ways Americans assured their participation in public discourse, increasingly it has also become a way for Americans to claim right of access to art and entertainment others deem improper and inappropriate.