Subject: Re: Internet on City TV news...

From: [email-masked] (Evan Leibovitch)
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1992 03:12:44 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>
	[email-masked] (David Mason) writes:

>Isn't anyone going to comment on City TV's treatment of pornography/censorship
>at U of T of Usenet groups and Internet resources?

[ For those of you joining the discussion late, CITY is a Toronto TV station ]

>Yes, for those who were lucky enough to miss it, they had a nice five minute
>summary of the issue. They were nice enough to comment that alt.sex and
>related items were only a small part of the system, but in typical
>journalistic style they had screen shots of cryptic looking symbols (well, I
>suppose to the uninitiated message headers scrolling by at 9600 baud can look
>cryptic) as well as semi-pornographic language on the screen.

>This was covered in regards to the censoring of alt.sex groups at the
>University of Manitoba. Apparently at U of M it was treated as a pornography
>issue while at U of T it is being treated as a censorship - freedom of speech
>issue.

The media is treating Usenet the way it treats most other parts of
everyday life. The stuff that doesn't bother anyone, or is productive,
or boringly efficient, is ignored. That which irritates someone, or
offends, or provokes outrage, is instantly fair game.

I wouldn't expect much of CITY, as I consider it one of the more
tabloid-type TV news programs. Their "analyst" Colin Vaughan has
all the political savvy of a box of Polyfilla.

It isn't over, though. A week or so ago, I was on the phone for the
better part of two hours with a guy from the Globe and Mail (newspaper),
who intends to do something a little more in-depth than the reports we've
seen so far. So he says.

As the moderator of the erotica group and a Canadian, I guess I was a
reasonable (and probably inevitable) target. What the reporter didn't
expect was that I have been on both sides of this fence, having
completed a graduate Journalism programme along with many of this
reporter's co-workers. So I could be honest in the interview, giving
his intentions the benefit of the doubt whilst keeping my guard up. Even
if he is either sympathetic or merely impartial, that's not to say that
his editors will be.

The impression I got during the interview while getting a feel for some
of the other people this guy has spoken to, is that some people are
scared shitless about Usenet.

Scared? You bet. Unlike a newspaper with its heavily selective letters
to the editor or a broadcaster who has complete editing control over
what makes the 6:00 news, Usenet has no such bounds over one's ability
to respond to what one reads.

Those who wish to be offensive or think offensive things, be they
fans of sex with animals, homophobes, holocaust revisionists or
John Palmer, cannot be silenced per se; Partially because the mechanics
of the system don't make it easy to censor, but also partly because
there's no central authorites to do the censoring.

This lack of control is something that, in my mind, would be very
difficult for those in conventional media to grasp. It is so easy to
keep out the views of the offensive and pretend they don't exist, or it
is possible to bring them into the open and expose them for the shams
that they are.

The point that kept going through my mind during the interview, that I
hope I conveyed well enough to the reporter, is that the individual
news reader/poster has much more influence over the content of the net
than in any other media. As a result, we see some commentaries and
discussions in many subjects that are of better quality and relevance
than the other media are capable of providing. We also see an awful lot
of absolute garbage, but the net is no better and no worse than the
people who contribute to is. Indeed, each site is in total control of
the level of participation they desire, even to the point of ignoring
certain subject groups totally.

"Where does it end?" asked the reporter. "It doesn't," I answered,
pointing out applications like Clarinet which make use of conventional
net mechanisms to *replace* conventional media.

The proportion of Usenet devoted to sex is a much smaller part than, I
would suggest, the amount of sex on DOS BBS systems like Canada Remote
Systems. But that's not news anymore. What is news is that some people
from the outside are starting to see what the net is and what it is
capable of being. Some of us are fascinated by it; others, who see a
potential erosion in the media status quo, or the reduction of the
media as a one-way tool for influencing thought, in my eyes indeed
have much to fear. I don't believe it's far fetched to say that I've
learned more about the gut problems behind that Canadian constitution
from can.politics that from any parade of taking heads on the Journal.

Imminent death of Usenet predicted?

NOT.

In Usenet, I see methods of frustrating those who would censor, of
knocking professional journalists and "experts" down a notch and making
them more responsible for what they say and do.

Indeed, Usenet is not for the overly sensitive or easily offended. It's
more like the floor of the Stock Exchange than an audience watching a
stage play. It's not for everyone, but I don't think it's reached a
fraction of its potential. The more the conventional media attacks it
out of ignorance or fear, the more I believe this to be true.

-- 
 Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
         [email-masked] / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
   Said Captain Jean-Luc Picard to the tailor at his machine: "Make it sew!"