1 Cyberspace: If You Don't Love it, Leave it
1 Something in the American psyche loves new frontiers. we hanker after wide-open spaces; we like to explore; we like to make rules but refuse to follow them. But in this age it’s hard to find a place where you can go and be yourself without worrying about the neighbors.
2 There is such a place: cyberspace. Formerly a playground for computer fans, cyberspace now embraces every conceivable constituency: schoolchildren, flirtatious singles, Hungarian-Americans, accountants. Can they all get along? Or will our fear of kids surfing for dirty pictures behind their bedroom doors provoke a crackdown?
3 The first order of business is to grasp what cyberspace is. It might help to leave behind metaphors of highways and frontiers and to think instead of real estate. Real estate, remember, is an intellectual, legal, artificial environment constructed on top of land. Real estate recognizes the difference between parkland and shopping mall, between red-light zone and school district, between church , state and drugstore.
4 In the same way, you could think of cyberspace as a giant and unbounded world of virtual real estate. Some property is privately owned and rented out; other property is common land; some places are suitable for children, and others are best avoided by all citizens. Unfortunately, it’s those places that are now capturing the popular imagination, places that offer bomb-making instructions, pornography, advice on how to steal credit cards. They make cyberspace sound like a nasty place. Good citizens jump to a conclusion: Better regulate it.
5 But before using regulations to counter indecency it is fundamental to interpret the nature of cyberspace. Cyberspace isn’t a frontier where wicked people can grab unsuspecting children, nor is it a giant television system that can beam offensive messages at unwilling viewers. In this kind of real estate, users have to choose where they visit, what they see, what they do. It’s optional. In other words, cyberspace is a voluntary destination -----in reality, many destinations. You don’t just get “onto the net ”; you have to go someplace in particular. That means that people can choose where to go and what to see. Yes, community standards should be enforced, but those standards should be set by cyberspace communities themselves, not by the courts or by politicians in Washington.
6 What makes cyberspace so alluring is precisely the way in which it’s different from shopping malls, television, highways and other terrestrial jurisdictions. But let’s define the territory:
7 First, there are private e-mail conversations, similar to the conversations you have over the telephone. These are private and consensual and require no regulation at all.
8 Second, there are information and entertainment services, where people can download anything from legal texts and lists of “great new restaurants” to game software and dirty pictures. These places are like bookstores, malls and movie houses-----places where you go to buy something. The customer needs to request an item or sign up for a subscription; stuff (especially pornography) is not sent out to people who don’t ask for it. Some of these services are free or included as part of a broader service like CompuServe or America online; others charge and may bill their customers directly.
9 Third, there are “real” communities-----groups of people who communicate among themselves. In real-estate terms, they’re like bars or restaurants or bathhouses. Each active participant contributes to a general conversation, generally through posted messages. Other participants may simply listen or watch.. some services are supervised by a moderator; others are more like bulletin boards------anyone is free to post anything. Many of these services started out unmoderated but are now imposing rules to keep out unwanted advertising, extraneous discussions or increasingly rude participants.
10 Cyberspace communities evolve just the way terrestrial communities do: people with like-minded interests band together. Every cyberspace community has its own character. Overall, the communities on CompuServe tend to be more professional; those on America online, affluent young singles; prodigy, family-oriented. Then there are independents like echo, a hip, downtown new york service, or women’s wire, targeted to women who want to avoid the male culture prevalent elsewhere on the net. On the internet itself there are lots of passionate noncommercial discussion groups on topics ranging from Hungarian politics (Hungary online) to copyright law.
11 What’s unique about cyberspace is that it allows communities of any size and kind to flourish; in cyberspace, communities are chosen by the users, not forced on them by accidents of geography. This freedom gives the rules that preside in cyberspace a moral authority that rules in terrestrial environments don’t have. Most people are stuck in the country of their birth, but if you don’t like the rules of a cyberspace community, you can just sign off. Love it or leave it. Likewise, if parents don’t like the rules of a given cyberspace community, they can restrict their children’s access to it.
12 What’s likely to happen in cyberspace is the formation of new communities, free of the constraints that cause conflict on earth. Instead of a global village, which is a nice dream but impossible to manage, we’ll have invented another world of self-contained communities that cater to their own members’ inclinations without interfering with anyone else’s. the possibility of a real market-style evolution of governance is at hand. In cyberspace, we’ll be able to test and evolve rules governing what needs to be governed------intellectual property, content and access control, rules about privacy and free speech. Some communities will allow anyone in; others will restrict access to members who qualify on one basis or another. Those communities that prove self-sustaining will prosper (and perhaps grow and split into subsets with ever-more-particular interests and identities). Those that can’t survive----either because people lose interest or get scared off-----will simply wither away.
13 In the near future, explorers in the cyberspace will need to get better at defining and identifying their communities. They will need to put in place-----and accept-----their own local governments apart from terrestrial governments, just as the owners of expensive real estate often have their own security guards though they can call in the police to get rid of undesirable customers.
14 Then what should be done about undesirable material in cyberspace? What to do, for instance, about pornography? The answer is labeling, besides banning, questionable material. It makes sense for cyberspace participants themselves to agree on a scheme for questionable items, so that people or automatic filters can avoid them. It’s easy enough for software manufacturers to build an automatic filter that would prevent you or your child from ever seeing the undesired item on a menu. (it’s as if all the items were wrapped, with labels on the wrapper.) Someone who posted pornographic material under the title “kid-fun” could be sued for mislabeling.
15 Without a lot of fanfare, private enterprises and local groups are already producing a variety of labeling services, along with kid-oriented sites like kidlink and kids’Space. People differ in their tastes and values and can find services on the net that suit them in the same way they select books and magazines. Or they can wander freely if they prefer, making up their own itinerary.
16 In the end, our society needs to grow up. Growing up means understanding that there are no perfect answers, no all-purpose solutions, no government-sanctioned safe havens. We haven’t created a perfect society on earth, and we won’t have one in cyberspace either. But at least we can have individual choice-----and individual responsibility.
本文来源：https://www.2haoxitong.net/k/doc/4296f142b52acfc789ebc991.html
文档为doc格式