The Net has no center. It is a web of interconnected nodes. A serendipitious result of this structure is that the Net resists censorship.
Predictor: Donham, Parker Barss
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 paper presented at the Symposium on Free Speech and Privacy in the Information Age, Parker Barss Donham, a staff writer for the Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest magazine, writes: ”Human expression is not the moral equivalent of smoking or toxic waste, and one person’s right to expression must not be subject another person’s thick skin … That’s the first thing to be noted about Internet censorship. It is inevitably a blunt and crude instrument. Deleting an entire Usenet group – or worse still, an entire Usenet hierarchy – because a few of the postings it attracts may contain banned or offensive information makes about as much sense as burning a carton of books because one or two pages in one or two of the books may depict anal intercourse or teenagers having sex … The Net has no center. It is a web of interconnected nodes. A serendipitious result of this structure is that the Net resists censorship.”
Date of prediction: November 26, 1994
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Censorship/Free Speech
Name of publication: The Symposium on Free Speech and Privacy in the Information Age
Title, headline, chapter name: An Unshackled Internet: If Joe Howe Were Designing Cyberspace
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/00/org/doc/sfsp/donham.txt
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Dorne, Jay