Sunday, November 25, 2007
Opinion
Regulate the Internet
A society that disregards truth and, indeed, encourages flagrant disregard for the truth, is unraveling from its core; it is descending into madness.
A woman looks at a Web page for the “Jokela Highschool Shooting Sympathizers” portraying Finnish high school student shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen, one day after he killed eight people in a school massacre.
CREDIT: Timo Jaakonaho/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage
In his indictment of postmodernist thought, “On Truth,” philosopher Harry Frankfort explains how, by losing our respect for, and insistence upon, the truth, we lose our grip on reality and descend into madness. He cites a recent trend—postmodernism—that has elevated the individual point of view above the previously supreme truth. To summarize: Anything goes, because it all depends on how you look at it. Frankfort explains how even things as prosaic as the stability of our bridges and the appropriateness of doctors’ prescriptions rely upon the truth. A society that disregards truth and, indeed, encourages flagrant disregard for the truth, is unraveling from its core; it is descending into madness.
The most basic truth we master earliest in life—and the one that will set the tone for all others—is that we as individuals are separate from anything that is not us: I am me and you are you. “Thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves,” Frankfort writes.
“In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control. If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identity.”
The greatest purveyor of postmodernist philosophy and its concomitant disregard for the truth has been accessible to average citizens for only about 20 years, and its degenerative effect on our grasp of reality and truth has been calamitously ubiquitous. It is the Internet, ironically, that same brilliant communications network heralded with such hope for its ability to distribute the truth. These many years later, it is plain to see that much of, perhaps even a majority of, the Internet’s content is not true, because the vast majority of it is provided by anonymous sources.
In journalism school, one of the first things we learn is that anyone who’s not willing to put her name on her statements probably isn’t telling the truth. Only in cases where a source is substantially and justifiably in fear of ridicule or retaliation should one rely upon an anonymous source. Good professors discuss the physical manifestation of anonymity in the form of the masked riders of the Ku Klux Klan. They went unchecked for decades in the South on their bloody journeys through the night because they masked their faces and withheld their names (though in many towns virtually everyone knew who they were). Today, many blogs and Web sites are populated by people masquerading under assumed names and identities.
Libel, slander and defamation are rampant on the Internet, and although there are laws against these, the laws are only enforceable against those who identify themselves, which means that conventional media—newspapers like this one, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and others—still disproportionately carry the brunt of accountability for truth and accuracy. Even in our Internet forms, we still identify ourselves. Every day, thousands of editors and reporters put their careers, their reputations and in some cases their very lives on the line to bring you the truth. And we stand behind it with our names and, in cases like mine, our faces, while the many masked and anonymous night riders of the Web slander, libel and defame with impunity.
In some cases, like that of Megan Meier, their fraudulence results in the loss of someone’s life or, in others, the perpetuation of the child sex trade, or, in the case of countless financial scams and online dating schemes, the bilking of the elderly and others of their privacy and cash.
Although Web sites are already obtained by registering with various domain brokers, there is no licensing mechanism in place that would allow for a public registry of Web site owners and operators. If there were, the number of supposed “regular Joes” who are “just doing this blog as a hobby” who would without doubt be revealed to be political operatives and others with vested interests in what they blog about would be a startling revelation to most Americans. Just consider this: I get paid to blog, and I barely have time to do it. How many people do you know who with eight spare hours in the day to constantly blog? Wouldn’t it be kind of difficult to hold down a steady job?
Having no licensing mechanism in place and no public registry of Web site owners—and why don’t we call them what they are, media owners?—means that there is almost no way to hold them accountable for the truth of their sites’ content. They can lie all day long and get paid for it. In the case of sites like MySpace, anyone can post anything on their page or others’ pages, no matter how libelous or harmful, and there is little that can be done to deter them.
MySpace is far from alone in this, but it provides a good example. It says its profiles “may not include the following items: telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, and any photographs containing nudity, or obscene, lewd, excessively violent, harassing, sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable subject matter. Despite this prohibition, information provided by other MySpace.com Members (for instance, in their Profile) may contain inaccurate, inappropriate, offensive or sexually explicit material, products or services, and MySpace.com assumes no responsibility or liability for this material.”
But if our laws are stymied by the anonymity of the Internet, what good are such guidelines anyway? If the same libelous or dangerous information were printed on a flyer and distributed to a neighborhood, the distributor, the printer and the author would be held responsible for libel or hate speech or both. How strange it is that the Internet is real enough to produce huge financial profits, but it is not real enough to merit real regulation.
It is high time, and indeed it is past time, that the Internet was stripped of its mask. It is time to require licenses similar to those that are required of every other broadcast and publishing medium in the world. The Internet, after all, is the largest and most powerful of all the media, so why should it be exempted from the responsibility that such power should, in a world based on reality, require? SP
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.