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| Media is the Matrix for Censorship and Free Speech |
| Between humans and their meanings are the media of speech, writing, print, photography, telephony and the broadcast media of radio, television and the Web. Marshall MacLuhan was one of the first to note the transformative effect of mutations in media forms: the modern organization of knowledge depends upon the printed book and the library; our sense of contemporary reality is a byproduct of the printed newspaper and television news; our idea of what it means to be entertained has been shaped by the cheap paperback book, the phonograph (from vynl to CD's) and celluloid film. If a mutually defining relationship between the media of communication and human culture has been a long standing feature of human history, one of the cardinal traits of the modern period has been an accelleration in the rate of the development and institutionalization of new media. We have been accustomed to unprecedented change in media. With the invention of each new medium, the powers at be worry: how will this challenge our authority? our ability to govern? Is this new medium a threat to public order and social morality? At the end of the 20th century, these anxieties have come to focus upon the Web. At the same time, mutations in both media forms and the media practices, which are enabled by new technologies, allow users to expand their role in the articulation of meaning, knowledge and pleasure. The struggle between censorship and freedom on the ground of media appears to be both necessary and interminable. Rather than consider censorship as an avoidable condition, or free speech as an absolute right, this web page will consider several salient episodes in the onging contest between censorship and free speech. By considering this struggle across several different media since the Renaissance, one notes two contradictory themes: the remarkable persistence of the issues of free speech and censorship across different media; and, at the same time, the very different ways media come to be deployed at different historical moments in different cultures. This suggests the plasticity of culture and media, as well as a the value of being inventive and exploratory in devising new media practices and forms for the Web. |
This page created by William B.Warner
for the Transcriptions
Team
7/12/99 (Last Revised 7/21/99 )