Journal of Free Speech Law: “The Connected City of Ideas,” by Robert Mark Simpson
The article is here; the Introduction:
I think we need to update the metaphors we use around free speech. Everyone can see that our communication tools and practices are evolving fast, with a mix of welcome and unwelcome results. But there is an aspect of this evolution that is seriously underappreciated. Our communication tools and practices are increasingly subject to standardizing and homogenizing pressures. We are being corralled into a narrower range of devices and methods for talking to each other. We need to actively strategize about how to deal with the threat that this homogenization poses to our abilities as creative, reflective, thinking beings. But first, we need to recognize it as a threat.
The dominant moral metaphor in free speech discourse—namely, the marketplace of ideas—inadvertently desensitizes us to this threat. This metaphor invites us to worry, primarily, about authorities controlling the ideological content of public communication. At the same time, it analogically portrays homogenization in our m
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