Protecting Free Listening

As online communication becomes more and more important, the government needs to value the individual's right to speak and the public's right to hear.

Last month’s meeting of the Committee on Canadian Heritage on Emerging and Digital Media reminds us that the state can play a role in shaping the conditions for online speech – but that it’s up to us to design what this means.

And like all good design, we should start with some big questions that focus on values.

If the government’s core function is to protect collective interests amongst empowered individuals, then the state needs to craft an approach to online speech that values a public’s right to hear, not just an individual’s right to speak.

Essentially and most broadly, government can have two roles when it comes to online speech. It can be a post-hoc regulator, narrowly and sparingly punishing individuals and organizations that stray from the kind of behaviour that we think produces valuable speech – i.e., applying legal sanctions. Or it can be an innovative leader, creatively and experimentally crafting new systems and conditions for speech that let publics hear diverse ideas and that reward organizations that do the same – i.e., managing public forums.

The Canadian federal government – more so than, for example, our neighbours to the south – plays both roles when it regulates and participates in public media systems. Canadians have historically recognized the need for both private industry and state sponsorship to facilitate the kind of national conversations we’ve wanted and needed to have.

Today, though, we’re at a critical point. We need to decide what, if any, changes we’ll make to this balance as the state begins to regulate and participate in online speech systems.

Many such systems assume that someone speaking means that someone’s listening, but the government shouldn’t make this mistake as it crafts its strategy. Speaking is relatively easy, especially online. Anyone can put up a blog, start a Twitter feed or make a Facebook page. There is no shortage of opportunities to publish a thought on any topic you choose. But it’s much harder to hear in online environments – to know who you should read, who you should let influence you, what makes some speech more valuable than others, to know what you haven’t heard, and how to find it or get someone to say it.

Hearing means having both access to and respect for others who are willing to speak, having the opportunity and humility to learn things that you didn’t necessarily choose to know. In contrast to self-focused rights to speech, hearing means that someone else has taken a risk, articulated a perspective, and that some set of circumstances has led you to find their thoughts. It relies on “listening systems” – infrastructures that make some speech more likely than others, that protect rare ideas amidst popular ones, and that separate signal from noise.

In the past, these infrastructures consisted of editors, artists, patrons, investors, censors, and producers who decided what we would see in our newspapers, textbooks, movies, and paintings. They were often elitist, sexist, oppressive, and exclusionary, but they were also sometimes guided by expertise, principles, and professional traditions that seem quaint amidst our modern embrace of populism.

We need to be equally critical of our contemporary, online listening systems. We need to recognize that, although we have many opportunities to speak, we often have little influence over how we hear online: the search engines, reputation rankings, commenting systems, and software designers that index, evaluate, rank, and ultimately decide what parts of the internet we experience are largely opaque to us and our government. Things could be different.

The Canadian government has a mandate, capacity, and responsibility to support the creation of new online environments focused on a very simple, old idea: that a public’s right to hear is just as valuable as an individual’s right to speak. This could become a modern, Canadian design value.

First, we could critique the very idea of public participation in online speech systems. For example, we need news systems that let us do more than give thumbs up or down to comments, submit pictures and videos, or index blogs. The state could fund individuals and organizations that create entirely new types of participation systems that work outside of market logics that often commodify communication with the aim of generating advertising revenue.

Second, we could ask whether there should be a difference between what we want to know and what we need to know. For example, any time we encounter a search engine, we – or government-sponsored initiatives acting on our behalf – need to ask hard questions of it and its designers. How do they decide which results are more important than others? Which decisions are made by humans and which are automated? How do search engine results map to what publics don’t know, or might need to know?

Our search engines listen for us. Practically, they make it more or less likely that we’ll know certain things; they are schools of a sort, quasi-public goods. We need to understand how and why they behave, and not simply see them as the product of market logics and private industry.

Essentially, we need to question anything that gives the illusion of participation, or that equates a free market with a free press.

Canada could be a leader in designing new kinds of listening systems for at least two reasons. First, we have long understood the complex dynamics of individuals and institutions in designing and managing communications systems (imagine what Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan would have said to the Heritage Committee).

Second, our country is essentially an experiment in how to create a national community that balances individual and collective rights (the Supreme Court’s ruling on “responsible communication” and the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Accommodation were ultimately dealing with very similar questions). While our history – and present – is still rife with failures and inequalities in this regard, we have a unique understanding of why it’s important to speak and hear, express and reflect, differ and consent.

We now need to ensure that Canadian online speech communities – try thinking of them as studios for communication, rather than marketplaces of ideas – reflect this understanding. Instead of worrying about how to apply the CRTC’s CanCon rules online, we have a chance to showcase a new set of made-in-Canada values for online participation that let individuals speak and publics hear.