The article is here; an excerpt:
I think we need to update the metaphors we use around free speech. Everyone can see that our communication tools and practices are evolving fast, with a mix of welcome and unwelcome results. But there is an aspect of this evolution that is seriously underappreciated. Our communication tools and practices are increasingly subject to standardizing and homogenizing pressures. We are being corralled into a narrower range of devices and methods for talking to each other. We need to actively strategize about how to deal with the threat that this homogenization poses to our abilities as creative, reflective, thinking beings. But first, we need to recognize it as a threat.
The dominant moral metaphor in free speech discourse—namely, the marketplace of ideas—inadvertently desensitizes us to this threat. This metaphor invites us to worry, primarily, about authorities controlling the ideological content of public communication. At the same time, it analogically portrays homogenization in our methods of communication as something benign or even good. We need another metaphor that frames this homogenization as something to worry about.
Cities are more liveable when they are connected, when they have an integrated mix of trains, cars, buses, cycle paths, and walking paths, which provide a diverse array of locomotive affordances. Similarly, societies are more liveable if they enable us to use a variety of idea-transmission media with diverse communicative affordances with respect to expressive formats (text, voice), stylistic options, breadths of audience, and tempos of exchange. We should be able to freely exchange ideas and information, subject to reasonable caveats. But we should not be content with this measure of freedom. We should also be free to exchange ideas using a heterogeneous repertoire of media and methods, suited to various communicative purposes. We should have a connected city of ideas.
