313 Social Control & "Free Speech"

Andrew Young
Social Control
313 Colin O.

On August 19th, 2009 an article came out about a man who had been blogging about "skanks in NYC". This blog(on Google) also talked about a certain model, Liskula Cohen, who is about the age of 37, who has appeared in magazines and photos for Vogue, and all those popular ones. She was referred to as a "Skank" and "Old Hag" and she found out about, pressing charges against Google, for the identity of the man. She got favor from the court and Google now must hand over the identity of the man to this woman. Most would say, including the bloggers lawyer that it was just a type of "trash talk" and that many people talk this way not only over the Internet but everywhere. The man was very much insulting her, but he has the right too, and the point of the matter is should we not be allowed to say what we want.

So Free Speech is an issue here, whether we can say anything we want or is that not right? That we must watch every word we say because our identity and safety is at jeopardy? I don't really know, i believe though that this falls under a social control, how now governments/ courts are trying to to stop what we are saying and find out who are are because of things we say. Its hard for the government now with the Internet to find people like this, and now the door is open for them to take any information from groups like Google to grab hold of individuals.

Now people have to watch what they say and make sure that when talking about anything, that we wont be put into a situation where we have our identities known to governments groups. This might trigger many other lawsuits that were the same as this and can have either negative or positive outcomes. The positive is that people will stop saying crude things like this but on the negative out online privacy is gone.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/google-identity-blogger/