Reworking Freedom of Speech in a Digital Age

This is not the same thing as a system of freedom of expression. Rather, it is a system of freedom of consumption, where liberty means freedom to choose among media goods. That is a stunted vision of free expression because it undermines the creative and participatory possibilities of digital technologies.

I'd like to offer a different notion of freedom of speech for the digital age: I believe that the point of freedom of speech is to promote a democratic culture.

A democratic culture is democratic in the sense that everyone gets to participate in the production of culture, not in the sense that everyone gets to vote on what is in culture. People are free to express their individuality through creativity and through participation in the forms of meaning-making that, in turn, help constitute them and other people in society.

When the broadcast media first emerged in the twentieth century and become highly influential, free speech theorists worried that democratic discourse would be skewed.  They feared that the information necessary for wise governance would be limited or distorted when the most powerful broadcasting entities were held in a relatively small number of hands. This concern justified public interest regulation of broadcasting, cable, and other mass media.  Twentieth century theorists argued that the goal of freedom of speech was not individual autonomy but providing information necessary for democratic deliberation.

However,  this conception of free speech is seriously incomplete. Focusing as it does on the asymmetries of mass media like television and radio, it does not adequately address the technological changes of the digital age that make it possible for everyone to participate in electronic communication, both as speakers and listeners, both as producers and consumers.  In fact, the digital revolution makes three features of free expression particularly salient:

First, speech goes well beyond the boundaries of deliberation about public issues. Although many people do talk about politics, even more talk about their favorite television show, about art, popular culture, fashion, gossip, mores and customs.

Second, much speech, and particularly Internet speech, is not unidirectional.  It  is interactive. People talk back to each other, they respond to each other. People are not simply passive consumers of media products sent to them by the broadcast media.

Third, speech is appropriative: People build on what others have done. They make use of the products of  mass media and popular culture as well as each other's work, building new things out of old things.

The 20th Century concern with promoting democratic deliberation focused on regulating mass media to ensure delivery of information about public issues to the citizenry. This is only a partial conception, inadequate to deal with the features of speech that the new digital technologies bring to the foreground of our concern. The values behind freedom of speech are about production as much as reception, about creativity as much as deliberation, about the work of ordinary individuals as much as the mass media. Freedom of speech is and must be concerned with the ability of ordinary individuals to create, to produce, to interact, to particulate in culture, to engage in non-exclusive appropriation of ideas and expressions, to make something new out of the cultural materials that lay to hand.

Freedom of speech is more than the choice of which media products to consume. Freedom of speech in the digital age means giving everyone - not just a small number of people who own dominant modes of mass communication, but ordinary people too - the chance to use these new technologies to participate, to interact, to build, to route around, to glom on, to talk about whatever they want to talk about, whether it be politics, public issues, or popular culture.

Participation in culture is important because it allows people to influence each other and change each other's minds. But it also has a performative value: When people make new things out of old things, when they produce, when they are creative, they perform their freedom through their participation in culture.

Today, media corporations, in their quest for ever greater profits, are more likely to treat ordinary individuals as potential consumers of media products, rather than active producers of their cultural world.  This distorts freedom of expression, turning it into a freedom to choose which media products to consume. Surely this choice is part of freedom of speech, but it is not everything, or even the most important thing. The new technologies allow individuals, more than ever before, to produce culture rather than passively consume it; they allow people to enact their freedom through new forms of cultural participation. But from the standpoint of profit maximisation, this active participation has no independent value except to the extent that it involves the consumption of media goods, in which case it is equivalent to consumption. And to the extent that active cultural participation diverts end users and causes less consumption of media products, interferes with an expansive definition of intellectual property rights, or challenges corporate technologies of control, it is less valuable than passive consumption; indeed it is positively harmful and must be cabined in.

That is too limited a vision of what freedom of speech is, and what a system of free expression is for. The digital age offers the promise of a truly democratic culture of participation and interactivity. Realising that promise is the challenge of our present era.