Technological advances, globalisation, and the rise of religious extremism threaten our freedom of expression.
Threats to free expression come in many forms, from the battle over government funding of the arts to the ways artists and writers willingly censor themselves. Today censorship is just as likely to be led by economics and market forces as by repressive regimes. According to a 2005 report by the Canada Council for the Arts, among industrialised nations, the United States ranks with the least generous in public arts funding per capita (Australia spends more than four times as much per capita). This creates a greater dependence on support from private sources, including corporations, which may or may not come with restrictive conditions.
Increasing Homogenisation
Dee Dee Halleck, the co-founder of the first grass-roots television network in the US, identifies the consolidation of corporations into ‘"multi-nationals" as a serious threat to free expression, because viewpoints are increasingly homogenised to suit the global context. The areas in which this is seen most strikingly are in the mass media and book publishing industries. In places like the US and Australia, ownership of the traditional communications industries—broadcast, radio, publishing, and entertainment—is essentially monopolistic. Indeed, most large publishing companies are now part of corporate communications empires, guaranteeing publication to those authors with a proven track record and to those that conform to expectations, but exiling the voices of the less experienced and those of unpopular or socially marginalised groups.
Creative Commons: An Answer?
In the non-traditional communications industries, dominated by the Internet, different circumstances exist. Lawrence Lessig, a law Professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University, believes the internet is a world in which “the economy of ideas” reigns. He argues “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online” and encourages cultural production that moves quickly to an intellectual commons. In his view, extensive governmental regulations are unnecessary and the extreme protection of property is counter-productive.
Cultural Intolerance
Increasing awareness of cultural diversity exerts its own restrictions on free expression. We live in an age where a film director may be killed for creating a work about violence against women in Islamic societies, where a lecturer may be assaulted by assailants opposed to his reading the Qur’an during a lecture, and where world-wide riots are sparked by a series of outrageous, deliberately challenging cartoons. Artists, writers, and even translators are refusing to participate in anything that the Muslim world might find offensive. But these are extreme examples, in which the artists have been intentionally provocative. In fact, some have called Theo van Gogh, the assassinated Dutch filmmaker, a willing martyr for freedom of expression, not all that different from those willing to die for religious beliefs.
Political Correctness
As awful as these events are, more insidious is the slow, constant, camouflaged erosion of free expression through the exercise of " political correctness". In less politicised situations, writers, artists, curators, producers and government organisations make decisions everyday to restrain and repress free expression out of a desire not to offend particular social groups. This is counter-productive. Excluding subjects and perspectives from cultural discourse does nothing to extend causes. On the contrary, stifling debate only enhances stereotypes and creates deeper misunderstandings.
An Exile of Silence
Crucially, artists and writers remain aware of these dangers. While no one in the developed world is being forced to labour camps, artists face other kinds of exile: that of not being exhibited, performed, read, viewed, or heard from. In other words, they face an exile of silence.
Indeed, the South African Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee posits an internalised figure of the censor and remarks that it is the dream of censorship that “the law and its constraints will be so deeply engraved on the citizenry that individuals will police themselves.” Judy Blume, the best-selling author of books for teens, has been widely censored for her frank portrayals of sensitive teen issues. She mourns “the loss of books that will never be written…the voices that will be silenced…all because of fear.”
The internet offers what seems to be expressive freedom; however, this may be an illusion and, thus, even more insidious. Artists and citizens alike must remain aware of the wide-ranging threats to free expression in the world today, examining in depth the subtle and not so subtle ways in which our rights are at risk—even in open societies where such freedoms are explicitly protected.
