Good Fences
Amy Wright
There are several words, in our grand old language of English that evoke quite a deep and negative reaction. Most of the time this is understandable. In other cases this reaction is based on a gross misunderstanding of the word's meaning and intent. The word “prejudice”, for example, is entirely neutral, simply meaning to pre-judge which can be done positively just as easily as negatively. The word “segregation”, likewise, simply means to keep things separate. When the separation in question is between peoples, particularly by government diktat, this is problematic. It is not only people who are segregated and there are instances in which segregation is actually a preferable condition to a limitless free-for-all.
One
of the cases in which segregation was preferable to its alternative
was the early days of the internet. It might be difficult to fathom
now that the development of the internet was a fairly slow and
gradual process. There were websites in the late 1990s but not nearly
as many as there are today and they were for the most part,
independent entities that needed to be sought out individually. There
was all the wondrous, wacky, weird, pointless and awful things than
that there are now but the self-selecting nature of the web-surfing
audience of the day kept the less positive aspects of the net small
and localized.
Then
came net democratization. A move criticized by Tech. Industry
pioneers from Silicon Valley inside Jaron Lanier to Tim Berners-Lee
who literally created the architecture of the modern-day, Linux-based
world-wide web, as misguided and potentially dangerous. One need only
look at the critical mass being cultivated on Social Media to see
they have a point. What platforms like YouTube and Twitter have done,
as unintentional side effect of their push for and open internet, is
breakdown the arguably necessary walls between various internet
communities. There were certainly white supremacists online before
2005 but they were restricted to ghettoized fringe sites like
StormFront. What YouTube has done is give them a place to meet,
socialize and plan, for the most part unnoticed, while also giving
their ideas a modicum of mainstream visibility and respectability. If
you suspect I am exaggerating go to YouTube and type the words “Ian
Stuart” into the search bar. This is but one example of the
Neo-Nazi propaganda openly available.
This
is not to lay the blame for things such as the rise of the Alt-Right
or what happened in Charlottesville squarely on the door-step of the
Social Media. Those on the extreme fringes have used the media of the
day to their own devices, going back to the self-publishing and
pamphleteering boom of late 17th
century Europe, during which anyone with a
room and a printing-press was considered a legitimate source of
information. A system which gave the good things like Thomas Paine's
The Rights of Man and most of the work of
Jonathan Swift as well as the rebirth of 'Flat-Earth Theory' and the
sort of racial blood myths that would later inspire the Third Reich.
There is no way to completely control what people do with the
information technology given to them, but that does not mean the
situation is hopeless. We need simply to recognize the potential
risks of what is going on and do what we can to limit and counter its
impact.
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