In James Brown’s, Evil Bert Laden: ViRaL Texts, Community, and Collision, he explained how globalized web technologies welcomed great “transcultural confusion.” “Transcultural confusion” is a symptom of the web that has created “a new and heightened level of interaction between cultures” (Poster), and has “radically altered the old limits on the size sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort” (Shirky). With the unsupervised environment surrounding the web, it is easy to understand why different cultures would be offended by certain content. Brown used the Bert Laden image and the Spice Girl concert as an example of “transcultural confusion,” by explaining that Asadullah and other Muslims felt the encroachment of Western popular culture on their Muslim values. Muslims want their “cultures, traditions and religious, and societal standards to be respected” (Brown), but how do we (by we I mean everyone on Earth) go about respecting every culture when the web openly displays everything and anything in an unsupervised environment?
Everyday, I encounter numerous political cartoons, fail blogs, and other seemingly comedic web articles, and realized that they are meant to be edgy and funny. However, I am sure there is a community (as discussed in Brown’s article) that would take offense to those. For example, the Bert Laden image was considered to be a joke by Dennis Pozniak’s standards, but to the Sesame Street producers, the image was “unfortunate” and “distasteful.” According to Brown, “The producers of Sesame Street made an immediate attempt to control their intellectual property.” Ultimately, with a free-for-all unsupervised web environment, and a lack of international intellectual property laws, the web will continue to cause “transcultural confusion.”
…..Unless you live in China, Iran, UAE, Morocco, Thailand, Turkey, Iraq, Brazil, Victoria in Australia, and India (http://mashable.com/2007/05/30/youtube-bans/). Brown stated, “The degree of autonomy of each culture to significantly reduce as a consequence of the global information network.” However, many countries like the ones I listed above, have taken government efforts to control the unsupervised and culturally offensive web technologies. For example, Morocco banned youtube because of videos that mocked the Moroccan king as well as some pro-Western Sahara clips. China has also banned facebook and twitter since 2009 (http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/cer/2011_02/Open_book.html). And in addition to those bans, China’s government banned microblogging on Sina Weibo because people were comparing Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Tiananmen Square (http://www.hindustantimes.com/Cairo-protests-make-Chinese-censors-nervous/Article1-657400.aspx). Even if you tried searching for “Egypt” on a google search engine in China, you would find this statement “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown” (Patil).
Does government censorship of web technologies help the “transcultural confusion?”
Again we see the tensions from Convergence Culture take shape through Brown’s article. The web created an unsupervised environment, so the tension lies between a community that has learned how to rhetorically deal with web technologies (including offensive material), and a community that works against the new web media (censorship).
I think you raise an important point that the jokes published online may be offensive to some communities. This is a negative side of the nature of the online space. However, I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives. We can use the online space to settle difference and open understanding.
ReplyDeleteWhenever someone mentions a country intervening in the information their population can access online it evokes images of North Korea for me. I think that it is dangerous for a country to preserve the sanctity of accessible information because there is too much opportunity for abuse. That being said, I hate the use of the First Amendment to justify things like child pornography. I simply do not believe the government has a place in mediating our information.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lindsay, government shouldn't censor information. It is dangerous. I don't think free speech in the virtual world is dangerous at all. It is healthy, and can be used from a cultural anthropological/ sociological stand point. Now we can truly try to understand different internet niches, if we really wanted to. The internet is like a dazzling ge0de, and a good source for ethnographies.
ReplyDelete@Lindsayp and RVL: I agree, this is just like North Korea. In a way I'm thankful for the internet because even if there was a ban or censorship of a web-related article/video/etc. there is always another online forum to find what you are looking for. In the future it would be interesting to see how our government and other governments shape laws around intellectual property. I wonder if those laws will lead to more confinement on freedom of speech?
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