Day 75: Walking the Talk
This isn’t a new argument, but it’s something that has always struck me as funny. The Bill of Rights grants to us the Freedom of Speech. Now what exactly is covered and not covered isn’t something I want to get into here. Hate speech or sentiments considered unpatriotic are all very complicated topics, and I’m just not well-versed in law or politics, and I’m simply not intelligent enough to really go deep into the topic.
The part I find odd is you can say whatever you want, but they’ve restricted how the speech is delivered. The popular argument is that the Bill of Rights only covers what the Founding Fathers had to deal with at the time, so that’s why speech is protected in the printed word, but not when it’s broadcasted.
Think about that for a moment. If you want to read something, be it something base like pornography, there are rules in place for minors, but after that you can basically buy, read, and *ahem* “celebrate” whatever is that makes your tingle parts tingly. Something like an Allen Ginsberg poem or any of Aldous Huxley’s treatises on the virtues of LSD can be read by anyone who’s willing to walk into a bookstore or a library, and there is nothing in place to stop a 12 year old kid reading all the vulgarity or drug use. If it’s written down, all bets are off. All content can be viewed as long as you read it.
It’s almost like intellectual Darwinism. If you’re willing to sit down and read these ideas then you’re supposedly mature enough to handle it, and not immediately become whatever it is you would become if you had watched that same content.
If you’re willing to go to a bookstore, and find a book, invest the hours, even days, into something a movie could tell you in hours, or even minutes then you wanted to find that and all the dangerous and subversive ideas are your reward; whereas if something is broadcasted then it somehow insidiously creeps into your brain and imprints itself on your soul.
Our society is rapidly becoming logo-centric, and while that means ‘picture orientated,’ it’s changing in this young century to encompass more. We are fast accepting catch-phrases, emoticons, AIM/text speak, internet memes, and references as cultural short hand. It’s how we communicate now. Everyone’s got a blog but if you want to actually make an impact you have to post a video on YouTube. How entrenched is something like YouTube? Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize it as grammatically incorrect.
I was talking with someone, I think it was JP, that I felt locked out of a lot of contemporary culture because I’m too impatient to wait for videos to load. I spend, maybe, ten minutes a month on YouTube, and that’s only because people send me videos, and of those, a rare few are members of the elite circle of people who can get me to click on any link they send.
The internet is faster than ever, but it still loads much, much, much slower than I can read. If a story on CNN is video only, I don’t click on it, even if it’s about something that has me absolutely interested. I just can’t sit there during the thirty second ad, then another forty-five seconds to buffer, then thirty seconds of the reporter’s rambling intro before they get to the actual goddamn news.
If you’re willing to sit down and read, and not have someone talk the message at you, then you are, by this strange and indirect definition, intelligent enough and responsible enough to hear it, understand it, and then decide whether or not the information is relevant to your life, valuable to be a part of your experience, and if it deserves to be absorbed or discarded.
Those not willing to read can’t be trusted with that responsibility. That’s why the FCC has to step in, and why some studios have a mission statement (cable news, MTV, Nickelodeon) to let whoever they are about to impress upon know exactly what they’re going to be experiencing. You don’t even have to research what you want to watch on YouTube. Just type in a couple of words, and the engine brings up a thumbnail, and then next to it a whole mess of words, not sentences, but just words, that represent what makes you excited or interested.
All of this brings up the question: which came first? Are we being socially conditioned to be like this, or are we dictating the market and this is what we want because it’s easier and to an extent, safer?
Furthermore, is it right? Should you be taken by the hand if you don’t the wherewithal or the initiative to actually sit down and absorb ideas and philosophy and decide for yourself what’s worth becoming a part of you? Yeah, they’re just books, or they’re just movies, but you take that stuff in, and they glom themselves into your memories, and what are you without your memories?
Is Freedom of Speech a passive rule that acts as an umbrella to protect ideas? Or is it an active and moving and changing thing that calls to us to be selective and hungry in what we experience? With Freedom of Speech, you can do and say whatever you, and in turn all those ideas can be seen by anyone. Perhaps it means we should all step up, so that when you say something, it means something.
Matt