Posts Tagged ‘freedom of speech’

Harper’s Letter

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

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A Deeply Provincial View of Free Speech

Many prominent writers and thinkers seem invested in the notion that simply facing strong public criticism is a threat to free speech.

HANNAH GIORGIS

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/harpers-letter-free-speech/614080/

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The Harper’s Letter, Bari Weiss And Tucker Carlson: Why Are We Still Talking About ‘Cancel Culture?’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/07/14/the-harpers-letter-bari-weiss-and-tucker-carlson-why-are-we-still-talking-about-cancel-culture/#70e071ac39ca

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Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and the Harper’s letter: the case for open debate

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/17/opinions/harpers-letter-free-speech-bari-weiss-andrew-sullivan-avlon/index.html

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Public letter in Harper’s sparks furor

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/506846-public-letter-in-harpers-sparks-furor

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Cancel Culture

Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/illiberalism-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html

Haas, L. (2019). ETTU?: Notes on Cancel Culture. The New Republic, 250(7-8), 40–. https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_gale_infotracacademiconefile_A594089998

GIL TROY. (2019). Cancel the “Cancel Culture” phenomenon with sincere self-scrutiny. In The Jerusalem Post (Online) (English ed.). The Jerusalem Post Ltd.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2299562101

Nya Bentley. (2020). Fresh Talk: Does cancel culture even work? In Hartford Courant (Online). Tribune Publishing Company, LLC.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2370756493

free speech and privacy

IT’S THE (DEMOCRACY-POISONING) GOLDEN AGE OF FREE SPEECH

Jan 16, 2018

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

My note: the author uses the 1960 military junta in Turkey as an example. Here it is the 2014 “modern” ideological fight of increasingly becoming dictatorial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan against his citizens by shutting off Twitter: http://time.com/33393/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-twitter/
Here is more on civil disobedience and social media: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=civil+disobedience

until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.

When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.

In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots?
My note: see the ability to create fake audio and video footage:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/

HERE’S HOW THIS golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers

They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

more on free speech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=free+speech

social media and freedom of speech

the use of social media, personal versus institutional, or personal in the context of an institutional repercussions, is a complex and thorny issue. How much can one criticize the institution in their personal social media? And if the institution responds, when does it become silencing the social media as expression of free speech?

Is the article below touching only a specific [political] issue, or academia, as an institution, goes beyond this issue in imposing on freedom of speech?

Why I Was Fired

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Was-Fired/233640

My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment can’t be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.

Academics are usually eager to contest censorship and deconstruct vague charges of vulgarity. When it comes to defending Israel, though, anything goes.

Students are capable of serious discussion, of formulating responses, of thinking through discomfort. They like my teaching because I refuse to infantilize them; I treat them as thinking adults. My philosophy is simple: Teach them the modes and practices of critical thought and let them figure out things on their own.

Professors are often punished for disrupting convention in informal ways, however. My case is interesting because administrators ignored the de facto standards that regulate our behavior and exercised their power directly. This should be worrisome to any scholar who isn’t a sycophant.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here.
Benjamin Ginsberg points out that in the past 30 years, the administrator-to-student ratio has increased while the instructor-to-student ratio has stagnated. The rise of untenured, or non-tenure-track, faculty exacerbates the problem; a significant demographic in academe lacks job security or the working conditions that allow them to maximize their pedagogical talent. Over a recent 10-year period, spending on administration outpaced spending on instruction. At American universities, there are now more administrators and their staffers than full-time faculty. In the past 10 years, administrative salaries have steadily risen while custodians and groundskeepers suffer the inevitable budget cuts — as do the students whose tuition and fees supplement this largess.

When so much money is at stake, those who raid the budget have a deep interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. Their privilege and the condition of the brand are causally related. The brand thus predominates. Its predominance often arrives at the expense of student well-being.

critical thinking is a terribly undesirable quality in the corporate world, much more damning than selfishness or sycophancy. Let us then be honest about critical thinking: On the tongues of cunning bureaucrats, it is little more than an additive to brand equity, the vainglorious pomp of smug, uptight automatons who like to use buzzwords in their PowerPoint presentations.

Critical thinking by faculty is even more undesirable. In research institutions, we are paid to generate prestige and to amass grant money; in teaching-centered colleges, we enjoy excess enrollments according to fine-tuned equations that maximize the student-teacher ratio. (In elite liberal-arts colleges, we pamper the kids with simulations of parental affection.) Critical thinking is especially harmful to adjuncts, reliant as they are for income on the munificence of well-paid bosses who cultivate a distended assemblage of expendable employees.

more on social media in this IMS blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=social+media&submit=Search