web ethics

[bear]

All right so...
what do people think of censoring the net?

[This message has been edited by magic_girl (edited 18 May 2000).]

[The Shadow]

[This message has been self-censored by The Shadow] [joke]

A hard one. Dead serious too.

First off, I'm totally pissed off with reading newspaper articles about the need to control the Net (do we need to censor, say, pub conversations?), because they usually come from a really defensive pre-Net age.

I don't know if I'm stating the obvious, but in general the Net is a lot more open and democratic and equal and anti-censorship than more traditional media such as print. At the same time it's not as free-for-all as some utopians make it out to be. It can't be. Life is a bit more complex than that.

And communities on the Net also evolve their own levels of regulation or self-censorship and ways of dealing with totally disruptive people or racists or whatever. God this is dead serious for 12.45 on a Thursday nite but...

- shad

[red]

re the pub analogy:

If I owned a pub, and someone was coming in every night spouting crap and making other people say "well, I'm not going to that pub if yer man is going to be there spouting crap", I, as the publican, would throw the offender out on his ass.

Just my theory anyway....