To Free Or Not To Free

Headlines of US and UK newspapers and magazines today featured an assortment of updates on:

• The scandal involving paparazzi  photos of the British princess Kate sunbathing topless  - published by European newspapers
• The frenzy in the Muslim world that followed the publication of an anti-Islam amateurish movie

Readers are of course lured by cover-page photos of sexy princess Kate,  side by side to photos of angry long bearded Muslim protestors bearing guns and yelling hysterically.  Talk about 'sex and violence'. I wonder what Freud would have said about this media masterpiece! After having been lured, we the readers are supposed to skim through the headlines and flip through to the ad-heavy guts.

But I wonder - are readers expected to make the subtle connection between the two headlines, or did editors even intend to highlight the connection when this headline combo was lined up?

The thing is, we as a global culture are nearing a new crisis point involving a very old topic: freedom of expression vis a vis the information age. The following question remains fundamentally unsettled and therefore seismic:

As a global community of deeply opposing views and value systems, what should be our globally accepted do's and dont's relating to media? What can we all agree people should be free to publish, and what can we call agree people should not be free to publish?

• Should it be allowed to snap a quick photo of somebody's naked body and then publish it for everybody else's viewing pleasure across the globe? 
• Should it be allowed to film a movie mopping the floor with somebody else's ground truths and then trumpet it all around the world?

If you're about to answer yes to either question - take a moment to understand the ramifications of your answer. It follows that everybody in the world would be allowed to photograph your own breasts (substitute nuts as appropriate) and then reproduce them digitally in high fidelity for the world to enjoy throughout all eternity. It also follows that anybody and everybody gets to publicly mop the floor with anything and everything you believe in dearly. If you are a feminist, imagine a film portraying women as inferior slaves fit only for service of their male masters. If you're black, imagine a film glorifying the times of slavery or segregation, or portraying the civil rights movement as misguided attempt to give an inferior race more rights than they deserve. If you're Jewish, how about a film portraying the holocaust as the greatest achievement of the twentieth century?

If you're about to answer no to either question - you're on shakier grounds even! the moment you establish that limits to freedom of expression are justified, you immediately fall into the slippery slope of just what the limits should be, who gets to set them, who gets to enforce them, and who gets to adjust them later on in a world of constantly shifting social norms. More importantly, who gets to act as judge, jury, or executioner in cases where somebody crosses such limits?

As in every crisis, the global community is being pressed to evolve -  to take yet another painful step forward. Answers sought to such questions don't necessarily have to be the right or ideal or final answers. We should be working on pragmatic answers that aim to minimize conflict rather than establish Utopia.

Laws protecting and limiting freedom of speech are a tough nut to crack, and they do exist in local pockets here and there. But such laws remain mostly useless in a world where a photo of a princess's breasts can be snapped with a tiny anonymous device, then immediately leap out of the British Island and hop over several legally isolated oceans in a mere millisecond. Further, local laws only apply to small groups of rather homogenous lifestyles - where the real issue at hand is how intra-culture expression is to be governed. So where a film maker in the US is only bound by the laws of film making in the US, his film can still spark an international crisis because it can go viral in another part of the world where the values related to limits of expression are fundamentally different. 

We are in need of an overarching global mandate, something like the Geneva Convention of limits  of expression. The rules need to be agreed upon once and for all - so that we all can move on. Keeping in mind that it took a world war for the Geneva Convention to pop up, my fingers are crossed for us all this time around.

Meanwhile in an unfortunately-way-too-real world:

• Princess Kate remains in distress as the Royal Rack is still on display all over the internet
• People in Libya have already murdered the US ambassador -an act of war by any standard- where less than 6 months ago US-backed NATO forces saved their butts from an assured massacre in Benghazi
• People in Egypt continue to burn US flags and demand that the US regime apologize over the film and ban it - apologize even though the man behind the film is Egyptian born - and ban it even though less than 2 years ago the same people shed blood to establish their freedom to post films without government censorship