Posted on 28-5-2002

The Internet and the Liberation of Public Expression
by Pierre Lévy*

The expansion of the Internet is being carried forward by an undercurrent
whose breadth and strength has still not been completely measured: the
liberation of public expression.

In our home environment or immediate geographical vicinity, if nobody
defends a point of view with eloquence, and if that point of view is not
clearly expressed on television or radio or in the main newspapers either,
the fact that we "live in a democracy" makes us none the less ignorant of
the true landscape of ideas, whether those ideas are political,
philosophical, scientific or whatever. However, on the Internet,
cybercitizens are able to discover a multitude of ideas and propositions
which they would never have imagined if they had not logged on. Moreover,
on the Web, those ideas are expressed by the very people who create and
think them, not by journalists compelled to simplify and caricature them
for lack of time or competence or, worse, because they are subjected to an
authoritarian political power. This new medium that is the Internet thus
particularly encourages us to transcend traditional public space.

But will not this torrent of "public opinion" be stopped, or even reversed,
by the current trend towards concentration among communications companies?
Certainly that risk exists, but it seems to me to be limited. I ask the
reader to base his opinion on investigation and observation, rather than on
emotions (fear, in particular) and prejudices. When one connects to the
Internet, one can see that financial concentration in the world of
communications does not reduce the diversity of information, which
continues to increase despite corporate mergers. The first reason for this
apparent contradiction is that disseminating texts, images and sound to the
entire planet now costs almost nothing, and that this situation is
henceforth irreversible. The fact that a person’s or an association’s web
page is hosted by a large virtual commercial community does not reduce its
poetic or cognitive range, or its ability to denounce.

The second reason, equally obvious, is that the owners of the large
communications groups would derive no benefit from broadcasting a
monotonous message over all channels. On the contrary, they must ensure
that their content is creatively diverse, in order to reach a public which
is itself increasingly differentiated, changing, moving, difficult,
well-informed and - let us not forget - whose members are in a position to
choose between several competing options.

By allowing ourselves to fear capitalist concentration, and by taking the
easy option of automatic denunciation rather than the more difficult route
of making the effort to understand innovation, it is possible to deny the
broadening of the range of ideas and information available on the Internet.
But there is another objection one can raise - the theory that the
development of the Internet is bringing about a liberation of human
expression. This objection no longer consists in denying the fact, but in
condemning it in the name of defending "truth" against chaos. As if truth
does not flourish better in an atmosphere of freedom! These two objections,
though they contradict each other, are often raised by the same forces of
conservatism.

The anti-liberation argument can be summarized as follows : "Since
competent persons and other specialists such as journalists, teachers,
publishers, producers, and those in charge of museums and galleries (i.e.
the traditional intermediaries of culture) are no longer there to control
the quality of messages in circulation in this new public arena, now you
find any old rubbish there. How are we supposed to find our way around the
immense quantity of information available, most of which is of dubious
quality? Surely the situation has become worse than before? And doesn't it
favour the privileged, the rich and educated, who will be always be able to
find their way around in this chaos, while the majority of people will be
condemned to roaming its excessive expanses of mediocrity and
popularity-seeking?"

However, this argument presents the disappearance of the old processes of
traditional selection and intermediation as a catastrophe, without
portraying the Internet as a set of emerging new ways of hierarchizing and
orienting information. If we imagine an isolated individual, lost in the
Internet’s immense mass of disordered data, unable to find what he or she
is looking for, or satisfied with the first results a search engine comes
up with, then we have the feeling that the Internet’s increasing abundance
of information and absence of prior sorting represent a loss rather than
progress.

But if, on the other hand, we imagine an Internet surfer who is not only
able to use the entire range of research techniques available, but who also
participates in virtual communities in which his favourite interests are
discussed and where people exchange information about the best sites, then
perhaps this new form of intermediation, using capillary relationships,
distributed processes of collective intelligence and increasing familiarity
with the expanding territories of planetary hyperdocumentation, may be more
effective and relevant than the old one. A network of people interested in
the same subjects works more powerfully not only than any search engine,
but more effectively than traditional cultural intermediation, which is
only able to sort information in an approximate, a priori way, without
detailed knowledge of individuals’ situations or needs.

