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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Public and private in South Africa
Paul Jacobson · Johannesburg Gauteng (South Africa) · Oct 17th, 2007 11:41 pm · 21 votes · no comments made
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| Apartheid Posters 2, by mvcorks at http://flickr.com/photos/mvcorks/ |
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Traditionally there has been a gulf between the public and private spheres. The public sphere has been the realm of government and The Man which has overseen and has meddled in the private sphere; the domain of private individuals and private business. Freedom of expression was an ideal. It was certainly not guaranteed by any measure and private forms of expression were constantly held to a moral standard developed and imposed by a small minority. Censorship was commonplace and, at its worst, was evident in numerous blacked out passages and words deemed by government censors to be against public policy or perhaps just the politics of the day.
For the most part the Apartheid government's censorship efforts had a political motivation and were intended to preserve the ideology of white, Afrikaans conservatism and root out any seditious content, notably of the communist variety (even the term "communist" had a pretty wide definition). The dominant ideology was the State's ideology informed strongly by conservative Christian values promoted by a legislature dominated by the National Party also responsible for the introduction of Apartheid. It was also protected by sympathetic judges whose decisions guided the enforcement of the dictates from above. That being said, there were a number of judges who worked within the parameters of the law in force to mitigate the harsh effects of those laws. Both groups of judges played their roles in the freedom of expression debate in Apartheid South Africa.
The bottom line is that any form of liberal expression was regarded with considerable suspicion and this was hardly conducive to an open exchange of ideas among equals. The private sphere of the day was virtually underground, certainly the more radical forms of expression. All this began to change with the unbanning of organisations like the African National Congress and the adoption of one of the most liberal Constitutions of the time in 1994. Even then there was a clear distinction between the public and private spheres. The Bill of Rights, arguably the central feature of the new Constitution, didn't apply to both the public and private spheres in all respects. The interim Constitution (the 1994 Constitution was designed to be an interim Constitution until the 1996 Constitution was finalised and ratified) tended towards a vertical application in many respects, that is it applied as between the State and private persons. It was only with the adoption of the 1996 Constitution, which had greater horizontal application (between private persons), that South Africans found considerably more freedom to express themselves in ways that were simply not permissible in our dark past.
The right to freedom of expression in the 1996 Constitution goes beyond the traditional freedoms of speech and the press and encompasses artistic expression, academic freedom and the simple freedom to exchange ideas. In short, it is a fertile ground for the development of the Commons in the private sphere and it is protected by the public sphere. It is a stark contrast to the old days when the public sphere did anything but protect the expressive rights of the inhabitants of the private sphere. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity for collaboration between the public and the private for the cultivation of our collective heritage and a wonderful example of this is Constitution Hill and the Constitutional Court building in particular which contains a number of pieces of art hand picked by the judges and placed on public display.
In the face of such tremendous potential there is a growing spectre of State censorship in the guise of initiatives to guard against child pornography and hate speech as well as growing intolerance in government to opposing views. One example of these initiatives is the proposed amendment to the Film and Publications Act which purports to introduce measures to guard against child pornography. The problem with this proposed amendment is that it ignores the nature of the Social Web and will introduce a series of mechanisms that are impossible to enforce. For example, the draft amendment potentially requires that a range of user-created content on the Web be approved only after payment of hefty fees by the content creator (content affected by the draft amendment would have to be rated by the Film and Publications Board and a fee is payable for all content submitted for approval and rating) but which also constitute an unreasonable limitation on the freedom of expression. Granted, child pornography is something that should be fought against but there are less restrictive measures to achieve this. These initiatives are still in their early stages but it is more important than ever to be vigilant and fanatical about the protection of these rights. Censorship is not acceptable and freedom of expression should be jealously guarded both by the public and private spheres if the Commons is to develop even further into a vibrant marketplace of ideas and artistic expression.
tags: johannesburg south africa policy-law public private global-commons local-context south-africa apartheid
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