The article is here; the Introduction:
Without a doubt, the most widely read and closely studied argument for the freedom of speech ever written appears in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Marking in 1959 the centennial of the essay's publication, Isaiah Berlin opined that Mill's "words are today alive and relevant to our own problems; whereas the works of James Mill, and of Buckle and Comte and Spencer, remain huge, half-forgotten hulks in the river of nineteenth-century thought." According to Berlin:
Mill's central propositions are not truisms, they are not at all self-evident…. They are still assailed because they are still contemporary…. Mill looked at the questions that puzzled him directly, and not through spectacles provided by any orthodoxy…. One of the symptoms of this kind of three-dimensional, rounded, authentic quality is that we feel sure that we can tell where he would have stood on the issues of our day…. Surely that alone is some evidence of the permanence of the issues with which Mill dealt and the degree of his insight into them. Because … his conception of man was deeper, and his vision of history and life wider and less simple than that of his utilitarian predecessors or liberal followers, he has emerged as a major political thinker in our own day.
Berlin's "day" was the middle of the twentieth century. My question is whether sixty-five years later he plausibly could have maintained Mill's contemporaneity in the face of the various ways that digital technology has altered the dynamics of human belief formation and persuasion.
To address this question, I identify the distinctive concerns, assumptions, concepts, objectives, and derivations that have given Mill's argument its preeminence for a century and a half. Then I canvass the changes wrought by digital technology in how speakers formulate their messages and generate attention to them, and how audiences notice, receive, and potentially act on such messages. Finally, I assess whether, in the light of such changes, On Liberty remains an instructive resource for thinking about what Mill terms "the liberty of thought and discussion" and its cognate liberties.
And the concluding paragraphs:
