Happy Fourth of July! I’ll be celebrating Independence Day pretty much like most Americans, consuming a mountain of carbonized meat and gallons of iced tea and watching my teenaged son and his friends detonate enough fireworks to attract the attention of Homeland Security.
But I’d also like to celebrate by stepping away from the usual technical topics and offer a brief reflection on liberty.
As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 a woman asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The founders of the American republic understood that the political system they had created could not survive without a well-informed electorate. Hence the only business protected by the Bill of Rights, in the very first amendment, is the press. Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Tyler in 1804, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”
Modern forms of “the press” are understood to include the news divisions of radio and television, and are equally protected in the United States by the First Amendment. But American broadcast news has abdicated its civic responsibility. Most important national and world issues are ignored; instead we get obsessive coverage of celebrities. Events cynically deemed to have entertainment value such as this week’s attempted bombings in the UK are fed to us with hysterical, fear-mongering sensationalism and scant serious analysis, then quickly forgotten for the next big celebrity story.
Thomas Paine wrote, “When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”
Shows purporting to present political issues consist mainly of contestants attempting to shout each other down: Entertainment impersonating legitimate political debate. And there are the likes of the venomous Ann Coulter, welcomed onto news shows of all stripes to boost ratings by spewing invective: Freak shows to glue eyeballs to the screen.
John Adams wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”
Television and most radio news in America are controlled by a very few large corporations and run by their entertainment divisions, and there is not much hope that this will ever change. That’s no great loss to the republic, however. Radio and television, even in the nobler age of Murrow and Cronkite, were never the right media to insure the survival of a representative democracy because they can only transmit information. No means exist in one-to-many broadcast technologies for an open dialogue among the citizenry.
The Internet, on the other hand, provides the technological medium for a forum in which liberty can flourish. It connects all of us not only to myriad information sources but also to each other with a many-to-many multicast technology. We have the means to learn, share, expose, reason, argue, debate, protest, decide, and organize. It opens for us, in Jefferson’s words, all the avenues to truth.
You and I have the honor of being among the pioneering builders and operators of the most profoundly liberating technology since the printing press. As long as we, and our descendants, fight to keep the Internet uncontrolled and uncontrollable it will be the milk of freedom and the poison of tyranny for all of humanity.
Happy Independence Day.
Join me for a live chat, August 1, 2 p.m. eastern. No registration required, just point your browser to www.networkworld.com/chat