Internet users do not have to face this ocean of information alone. They
gather in virtual communities, often organized around sites or portals
which help them to navigate their way around particular areas of semantic
space. This space is bigger than that of the old cultural domain, and its
modes - constantly improving - of orientation and location are finer, more
precise, more alive … provided that one takes time to learn them and to
become integrated into the virtual communities which offer access to it.

Whereas the old-style intermediation of the public domain sorted
information a priori, the new intermediation selects a posteriori. All
publications are authorized (to the extent that the law is respected…) but
selection occurs by virtue of the number of links which converge towards a
site, by frequency of connections, by mentions made in discussion forums or
other sites, by the votes or comments of readers and users, etc. It should
be noted that the scientific community has already started to work in this
manner. Certain scientific sites, such as that of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in the U.S.A., which specializes in nuclear physics, posts all
articles submitted (not just an a priori selection), but also counts how
often published articles are quoted and readers’ comments are posted (i.e.
a posteriori selection).

In the same way, sites which sell books on the Web make it possible for
readers to give their opinions and to give a mark to the works they have
read. The distribution of advertising spending also functions on the
principle of evaluating sites according to their degree of success, as
measured by frequency and duration of user connections. It will be noticed
that these new forms of selection almost amount to counting votes (numbers
of times quoted, links, connections, marks), a state of affairs which
represents a projection of democratic practices into sectors of social life
where they were not previously predominant.

But, some may say, what is to become of truth in this new way of selecting
and evaluating messages? Are we to put to the vote mathematical theorems or
other types of information whose authenticity can only be judged by
specialists?

Let us observe initially that control of the means of information by a
small minority, even though that minority may regard itself as the elite of
knowledge and culture, is no guarantee of quality of the information
selected. The largest publishers refused manuscripts by Marcel Proust and
other great authors, while publishing on a daily basis cultural nonentities
which are "commercial".

Under totalitarian regimes the press and other media have told lies for
years, and even in democratic regimes errors slip daily into the writings
and speeches of journalists. The Church and Universities often resisted new
ideas for centuries. Unless one allows oneself to be taken in by
authoritarian arguments, a book is not "good" just because it has been
published, news is not "true" just because it has been announced on
television, knowledge is not "guaranteed" just because it is taught at
University (we speak from experience, dear colleagues!) With all due
respect to the credulous and the lazy, the truth is not already given (by
whom could it be?) but rather it is constantly the subject of open,
collective processes of research, construction and criticism.

Now, the pluralism and interconnection which are intrinsic to cyberspace
(the first user of which, it should be recalled, was the scientific
community) actively favour such processes. Do I hear claims that scientists
are capable of curiosity and criticism, and thus able to "read everything"
and "see everything", while the common run of people needs simple
information, pre-digested and stripped of its contradictions? I answer that
these arguments have been used, by turns, against democracy, against
universal suffrage and against freedom of the press, and in favour of
censorship, and that they ultimately they always amount to treating
citizens like children - or worse, like isolated children.

But the project for civilization which, building on that of enlightment,
would seek to exploit cyberspace’s greatest potential, is precisely about
making citizens associated intelligences, and is thus about recognizing
everyone’s particular faculties for intelligence, discernment and
criticism. If one is in favour of freedom, one must accept that each time
it makes an advance, this implies increased responsibilities for each of
us. There is no other way of training oneself for this responsibility than
by practising it. If one is against freedom, no argument based on the
prospect of emancipation can move us. Perhaps only shame will one day be
able to awaken us.

If one wants to, one can find on the Internet plenty of "bad" ideas,
expressions of hatred and degrading images, just as these exist in many
people’s minds. But the dynamics of the production of knowledge reside in
the free and responsible confrontation of information and ideas, not in
locking public expression up in chains. Yes, there are websites devoted to
hatred, pornography and stupidity. These are the expression of the hateful,
pornographic and stupid aspects of the human spirit.

Our collective intelligence, in this case, consists in humanity’s having
the courage to look at its own spirit - just as it is - in the mirror of
the noosphere, rather than in rubbishing, or becoming angry, or afraid, or
in condemning: these are merely as many ways of not learning. For humanity
as a whole, intelligence consists in discovering the raw image of its own
spirit. Acceptance of human beings as they are now is an essential "moment"
in the dialectic of learning - i.e. in the progress - of collective
intelligence.

* Pierre Lévy is Professor at the University of Quebec; his latest
published work is entitled "Cyberdémocratie" (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002)