A Blogger's Manifesto

There was never such a thing as true freedom of speech. In the past, in order to speak freely you had to have access to a printing press, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. And everywhere you had to get past the editors. Only members of the elite ever did the articulate and well-behaved 'representatives' of ordinary people. But those ordinary people hardly, if ever, had a chance to speak publicly and freely. Until now. The age of blogging has begun. The internet revolution has given us all a chance to be irreverent, blasphemous and ungrammatical in public. We can reveal secrets, blow whistles, spill beans or just make stuff up. The old elites don't like it. In fact, they really, really hate it. Blogs are commonly shut down, and bloggers are silenced, reprimanded and fired from their jobs. Suddenly modern liberal society reveals a repressive face that few of us knew existed. Should we behave ourselves? Should we fall silent? Absolutely not! Let's call them on their hypocrisy. Let's demand that modern liberal society lives by the principles it claims to embrace. Bloggers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your gags.

Erik Ringmar is Professor at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He is the author of Interest, Identity & Action (CUP, 2007) and Surviving Capitalism: How We Learned to Live with the Market and Remained Almost Human (Anthem, 2005). He received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1993.