Wednesday, December 05, 2012

The Greener Pastures of the Internet


Recently, I visited an old friend who is currently living in Japan. On the train ride from Tokyo to the Sea of Trees, we caught up, talking about our lives, relationships, careers, plans for the future, speculating on happiness and ambition and satisfaction, the paths we took, where to go from here. As the skyscrapers of the city outside the train’s window gave way to jagged hills and manicured hamlets, we kept coming back to the truth of the old adage/cliché: the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Realizing this, and living by this, had helped us, so we thought, to feel happier and more fulfilled (or at least less miserable). All the talk of relationships and careers and places to live seemed couched in this. And yet, strangely, that whole day, as I walked around in the crisp autumn air with Mt Fuji in the distance, relishing the company of an old friend and several new friends, I kept thinking “this is the place to live! I’d be happier here” even though I knew that my happiness had more to do with my attitude (or perhaps other qualities like self-control, grit, etc.) than where I was. The grass was still greener on the other side. Like an optical illusion, I couldn’t not see it even though I knew it wasn’t real.

This got me thinking about some aspect of living in the world of many media options.

Basically, my hunch is that the Facebook/jealousy effect (Facebook use can inspire jealousy) encompasses a larger swath of our experience each day. When you interact with warts-and-all people, you get frustrated at times, you have to work through problems, and you hone your abilities to cope with and deal with problems. When you deal with people on Facebook, you deal with co-constructed entities, products of those other people’s attempts to hide their “warts” and your desire to avoid seeing some of their warts (maybe not that simple. Maybe we’re trying to see imperfections at times and maybe we’re blind to them at other times, depending on mood, individual characteristics, etc.). I suppose those given to the language of communication theory would call these relationships “pseudo-relationship” and call the larger phenomenon I’m talking about the creation of “pseudo-environments”.

If these are pseudo-environments we live in, filled with pseudo-relationships, they are different than the pseudo-environment informed by the mass media and constructed by the Powers that Be. The priorities in their creation are different. They are similar in that they lack some important characteristics of unmediated relationships and reality. But the distortions are different. They are animated not by The Powerful’s desire to control the powerless, but by some aspect of our brains that wants a fantasy, an aspect that, in real life, runs into obstacles, gets sad, adapts, and overcomes obstacles, but now, in some sense, runs amok. We’re losing out abilities to revise our conceptions of what is possible in response to adversity because we’re often seeking new realities instead of trying to fix the problems of the old realities. We still live in a world of real, material relationships and must always, eventually, return to them and confront them, but our abilities to adapt in that environment have atrophied, and so we’re left in a world that seems depressingly unfair. But it’s not because the world is depressingly unfair so much as it is because we’re less and less capable of re-making any of it or ourselves in order to bring the two in sync. We grasp for explanations for this seemingly insurmountable disconnect: our own inherent inferiority; malevolent, powerful authorities. Maybe we’re partially right. Maybe unchangeable flaws in ourselves and changeable flaws in The System (i.e., corrupt authorities) are part of the problem. But maybe that sense is exaggerated by feelings of powerlessness that comes with our atrophied ability to adapt to adversity.

The features of the options we browse through, be it Facebook profiles or places to lives, are shaped by those presenting them in a mediated form. The options, as they appear to us, are optimized for online searches, edited to attract more people and/or the “right” people. We eventually encounter their hidden flaws in a patterned way. At first, we can’t see them because we’re hopeful about the New. Eventually, as we get to know the option better and its ability to hide flaws decreases, we become disappointed. Not to worry: there are always other untried options, other greener grasses.

