The internet as speech, speech as communicating

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In this scathing post, let's use our wild imagination for just a few moments:

In a radical attempt to condemn piracy, the Canadian government will follow suit with an American proposal by installing a new mandatory device in each newborn child. This device will use sophisticated speech recognition systems to monitor words that are uttered. It will have a mechanism which can override the contractions of the vocal chords, and a micro transmitter which will transmit gathered speech telemetry to central servers dispersed around the country. Orality will become regulated and privatized.

For about $55 a month, Rogers will allow the full vocal range the human subject is born with, but one may only speak for two hours per day. Smaller speech service providers will pose unlimited speech for a smaller price, however the vocal range will be limited to half an octave. Singing will be permitted, however, if you sing a song written by an artist, the device will throttle off your voice temporarily. Likewise, quoting someone's intellectual property will have a similar effect. Repeated offences will result in a bill being mailed to you for compensation of your constant use of others' IP. 

What is horrendous about this example? You likely are thinking that the private control over someone's capacity to speak is a direct violation of your natural rights to communicate. It is isn't it, but it's already happening elsewhere. Let's move to the internet. So the first red flag to raise with this comparison is that the internet is a service available external to the body. The regulations and costs do not violate your presumably natural means of communication. But there are more similarities than you think.

Disposing of technological determinism: Technology didn't invent itself, nor does it decide how it will manifest itself in society. Human actors appropriate technologies into their lives and they become naturalized in everyday use. This is exactly what has happened with the internet, in our civilization at least. We're all students and in 2012, we absolutely cannot take courses without internet access. Believe me, I tried it, albeit unintentionally, in September when my ISP was absent without leave. I was in trouble, yes me, for not having regular internet access and a moral panic arose within my household throughout the three week ordeal, even though I could do nothing about it. Finally, consider this: You can take an online course and through the three month duration evade speaking entirely. I dare you to try the inverse, it doesn't work. So in support of Finnegan's article, we really need to understand that we as a society have generated the importance of these modern forms of orality, to the degree that we cannot imagine a feasible way of 'going back'.

 But the internet is a private affair, obscurely so, because public funds provided the means of laying down the infrastructure for mass computer networking to be possible. We gifted large telecom companies with a new facet to make money of an electronic successor to orality, and nothing's changed, even though it is a necessary means nowadays. But now other big companies, who profit from the distribution of IP see a bottleneck in their moneymaking techniques, and they want the ISPS and policymakers alike to put a stop to it. What things be like when in the current succession (from primary to secondary orality, to this electronic orality), becomes limited based on the capitalist intentions of large corporate entities?

In past civilizations we have seen people punished for saying what they ought not to, we've seen book burnings to 'silence' the spread of certain information, which we have quickly realized violates our right to communicate information, which is after all a vital component to our living existence. Yet today we passively accept the increasing control over our CMC, wincing briefly at notions of surveillance and increased regulation before letting it proliferate our lives.

We wouldn't want seemingly absurd restrictions being placed on our speech. But as we are beginning to see in our texts, new communication technologies are inherently new forms of our speech, since they manifest spoken words in new ways. Why should someone gain the nod from the state to put a price on transmitting, and limit our communicated thoughts for their own monetary gain? It's us who decide how technologies are used and controlled, not technologies, and equally should not be capital. Let us not revolt against internet regulations as limiting access, but as limiting our natural rights to communicating.  

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