Free at last? Maybe not...

The quote below is from an article by Seth Finkelstein that I read today in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Every time my romantic inner self is predisposed to celebrate the proliferating and apparently unstoppable freedom of the Internet and the new power of the participative web, I read statements like this.  The real world is unlikely to be be as untramelled as we might like to hope...

"It's sometimes suggested that we are entering a new internet era with blogs and syndication feeds and massive digital sharecropping sites that will, on the whole, be more difficult to censor.

My response is to remind people that identical rhetoric was heard at the start of the internet's popularisation. And we're all witnessing how wrong those predictions were.

Indeed, there's every reason to expect that similar trends such as centralisation, willingness of corporations to collaborate, the power of the market for repression and so on will be applied to these forms of communication.

The failure of technological determinism just a short while ago should argue strongly against such baseless optimism."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/the-problem-with-porn-/2008/05/20/1211182807006.html