Once you’ve tried many, many options and are still running into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you feel all the more hopeless. The infinite possibilities that initially seemed so liberating are now just more ideas that didn’t work. The notion that nothing will “work” (in the sense that it will provide enough meaning and happiness to keep you fulfilled, or at least extant) seems more likely as the number of failed options grows. Perhaps it’s right to think, as a hopeless person might, that all those options you haven’t tried – the people you haven’t met or dated, the places you haven’t visited or lived, the books you haven’t read, the religions you haven’t experienced – aren’t that different than the options you have tried. Perhaps they never were “different” in any objective, meaningful way. But it might have been the ability to adapt to the disconnections between fantasy and reality, hardened by the rough edges of reality with its dearth of options, that provided us with enough meaning and happiness.
But this is idle speculation. How could we test this hunch? It would be interesting to see to what degree belief in this statement (and other adages, like “no man is an island” or “wherever you go, there you are”. I’m a big fan of adages these days) predicts happiness in a world of more options.

Related questions:
What exactly does the green grass statement convey? Is it the opposite of jealousy? It is, but it’s also something that runs counter to hope, or “hope” as most people think of it. It’s being happy with what you have, which may be the opposite of striving as well as hope.

What do you do with the world of expanded options? That is, what is the practical response to our media environment for someone who acknowledges the truth of the green grass statement? You can think of ways to make the options not seem quite so infinite. And you can identify the characteristics of those who flourish and languish in these environments.

Who survives best in the world of infinite options? What is the relationship between striving, hopefulness, jealousy, number of options, qualities of those options (how mediated they are, how curated they are) and life satisfaction? What about other individual characteristics like self-control and grit?

This might lead us to the Green Grass Theory: In a world of many options, those who are high in striving and hopefulness yet low in jealousy (i.e., those who agree with the aphorism that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence) flourish. Those who are not languish.

Our actions and moods are in part determined by our notions of what is possible or probable in the future. Media are tools for considering possibilities and probabilities. The extent to which they distort depends on our orientation to them. 

Friday, October 05, 2012

On "Liking"

Facebook's decision to create a "like" button seems like one of the most effective tweaks to a social media application, or any piece of new media for that matter. I feel great sympathy for the up-keepers of popular new media applications. To remain the same is to stagnate in an environment where novelty is among the highest virtues. And yet most changes you make, no matter how subtle, tick off the user-base. I imagine that its hard to quantify such things (only the folks at Facebook will know for sure), but adding the "like" button has to be one of the most effective tweaks in terms of its ability to increase interaction on the site, thereby increasing time spent and "personal investment" in the site, thereby increasing ad revenue. The "like" button achieved what all technological innovations aspire to: it became so ingrained in users' behavior, so instinctual, that its virtually invisible. The only push-back was the half-hearted attempt by some users to get a "dislike" button which, smartly, Facebook never delivered.

What is it about "Liking" that works so well? In a sense, it lowers the barrier for interaction. You're not required to have something to say in order to interact with others. Although Facebook has experimented with ways to give users control of their audiences when they post content, the process of creating discrete groups, thinking about which groups you want to see whatever you're posting, and then selecting that group is unwieldy and requires consideration and reflection. Using Facebook, like most real world social interaction, requires spontaneity and impulse. If that flow is interrupted, users might as well click to another site. So users are still stuck with the problem: when I say what I want to say, will some of my friends judge me harshly or misinterpret what I've said? Or there might be a more fundamental problem: what do I really have to say besides: I agree!

Real world interpersonal communication is filled with subtle cues: head-nodding, furrowed brows, smiles, "uh huh"s. These non-verbals and "barely verbals" have no "content" per se but are integral to the process of communication. The speaker knows that they're not putting information into a vacuum and the listener is not called upon to risk judgement or do the work of generating a substantive response. On an interpersonal level, "Liking" something on Facebook essentially replicates this in the online social environment.

Of course, Facebook isn't one-to-one communication. There is a broader (though not too broad) audience for your "like"s. "Liking" forms a visible social net that reflects people's attention and affection. Avatars, names on our friends lists, or photos are adjuncts to the real substance of virtual presence: signs of attention and affection. Those are what prompt much-needed feelings of belonging to a group.

Additionally, "Liking" is a bit like voting for something at a town hall meeting: a semi-public (or "locally public") endorsement that, by virtue of showing that many like-minded people endorse something, is likely to influence an observer, even if that observer is completely passive. In this sense, the "like" button replicates an essential element of offline civic discourse.

