Apparently Facebook is a threat to social order – or so one of Canada’s Provincial governments, the authorities at Virginia Tech, and some employers believe. They think their employees are wasting their time and that people shouldn’t be using Facebook to post negative comments about teachers or bosses.
Are authorities and employers right to ban access to Facebook?
Internet law professor Michael Geist believes attempts to block access to social media sites, such as Facebook, are misguided and show a complete misunderstanding of the nature and benefits of social media. He is quoted in this piece on the BBC news website:
The recent backlash against Facebook has generally on centred around two concerns – derogatory comments and workplace productivity – ironically missing the real sources of concern such as the privacy impact of posting deeply personal information.
Many Facebook users openly comment about issues of concern. That naturally includes students posting thoughts about fellow students and teachers or about supervisors at their part-time jobs.
In recent months, an Ottawa grocery chain fired several of its employees after company officials discovered negative comments on Facebook, while several Ontario schools have suspended students for posting “offensive” comments about school officials.
He continues:
The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the internet generation’s equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler – the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip.
Attempts to block such activity are not only bound to fail, but they ultimately cut off decision makers, school officials, and community leaders from their communities.
The answer does not lie in banning Facebook or the other emerging social media sites, but rather in facing up to Facebook fears and learning to use these new tools to engage and educate.
The interesting issue here for me as a Baha’i is the intersection between freedom of speech and the appropriate use of utterance. Language is powerful stuff. It’s our human birthright. Freedom of expression is a universal human right. We are affronted if anyone seeks to abridge that freedom. And yet we have to acknowledge that there must be some restraints on utterance. We cannot be free to libel people or to incite hatred against others with impunity. Rightly so.
So, what are the limits? And who has the right to create and enforce the limits?
There’s much to be said about the whole speech-power-law nexus, but I don’t want to go into that right now.
I shall be co-tutoring a course at the Baha’i summer school in Bath in August on The role of language in creating a new world order. The central question is how do we create a new etiquette of expression, suitable for the age of human maturity. This is the “sales pitch” for the course:
“Speech is a powerful phenomenon. Its freedom is both to be extolled and feared. It calls for an acute exercise of judgment, since both the limitation of speech and the excess of it can lead to dire consequences.” (Universal House of Justice) Speech shapes our relationships with one another; it shapes our cultures and our identities. We must deepen our understanding of the role of language. But beyond understanding, we must strain every sinew to bring our own use of it into conformity with the requirements of the times. As Bah
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