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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World-Wide
Web, seems to have a plan, via the teaching of so-called Web
Science at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, to combat what he calls "bad phenomena"
on the Web. I have asked him to send me the full text of his speech,
but I have had no reply so far. Here is one report of his views: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/bizfocus/archives/2006/11/05/2003334970
.
Here are the current or potential "bad phenomena" which
he mentions, according to that news report:
- fraudsters
- liars and untruths
- cheats
- unfairness
- blogging (some aspects of it)
- inaccurate information
- defamatory information
- uncheckable information
- taking too much information on trust
- The inability of Internet users to establish the original source
of the information they digest
He also said, apparently:
"We're not going to be trying to make a Web that will be better
for people who vote in a particular way, or better for people who
think like we do," he said. "The really important thing
about the Web, which will continue through any future technology,
is that it is a universal space."
And he also said, apparently, that the next generation of the Internet
needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original
source of the information they digest.
However, there are some serious problems raised by this plan of his:
- There seems to me to be a self-contradiction here: either he wants
the Web to remain a universal space, or he wants to create some in-built
discrimination against all those "bad phenomena". He cannot
really have it both ways.
- If there is going to be discrimination against all these "bad
phenomena", who is going to decide what is an instance of fraud,
lying, cheating, etc.? That is surely a very subjective matter.
- Not only are such matters subjective, but they are also (in part)
wide-ranging, regional, national and international legal matters,
and beyond the scope and competence (in all probability) of anyone
involved in teaching or taking a Web Science course. Jurisdictions
differ on all these issues.
- Legally, too, it is not clear that "defamatory information"
is necessarily a bad thing. In some legal jurisdictions, at least,
you are legally permitted to publish defamatory information, as long
as you have one of the accepted defences to a charge of defamation
-- such as a provable claim that the information is true. Why should
we want the Web to be free of information that is defamatory but also
true?
- He seems to want to impose higher standards on the Web than are
imposed on universities or the mass media. Surely this is irrational
of him? Why should the Web have these higher standards imposed on
it? Universities famously enjoy so-called "academic freedom",
which means that no outside body can impose any standards or controls
on them (apart from budgetary controls) -- and this, also famously,
has the result that universities are often strongholds of left-wing
propaganda.
- His plan, in effect, constitutes political discrimination, because
the education system and media in Western countries are generally
biased, Feminist-dominated and anti-male, and the Internet is a God-send
(where Berners-Lee is the God, as far
as the Web is concerned), because it is the only way that anti-Feminist
views can be widely disseminated.
- His plan is also a power-grab by the universities over one of its
rivals: the Web. The Web is a place where you can learn, without being
bullied by Feminist or Leftist lecturers into concentrating on sources
that are slanted in a way that suits them. It is also a place where
you can write what you want, without being implictly or explicitly
threatened with a fail or a lower mark by a lecturer if you include
material that she finds politically unacceptable. For example, I originally
wrote the article The Comparative Power
and Welfare of Men and Women in China, as implied by general historical
works and works on women in China for a Chinese course at
Massey University, New Zealand. The lecturer, Rosemary Haddon, saw
a draft, and told me that I would get a low mark unless I cut out
the section: Introduction: Parting the Feminist Veil. I refused
to take it out, and duly got a low mark. This is typical of the authoritarian-feudal
culture of universities, which are fond of criticising undemocratic
behaviour in the outside world, but are anything but democratic themselves.
People who succeed in the university system tell you to "play
the game" or to "make compromises", but I never went
to university in order to play games or make compromises.
- The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
homepage has an advertisement relating to a "Center for Women
and Enterprise" on it. That is proof of CSAIL's political bias
-- which I already knew was inevitable, anyway. The issue is not whether
a "Center for Women and Enterprise" is a good thing or not
(though it would be possible to argue that it is not a good thing)
-- the point is that it demonstrates that CSAIL has bought into a
particular agenda with respect to women and men. CSAIL can therefore
not be trusted to design rules for the Web, because they are almost
bound to end up as anti-male in some way. As regards the political
corruption of universities, please see Chapter
13: Indoctucation by the Media-University Complex of my
book Sex, Lies & Feminism and my article Female
Academics' Power and Control over Male Academics .
- Not only are Western universities ideologically hostile territory
for men (see the various articles at iseducat.html),
and increasingly dominated numerically by females, but their academic
freedom allows them to produce irrational teaching and research, as
well as arrant nonsense, at times. No one could argue that religion
is a rational phenomenon, but religious faith is and has often been
taught at universities. Add to that all the discredited disciplines
such as phrenology, and other branches of science or pseudo-science
which are now discredited. I would add here the activist political
fraud called "Women's Studies" -- see other writings on
this website such as Feminist
Jurisprudence Proves that a Woman's Place is in the Home.
- MIT itself was for many years where Noam Chomsky worked. His theory
of (Transformational) Generative Grammar has been enormously influential,
but not
for any rational reason. I was a Linguistics-and-Languages undergraduate
at York (UK) in the early 1970s, when I got the task of organising
a questionnaire on Language Department student attitudes to the proportions
of the course which should consist of Linguistics, as opposed to the
study of particular languages. My questionnaire was neutral and unbiased
in its questions, and returned a result which showed that the majority
of students wanted no change. This did not please the emotional advocates
of Generative Grammar, such as the then student Geoff Pullum, who
wanted a slanted questionnaire which would produce a result favourable
to the whole course consisting of Linguistics. He said or wrote to
me something to the effect that I must be mad! He later apparently
became a well-known Generative Linguist. Generative Grammar is based
on a
primitive attitude to the data on which it is built, and on a
distinction (the Competence-Performance distinction) which is really
a bundle of mutually-independent distinctions which do not support
his simplistic approach, once analysed.
- It is not a big deal for the next generation of the Internet to
be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source
of the information they digest. How far does that get them? For example,
in this article, I am quoting from a page that claims to belong to
the Taipei Times, and which claims to be a reprint from the
Guardian. How far does that get me? If I were (as I used
to be) one of the Leftist tribe known as "Guardian-Readers",
who regard the Guardian as the symbol of all that is holy and good,
then I might conclude that I can trust every word in the article as
being a true record of Berners-Lee's speech. But that is no more rational
than a similar faith in the accuracy of the reporting of a particular
blogger. I have heard of two cases of reporters who were later discovered
to have been inventing stories wholesale in newspapers such as the
New York Times. There are bound (in my estimation) to
have been many other such cases which were either not discovered,
not publicised widely, or not publicised at all. Moreover, in the
West, a lot of women have got jobs at the expense of men (e.g. on
newspapers) because of affirmative action or equal employment opportunities,
which means that they are not always competent. I once saw Polly Toynbee,
of the Guardian, claiming on BBC World TV (on the Dateline
London programme) that the War on Terror was not as serious as
it had been made out to be, because between Septerber 2001 and 2006
there had been relatively few casualties from this war. This is a
remarkably stupid thing to say, because the relative lack
of casualties is more likely to be the result of governments preventing
terrorist attacks than the result of terrorists not planning them!
For an example of media reactions to freedom of speech in the bloggosphere,
see Democracy Frightens
the Left.
The internet has liberated men and fathers
to some extent from the oppression and censorship they suffer at the
hands of the totalitarian-liberal (politically correct) media and
education system. This has left the politically correct Establishment
with the problem of how to counter this undesirable freedom of expression.
One approach was to try to teach people that only certain websites
(the politically correct ones) were "authoritative" or "reliable",
but this approach does not seem to have had enough success. Now
something that may be a new censorship tool has emerged.
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