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Subject: Re: Relevant text - Sat, 24 Feb 1996 00:21:01 -0500
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 00:21:01 -0500
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu>
Subject: Re: Relevant text
To: orgonomy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Message-Id: <Pine.3.07.9602232351.B29197-d100000@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu>
Sender: owner-orgonomy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
In response to Chris' questions about my (admittedly rather compressed) post:
I was making a couple of distinctions which may or may not have been
clear. First, i want to distinguish between the promise of freedom made at
the level of constitutional amendments and such, which reminds us of
certain presumably shared values (and which we relate to with more or less
active engagement, more or less habitually), and the more specific
type and degree of freedom (and it strikes me now that this must be at
least in part a qualitative measure) which greets a given attempt to
speak. In this second instance, "freedom of speech" might be best
understood as the results of an economy of speech acts, all of which
condition those that follow. "Shut up or I'll kill you" is certainly
likely to condition the interactions of all that hear, but i think there
are many more subtle fluxations of freedom which are worth taking into
account.
Imagine for the moment that "freedom" refers to the ease with which things
move, rather than with statuatory promises. What i was calling
"constraint" wouldn't so much involve preventing certain types of
speech as hindering them - specifically by raising the social, emotional, and
energetic costs of those types of speech. If you accept that possibility -
and there are plenty of tough-minded "laissez faire" speech ethics out
there that would deny it right away - then rather than thinking about
whether or not a speech act is free or not, you might think about the ways
that it is freed and freeing. How high is the cost - in terms of energy,
prestige, and credibility - of this particular message in this particular
forum? Is it higher, for example, because of the conflicts we've just been
through? Will it be deemed an appropriate response to previous messages?
And what sorts of responses does it encourage or discourage?
I'm assuming that individuals have the primary ability and responsibility
to open and maintain spaces of greater freedom, for more effective
communication - and that promises made at the level of the state are
useful (or not) in the way that customs and habits generally are, as
guidelines for more specific action (or sometimes as blinders in the
face of specific needs.) Of course, by emphasizing individuals' roles in
creating and maintaining freedom, and by speaking of it in terms of an
economy, i'm also acknowledging the likelihood (maybe even the necessity,
at least until we're all perfectly sane) of conflict. The way i understand
it, free speech is hard work (even when groups try to work together to
create spaces for it.)
This sort of understanding seems important for online groups because the
net distorts communication in novel ways, fostering both suspect feelings
of intimacy and a strange callousness (often in the same folks in the same
instances.) It amplifies the opinions of the persistent (and those with
more time on their hands.) It combines the commanding authority of print
with a situation in which authors can so easily hide themselves, multiply
themselves, etc. And it imposes its own pace on communication - or rather
opens the control of that pacing as one more way in which the freedom to
speak can be conditioned. For all that one could say about the power of
online communication for freeing individuals, the limitations of these
media are formidable. Unfortunately, even the signs of these limitations
tend to be erased. It's only in groups where free spaces have been active
created that we learn about the hesitations, lost sleep, fears and regrets of
other participants - the sort of feedback which, i think, allows thsoe
groups to weather conflict.
Anyway. Enough of me on this. I only pursue the question because, as an
experienced online administrator, researcher and participant in so-called
virtual communities, it seems to me that the questions raised might help
us deal with the conflicts already present on the OML. And, of course,
because the OML and its members continue to give me considerable pleasure.
-shawn
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