5. On Internet, Slander, And Irresponsibility
14 March 2011
Reviewing in the NYT of 3rd January a collection of studies edited by Marta Nussbaum and Saul Levmore and published under the title The Offensive Internet, Stanley Fish follows the line taken by most of its contributors – who mapped the topic of the reviewed study, the issue of anonymous slander licensed by internet vs. the demands of its legal prohibition or limitation, within the freedom of speech frame.
Can one stand up against the glorious legacy of the First Amendment, known to assume that freedom of speech cannot be overprotected, and demand that voicing of certain opinions should be made illegal and punishable? The Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed in 1995 the potentially morbid consequences of anonymity of information, arguing within the same frame and in the same spirit: he insisted that 'the inherent worth of … speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual'.
Jürgen Habermas, by the way, would certainly, and rightly, disagree with that somewhat stretched and skewed interpretation of the First Amendment: his own theory of (ideal, undistorted) communication rested on the (empirically confirmed) supposition that precisely the opposite is true for the offering of and perceiving/absorbing/evaluating a message: most commonly, routinely, indeed matter-of-factly, we tend to judge the value of the information by the quality of its source. This is why, as Habermas complained, communication tends to be, as a rule, ‘distorted’: who said it matters more than what has been said. The value of an information is enhanced or debased not so much by its content, as by the authority of its author or messenger.
What inevitably follows is that in case the information arrives without the name of its source attached people are likely to feel lost and unable to take a stance; under condition of distorted communication, naming the source is an enabling act, allowing to decide whether to trust or ignore the message – and all or almost all communication in our type of society belongs to that ‘distorted’ category (to free itself from distortion, communication would require genuine equality of participants – equality not just around the debating table, but in the ‘real’, offline or off-the-debating-chamber life). Such a condition would require nothing less than exploding and levelling up the hierarchy of speakers’ authority; telling people that information needs to be judged by its own, not its author’s merits or vices. Stanley Fish obliquely, and in an idiom different from Habermas’s, admits that fact: Suppose I receive an anonymous note asserting that I have been betrayed by a friend. I will not know what to make of it – is it a cruel joke, a slander, a warning, a test? But if I manage to identify the note’s author – it’s a friend or an enemy or a known gossip – I will be able to reason about its meaning because I will know what kind of person composed it and what motives that person might have had.
All these suggestions and reservations are, however, in this case side issues only; what really matters is whether the issue of internet-propagated and internet-enabled anonymity of opinion needs to be at all put, judged and resolved within the framework of freedom of speech, or whether its true social importance, one that needs to be put and kept in the focus of public concern, is its relation to the problem of a p_erson’s responsibility_ for her/his actions and for their consequences.
Net Responsibility of Nobody
The genuine adversary/alternative to the internet-style anonymity is not the principle of freedom of speech, but the principle of responsibility: internet-style anonymity is first and foremost, and most importantly socially, an officially endorsed licence for irresponsibility and a public lesson in practicing it – online and offline alike – an enormously large and venomous anti-social fly let free to scurry through enormously huge barrels of ointment advertised, and allegedly dedicated, to promote the cause of sociality and socialising.
The more potentially deadly the weapons, the more difficult it should be to obtain a permission to possess and carry them (though no blank-cheque permission, whether liberally or sparingly granted, should embrace its uses). Internet (alongside the bygone ‘Wild West’ and the mythical jungle) is, however, a stark exemption to that rule widely assumed to be indispensable for the civilised life. Slander, invective, calumny, slur, smear, casting aspersion and defaming belong to the deadliest of weapons: deadly to persons, but also to the social fabric. Their possession and use, particularly indiscriminate use, is a crime in the offline life (commonly called ‘real life’, though it is far from clear which one, the online or the offline life, would win the competition for the title of reality); it’s not a crime, though, in the online world. And it is all but a matter of guessing which of the two worlds, online or offline, is due to assimilate to the other and adjust its rules to the other’s standards; which one will eventually surrender to the pressure, and which one will be pressed to surrender.
For the time being, though, the online world has a considerable advantage over its competitor: in the online world, unlike in the offline one, everybody can be a 007. In the online world, everyone can boast a licence to kill. Better still: everyone can kill without an effort as trifle as that of applying for a licence. It’s impossible to deny the seductive power of such an advantage. And remember that each kind of seduction pre-selects its seduced.
A ‘floating responsibility’ (that is, responsibility detached from its carriers and agents relieved of their responsibility) means, as Hannah Arendt warned a long time ago, 'responsibility of nobody.'