So, what else can Facebook do to build on the success of "like"? Perhaps there's some way to address this issue of audience, but in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow of impulse. Somehow, Facebook needs to be able to just sense who we want to see our mundane, half-funny observation or reply to someone else's mundane, half-funny observation. Until then, we'll just have to keep liking.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Whom do we owe for that song?

After engaging in a stimulating discussion about the value of music on a friend's Facebook page, I thought I'd expand my thoughts to an essay. The discussion was prompted by this blog entry by musician David Lowery, which was prompted by Emily White's article for NPR. White, who is 20, explains that most of her huge music catalog consists of songs ripped from friends' CD, from promotional CDs she had access to while working at a radio station, and some songs that were illegally downloaded. She also explains that what she and her age cohort desire as much as the music itself is convenient access to the music. Lowery, along with my friend on Facebook, claims that White and her ilk fail to grasp how their unwillingness to purchase albums hurt artists. Its not quite clear from White's short piece whether she'd be willing to pay for all her music through Google Play or ITunes or some service that gave some of its revenue to the artist. But Lowery makes it clear that there are many people White's age who go out of their way to justify illegally downloading music (or downloading music from companies that don't give the artists a big enough cut of the profits). Ultimately, so the argument goes, they are exploiting artists.

My counter-argument rests on the notion of replace-ability. An artist may spend hundreds of hours working on an album which is then downloaded by millions of consumers and, in some cases, the artist may not see a dime, or may see a tiny fraction of the profits that ITunes, GooglePlay, or whomever is putting ads on Kazaa reap. I'll admit, this sounds hideously unfair to the artist. After all, the artist created the content and the artist is wildly popular. The consumers, seemingly, demand the artist's music. However, things aren't that simple.

As White points out, part of every young consumer's desire for music (and make no mistake, they desire music as much if not more than generations before them) is a desire for convenient music. Their decision to download the music of a particular artist seems to indicate that they love that artist and value their music. They may also tell you how much they love the music of that particular artist. But ultimately, we don't know the degree to which their decision to download the music of that artist was desire for that artist's music and to what degree it reflected their desire for convenient music of any kind.

The fact of the matter is that creating music that others will want to listen to is so inexpensive now that if one artist wants more money, either from the consumers or from distributors or aggregators of content like Google Play or ITunes, consumers or aggregators do not have to pay more. They can simply find music by someone who wants less money. Increased competition prompts us to re-consider the value of listening to particular artists or particular kinds of music. My feeling is that the ability to create music that people will want to listen to is not as rare as the ability to distribute it, make it searchable, and make recommendations that anticipate consumer demand, or the ability to help "brand" the music in such a way that consumers understand that listening to that particular music is a mark of social distinction.

In fact, I'm not convinced that it was ever particularly rare. Who's to say that every town didn't have its talented musician, none more capable of generating listenable music than the other? Corporations like Apple, Amazon, and Google know that most people want cheap, easy access to music and that there will likely always be another artist who will give away their music for free for the chance to become famous if this particular artist, or a hundred or a thousand artists, does/do not want to. Once musicians become popular, they become rare, and become worth compensating. But, it could be argued, they did not become popular because they possess some rare talent. Its possible that the rare and valuable commodity of the popular artist was created by handsomely-compensated talent scouts, content aggregators that used patented algorithms to put their songs in front of taste-maker bloggers, and some element of chance. In such a case, the artist at the center of it all could've been any artist.

I've discussed this view with friends, and some of them are skeptical that anyone could create music good enough to become popular. I suppose I'm not claiming that anyone could do it, but I'm questioning the reasoning of Lowery and others that the number of downloads or searches for a particular artist are at all indicative of a collective desire for the music of that particular artist rather than a collective desire for something to dance to, to empathize with, to sing along to with friends. Preliminary evidence from Netflix subscriptions suggest that people are willing to pay a premium for high quality video content, and there are only so many people who can make high-quality video content, so the content creators can and should expect a bigger cut of the profits. But does this apply to the average career musician? We need to think more about how to assess the replaceability of a musical artist's work before determining its value.


Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Asynchronicity

Most of the ideas on this blog come about as the result of some combination of talks, articles, books, events, or conversations to which I've recently been exposed. The most recent combination: a great talk by Nicole Ellison at Michigan's School of Information, a TED talk from Sherry Turkle, and the book Nudge.

The first part of Ellison's talk concerned online dating and deception: when, why, and how much are online daters willing to stretch the truth about themselves in their profiles. In her interviews with several online daters, she found that they often excuse online exaggerations about themselves by saying that it either once was true of themselves (e.g., a person who, when they made their profile, did not smoke but then took up smoking and failed to update his/her profile) or, hopefully, will be true in the future (e.g., a person who anticipates losing a few pounds or getting a slightly better job). This is excusable in the arena of online dating because the dater never knows exactly when he/she will be contacted by another person. You could easily "forget" (or say you forgot) to keep your profile up-to-date and you could easily lose those pounds or get that job by the time Mr./Ms. Right contacts you. Asynchrony (i.e., some lag time between when you put some information about yourself into the world and when you get a reply) is a defining characteristic of the online dating world; norms of deception reflect that.

Turkle was a bit more broad and impressionistic in her analysis of the recent increase in technologically mediated communication, at times indulging in the kind of cynical hand-wringing about "Technology" that, I feel, isn't the most fruitful approach to improving our interactions with technology and with one another. The overlap between the two talks related to asynchrony: Turkle pointed out that many of her interviewees preferred texting to talking face-to-face, and that this was likely due to the amount of control it offered them in terms of what they would say and how they would present themselves.

Early versions of various communication technologies are often asynchronous: think of the postal service, email, and texting. As technology became more advanced, people could engage in synchronous communication: telephone and Skype. But maybe people don't always want the loss of control over one's presentation of self that comes with synchronous communication. Even a small lag of 30 seconds allows the person to have an immediate reaction, think about what the other person wants to hear (or about what will make them react in a way that's desirable), and send that message. Both Ellison and Turkle note that this is a kind of tailored self, likely different than the un-tailored self that cannot help but come across in face-to-face interactions. In Goffman's terms, those who use asynchronous media like Facebook and texting instead of talking face-to-face or on the phone are all front stage and no backstage.

At the same time, people have noted the dangers of impulsive texting, suggesting that people don't take time to consider their initial emotional reaction and merely text or post without considering the consequences. I think this worry may have to do more with the permanence of the message (unlike the impermanence of something said in conversation) and the fact that the person might not consider the context in which the message will be consumed because he/she is not in that context (unlike face-to-face conversations in which folks see, immediately, the consequence of what they're saying). Its also possible that there's simply more conversation going on with asynchronous communication technology than there was without it, particular conversation with certain others (people you care about a lot, and not people you happen to physically be around). The more you converse, the more likely you are to say something impulsive.

There are a few reasons why the extent to which communication is synchronous or asynchronous appeals to me as a research topic. First, its an attribute of a media experience and not a medium or an application. Attributes like temporal proximity, assortment size, or synchrony are like mass or volume: they never change; television and Facebook change all the time, making it hard to know for sure if what applied to them 5 years ago still applies today. Secondly, you can easily measure synchrony: just gauge the average amount of time between posts, texts, emails, etc. Lastly, you can tweak it pretty easily. This brings me to Nudge. The book's premise is that there are many attributes of our choice environments that weren't considered when they were designed. By tweaking them in ways so subtle that most users don't notice or mind (e.g., changing the number of mutual funds a person picks from when investing via an IRA; changing the choices on multiple-choice questions about organ donation) you can profoundly affect what people choose. Email, texting, Tweets, and Facebook posting don't really have much in the way of temporal constraints. What if you introduced some: requiring people to reply within 10 seconds or requiring them not to reply for 1 day? Yes, of course, people would notice these constraints and would likely mind them. But technically, it wouldn't be very hard at all to make these changes. Most of these applications already have artificial constraints (think of Twitter and its 140 character limit). You'd just have to sell users on the benefits of such constraints. 

