I was looking around for one of my text books today (I didn’t find it), but I did come across Weinberger’s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a unified theory of the web. I opened it and rechecked the contents. The last chapter is called Hope. I started reading. It struck me that some of these words were important.
The Web isn’t entering the realm of our thoughts directly as an idea; it’s getting there as a technology. Ever since Marshall McLuhan told us that the medium is the message, we’re used to that: we adopt a technology and it alters the way we think just as much as an explicit philosophical credo or manifesto can. McLuhan also told us why that happens: technologies are extensions of our own bodies. (Source)
So what does this have to do with the hashtag dilemma? Whether we use #nocleanfeed or #nocensorship or #nonetcensorship, each of these, like the web, is an extension of ourselves. Some of us have invested our thoughts, our arguments, our concerns into particular frames. Some of us wore them with some discomfort. Some of us want to change them to incorporate the whole philosophical issue.
I don’t really want to buy into the argument of which is right and why. All of us in this debate are here because we believe that the web, the internet, in whatever form we use, in whatever way we use it, is an extension of ourselves. We feel ourselves being threatened, feel that some part of ourselves will be lost through ineptitude.
I’m not sure of the source of this image (allegedly an out take of the Dark Knight), but this is the ineptitude. I think we all know who Bruce is in this script!
Found on the internet
We are all small pieces and we are loosely joined. We should be able to find some aggregator, some technology that links us, perhaps even hyperlinks us into a web of concern that can bring in all the layers of meaning, all the fames.
Personally, I think of all the prongs we are using, #nocleanfeed is the pointy bit, the bit that wedges in and opens up room for all the other issues, because they’re there. They are important.
Tags:
censorship, nocleanfeed