Freedom to Read vs. Obligation to Protect: New Technologies and Twenty-First-Century Policies

The explosion of new information technologies and their varied capacity to display and disseminate news, rumours, data, reports, confidential memoranda, and so on have raised anew the issue of freedom to read. This essay is an attempt to compare and contrast the period following World War II with a present-day environment of skirmishes, insurgencies, and small wars—and how a democratic society must cope with conflicting aims: protecting the social order and permitting the dangerous message. The essay reviews a variety of national interests, global constraints, and personal values in order to take account of a new situation that requires urgent attention. It concludes by noting that, on overview, the tensions between personal freedom and political order are of long standing. The capacity of the new information technologies to deliver messages in an accelerated time span is distinctive. The stress between freedom and order is greatest in the absence of a social consensus; it is sharply reduced when such a broad national consensus exists. Since the long span from 1950 to 2010 is marked by the breakdown of a cultural consensus, it is plain that the struggle of competing aims of freedom to read and retention of systemic cohesion is on the global agenda.