To return to Turkle's point about control, its not just that these technologies allow users the time to have control over their presentations of self. They also allow them to choose how long to wait: whatever amount best suits your needs. Meanwhile, the person of the other end can feel quite powerless, causing a strain on the relationship. Maybe its not particularly important that sending letters via mail required folks to wait days or weeks before getting replies or that face-to-face requires instant replies (though with mail, one could choose to write back later rather than sooner). Maybe its more important that imposed constraints put the interlocutors on common ground.

Monday, March 05, 2012

How much of the media we consume is really user generated?

Like most media users today, I enjoy two kinds of leisure media: user-generated content (UGC) and professionally generated content. The former costs WAY less to produce than the latter. On one of my favorite user-generated content websites, Reddit, there was a pretty good description of why cable costs so much, and a good part of it has to do with the cost of professional production of content. But if we're using our internet connection to access UGC, well then, we shouldn't have to be paying so much for the professionally generated content that we're not using. This got me to thinking: how much of the content I use is user-generated?

I don't think I'll ever abandon professionally generated content: I still love sports and a handful of television shows like Mad Men and Charlie Rose. I also loved relaxing at the end of a hard day by flipping on the TV and channel surfing. But I don't really do that anymore. I think that what has replaced that for me are two things: Facebook and Reddit, both of which are primarily UGC. Facebook occasionally contains references to content that was professionally created: a link to an article on NYTimes.com, a link to a video clip from a TV show posted on YouTube. But MOST of the information I encounter on there is generated by my friends: status updates, photos.

The same is true of Reddit. Let's take the most up-voted stories on reddit today as a sample. Of the 25 items on this front page, 16 of them are pictures or statements or links to content ostensibly generated by a non-professional (someone who did not create the content with the understanding that it would generate revenue for them personally). So again, its not clear cut. Facebook and Reddit and YouTube derive SOME of their value from professionally generated content, but it seems disingenuous to say that they're similar, in terms of what it costs to maintain the quality of the experience, to the former great American past-time: channel surfing.

I accept the fact that Facebook, Reddit, and sites like them provide a useful service by providing a venue for all this interaction between users. I accept that this takes a lot of hours of coding, and I accept that I must pay for that service in some way: with my attention to ads or having those companies mine my data or sell it to advertisers. But clearly, the overhead of running such sites is much less than running a television network: you don't have to pay writers, actors, set designers, animators, etc. So yes, I should pay for my time on Facebook and Reddit, but not as much as I should for my time watching a television network.

It wouldn't be that hard or time-consuming to code a random sample of Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit content as UGC or professionally generated content, and then to do a rough calculation of the true cost of producing and distributing this content. Another project for the back burner!

Monday, February 27, 2012

Gender, social networks, the rise of Pinterest

I've been hearing more and more about Pinterest: via my Facebook feed, via a field observation study of media use of undergraduate students. Curious, I checked it out and, to the extent that I could understand the function of the site without actually becoming a member, noted some similarities between Pinterest and social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and, to some extent, news and entertainment aggregation sites like Reddit. As I understand it, users post images and other users comment or "like" things or re-post them, thereby boosting their overall visibility.

What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.

So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?

Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).

I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.

The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

I'll get back to you

I haven't checked my email lately. And by "lately", I mean roughly 12 hours. I feel a dual pull: the desire to put off other important work by checking my email, i.e. the desire for immediately gratifying distracting novelty stimuli, and the worry that I may be missing something important, i.e. the desire to be responsible. To neglect one's email is to deprive both one's short-term and long-term desires. That's how I feel, but how do the people on the other end of those emails waiting in my inbox feel? How long do you have to wait to be considered neglectful?

Email, like texting, is an asynchronous form of communication. With any asynchronous form of communication, there is no obvious answer to the question above. These two ways of communicating have vastly different norms as to how long one can wait to reply without seeming rude. In fact, I would argue that email does not really have a norm, and that lack of a norm may cause some animosity toward the person with whom the email user is communicating as well as animosity toward the medium of email.

