Here is a thoughtful piece from the Atlantic online about the Mohammed video that has been a catalyst of so much violence.
(Which, by the way, really is unbearably stupid and tacky piece of film – if you don’t believe me, you probably haven’t checked it out. This is a link to the video. It looks like most of the budget went to fake beards and shoe polish on people’s faces. Kind of unbelievable that it should be seen by anyone as other than a pure piece of amateur drivel. One suspects it stands for something else in the Moslem viewers’ minds – resentment of cultural hegemony, or suspicion that this is how the West secretly feels, perhaps.)
The writer makes several excellent points, which I believe play into our themes of people appropriating communications technologies to their particular contexts. For one, the Muslim Brotherhood, and many others besides, seems unable to understand that an independently-made film with broad distribution could not in some way have the approval of the government.
Similarly, it is hard for them and others to see Google’s refusal to take it down as a support of a core Western value, free expression (several in the West dispute this, as well.) That the governance of the Internet should or should not be within the power of any particular state is a related issue.
There is an interesting line of argument at the end that I’m not sure about:
“Companies like Google, Facebook, and (to a lesser extent) Twitter, are political players now. They sponsor political events, take part in policymaking, host White House productions, and more. There are those who see, in all that interaction, the U.S. government and U.S.-based Internet companies forming one big, networked, mutually validating community. The Internet doesn’t quite seem the place apart it once did.”
While this is so, and these companies do influence U.S. policy, they also vex it, by universalizing supposedly “American” ideas about freedom of expression. It might equally be said that the Internet publishers are forcing a change on government, by taking to extremes of both geography and example their somewhat libertarian reading of U.S. values.
Twitter refused to release a user’s information when ordered to by the New York State Supreme Court under the claim that it violates the Fourth Amendment. The user in question, an Occupy Wall Street protestor, has been arrested and under further investigation. Yet, his tweets have been made public on the internet and Twitter refuses to release them. I do agree that releasing this public information for prosecutors to gain a mere inference about this protester does violate his right to privacy. But when those tweets have already been made public, is it really data that should be kept private anymore?
“‘If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.’” -Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr., New York State Supreme Sourt
Link to the article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/twitter-ordered-release/