Speech, Privacy, and the Internet...

This post is based on Prof. Lawrence Lessig's keynote speech on November 21, 2008 at the University of Chicago Law School.



Some random facts you (and I) didn't know about him until right now:

• He was a character (played by Christopher Lloyd) in the popular TV show The West Wing.
• Artist group Monochrom performed a "Love Song for Lessig" on Boing Boing TV.

Prof. Lessig speaks about 3 elements that currently drive change today and hit close to home with new generations:

Extraordinary explosion of data.

Accessibility of information is at unprecedented heights. We can basically find anything we want on the Internet when we want it. More stuff accessible than ever before. G-O-O-G-L-E.

Data (and its architecture) are inspiring us to much worse behavior.
Behavioral expectations have changed because everything we do online is captured and monitored. Thanks to this our actions and that of others have become more rebellious in nature.

Data survives forever.
This endless data makes it harder for us to erase than it is to keep. WORLD-WIDE-WEB. People, much to my surprise, still fail to understand the meaning of those words individually and collectively in terms of speech and privacy. Once you put something out there, there's no turning back and people often forget that.

Further, Lessig states that democratization of speech on the Internet has diminished our ability (instead, I'd argue perhaps our motivation) to keep things in the right context. This makes sense to me in a way that more (and faster) does not mean better. We feel entitled nowadays to have access to everything online. We've lost sight of the responsibility to contextualize news and articles and differentiate them from opinion pieces and garbage information. We (those of us a part of the Google, Facebook, and Twitter generation) read/skim snippets of text and automatically jump to judgments and conclusions without going further to see what is beyond plain sight.