Thinking about how long is an acceptable gap between message-received and message-reply prompts me to think about the power dynamic between the sender and the receiver. One may always hide behind the fig leaf of busyness ("sorry I didn't return your email sooner. I've been totally swamped!"), and certainly some emails take longer to reply to than others. Some require that you look up other information or do some work in order to craft an acceptable reply, and this may take time. In some cases (as in mine right now), the receivers may not be aware that he/she received any message, and thus can plead ignorance (for about 12 hours or so, right?). But in many cases, the receiver prioritizes. All other things be equal, the receiver puts the sender somewhere in a hierarchy. They can afford to put off answering a co-worker but not the boss, a brother but not a wife, etc. To be upset about not being replied to sooner is, sometimes, to be upset at one's place in another's social hierarchy. Because email is asynchronous and it lacks the norms about time-to-reply than texting has, it is ideal for exposing these hierarchies.

One interesting solution to this problem might be to develop a thorough email policy: you're guaranteed a reply within one week, barring vacation or illness. You get a reply in 48 hours (excluding vacations and illnesses) if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. Within work hours, you can expect a reply in 4 hours if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. If the reply requires more work, the amount of estimated time of work in minutes = the required reply time in hours (20 minutes of work = 20 hours to reply). No exceptions, regardless of whether you're my boss's boss's boss or my intern.

I'm sure people would think you're pretty weird for setting these rules, but norms have to start somewhere.


Thursday, January 19, 2012

Is the internet speech or behavior?

In the debate about SOPA and PIPA, there are several assumptions worth examining. The first is that the content of the internet (by "content" I mean every bit of information conveyed via the internet) is "speech" in the same that "speech" was defined at the time that the Constitution was written, and therefore must not be subject to censorship. 

You can do more and more things with the internet each year. Hence, you can do more and more bad things with the internet. Eventually, people will be able to do so many bad things with the internet that in order to maintain any sense of economic or social stability, it will be impossible for governments to maintain a hands-off attitude toward regulating content. The scale of the havoc a malevolent person or group could create online will increase until, at some point, it will be greater than the amount of havoc that a person or group could create offline. We may not be there yet, but the more aspects of life move online, the closer we get to such a scenario.

If we consider the internet to be like speech, well then, we shouldn't restrict it in any way for fears of a new McCarthyist era, or worse. While the analogy of internet to speech is intuitive and made sense when the internet was little other than a replication of offline conversations and news, I think it makes less and less sense the more and more you can do on the internet. When you can engage in almost any activity online that you can engage in offline - commerce, relationships, etc. - then the internet becomes less like speech and more like an alternate social and commercial reality. If we consider the internet to be more like an alternate version of the offline world (or a microcosm of the offline world, complete with commerce, substantive relationships, etc.), then asking the law to stay out of online matters altogether in the name of free speech seems increasingly unworkable and inappropriate.

There's a larger philosophical point we will have to confront at some point: is the internet and all online interaction speech or behavior? Deciding what kinds of speech are okay is very neat and tidy: its pretty much all okay; speech is free. But behavior is not. Deciding what kinds of behavior lead to negative consequences - that is, what kinds of behavior are bad behavior - is very messy. Its an eternally unfinished project. But no one would ever claim that everyone is free to behave as they wish.

If a governing body is given the power to deem some online speech/behavior illegal and worthy of punishment, of course there will be the possibility that those in power could abuse their power and shut down sites not because the sites are doing something that most people would agree is wrong, but because it goes against the interests of those in power. But the same is true of law in the offline world: an authoritarian regime could seize power and enforce rules that are not in the best interest of the people. And yet we live within the law. We have a system of checks and balances in the offline world that, by and large, keep overwhelming corruption from happening.

So it seems increasingly unrealistic to have anything associated with internet content to be utterly and completely free from the rule of law, but clearly, there need to be checks and balances, and it seems as though this part of the plan of legislating online activity, at this stage, hasn't been thought out. Now would be a good time to start figuring out what such law would look like.