The headteacher at the Harris Academy in London has banned the pupils from using slang. This is not a new thing: Earlier this year, a school in Sheffield did the same thing, the Manchester Academy in Moss Side introduced a similar policy in 2008… and its exam results increased the following year.
UCB Radio asked me on the the Paul Hammond show to discuss the issue. You can listen to my contribution by following this link, or via the SoundCloud player below. Continue reading
Tag: free speech (Page 37 of 47)
I have worked for (and with) some courageous people at English PEN. I am often struck by the personal cost of exercising your right to free expression, and how damaging to life and finances taking stand can be.
For Banned Books Week, I was asked by Tor.com to write a piece on these people, the ‘Outliers’ who do the thing that most people would not.
Have you ever been stood up by Cory Doctorow? I have. Back in 2010 I was due to interview him at the London Book Fair about his latest novel For The Win. I read his entire back catalogue and planned loads of insightful questions, but when the time came for the interview in the PEN Literary cafe, he didn’t show up. Later, I received an e-mail from him with a preposterous and obviously made-up excuse about how his plane had been grounded by a volcano. So it was me on the stage with an empty chair. (My hastily written chat standard performance poem “The Empty Chair a.k.a Cory Doctorow Is Not Here Today” rocked YouTube, with literally dozens of views.) Continue reading
The Guardian reports:
Man arrested over Twitter threats to female MP and campaigner.
Police investigating threats to Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez say 32-year-old is being held in Bristol.
Some quick notes:
- Let us affirm that sending direct threats of violence to people is against the law. Arresting and charging such people is not an affront to free expression.
- In fact, the threats are themselves an act of censorship. They instill fear in the recipient, who may withdraw from the discourse.
- This arrest is in keeping with the Director of Public Prosecutions recent guidelines on dealing with social media messages. The guidelines recommend that direct threats and harassment should be proecuted ‘robustly’. Expect this chap in Bristol to be charged.
- Note that the police managed to track down this chap using existing powers and technical abilities.
- It is interesting that the man arrested is 32 years old. All the other arrests and convictions were of much younger men. Reece Messer (who trolled Tom Daley) was only 17.
I’m delighted to have spoken to the Washington Post for an article about the Twitter abuse furore:
“The worry is that the abuse button will be abused,” said Robert Sharp, a spokesman for English PEN, a literary group that promotes freedom of expression. “It puts the power of censorship into the hands of those who would be offended, which is fine when it’s a rape threat. But the same technology will be used by Christians to censor atheists, used by atheists to censor Christians, and so on.”
Credit where its due: Tom Phillips’ article on theTwitter abuse button was fresh in my mind when I spoke to the WaPo journalist. And there’s a huge body of work out there on the issue of ‘offence’ as a trigger for censorship. My turn of phrase “those who would be offended” is not natural speech, but its the sort of thing that springs to mind when you’ve been marinated in these kinds of arguments.
As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.
James Bridle is probably best known as the artist who first articulated ‘The New Aesthetic‘, but he has run many projects on books and technology. His project ‘The Iraq War‘ is a favourite of mine – the entire Wikipedia Edit History of the ‘Iraq War’ article, from 2005-2009, which stretches to twelve volumes. He’s also the creator of a Book of Tweets.
James’ projects are the inspiration of one of my own – The Defamation Act 2013: Complete & Unabridged. It collects together, in chronological order, every single parliamentary document published during the passage of the recent reform of our libel law. These include the various versions of the Bill (which I have previously published in a spliced together version, ‘Tracked Changes in the Defamation Bill‘), the parliamentary Hansard transcripts of the debates; and the amendment papers. Continue reading