Every once in a while I like to share something which takes the issue of Gun Violence Prevention far beyond the boundaries in which the issue is usually discussed. And in that respect, what Jonathan Zittrain wrote today in The New York Times should be read and given thoughtful consideration by everyone in GVP.
Zittrain is the co-founder of the Berkman-Klein Center, a Harvard-based research group which focuses on cyberspace, in particular the legal issues that abound regarding internet use and abuse. His editorial is a response to the decision by Apple to make a change in one of its iconic emojis, the revolver, so that it now looks like a water gun rather than the cap gun image that used to adorn lots of messages that I received from Gun-nut Nation over the years.
Although Apple isn’t saying anything outright, the decision to ‘de-lethalize’ this graphic and turn a gun into a plaything is no doubt a response to a campaign waged by New Yorkers Against Gun Violence to get this emoji removed from the approved emoji Unicode list so that it could no longer be attached to any message flying through cyberspace. The campaign asked supporters to tweet Apple’s CEO and send him a letter which reads, in part, “We ask that you stand with the American people and remove the gun emoji from all your products as a symbolic gesture to limit gun accessibility.” Evidently, the campaign worked.
Zittrain has no issue with the idea of Gun Violence Prevention per se. In fact, I suspect that given his background and training, he’s probably as interested in promoting gun ownership as the man in the moon. The problem, as he sees it, is that Apple’s decision to remove the gun emoji by basically turning the image into something else, raises the wider issue of who owns the internet and who should be making the rules on how we all use this technology to share and spread ideas.
This isn’t the first time that policing internet content about guns has been raised. Last year the Brady Campaign asked everyone to sign a petition that called for Facebook to police user content that promoted the sale of guns, in particular advertisements for private sales that were posted either by individuals or Facebook gun groups, a campaign that resulted in Facebook announcing a gun-sale ban although like any content restriction it’s a toughie to enforce.
But telling a company what they can sell or not sell on a proprietary website is one thing (commercial advertisements are not considered free speech) telling a company or an individual what they can say about a product is something else. And here, for Zitrain, is where the rubber meets the road. Because what he is arguing is that emojis have become not just a way to decorate a cyber-message, but now constitute a cyber vocabulary in and of themselves. As he says, “To eliminate an elemental concept from a language’s vocabulary is to reflect a sweeping view of how availability of language can control behavior, as well as a strange desire for companies — and inevitably, governments — to police our behavior through that language.”
And this brings us back to the central problem, namely, who can and should control what we say to one another, even if what is said constitutes something offensive, or something that a lot of people don’t like, or even promotes a type of behavior that we want to eliminate or change? Note the demand by NYAGV to get rid of the gun emoji as a ‘symbolic gesture,’ which is exactly what raised Zittrain’s concern; i.e., where do we set the border for acceptable versus unacceptable when we are talking about symbols which represent figures of speech?
The GVP community is dedicated to changing a culture which celebrates guns and gun violence as proper social norms. But Zittrain’s fears about how to strike a proper balance between what we want and what we do to get what we want deserves an audience too. His commentary should be read and shared.
Aug 16, 2016 @ 11:52:16
Sent from my iPhone Good piece >
Aug 16, 2016 @ 13:46:20
Last I checked Apple is a private company, so they are entitled to control what appears with their products. I don’t think an emoji has as much symbolic traction as say, the shape an arrow or and X does. An arrow actually has more since its directional value has been in use for centuries. An emoji has no value outside a very limited, very 21st century context. The value of a thing, in anthropology, is often measured in its endurance across time. Emojis are somewhat recent as forms of communication but in a very limited way, application, and very limited context. It would be like a 1st century Roman in Pompeii claiming to a fellow Roman his graffiti had intrinsic value which would get him laughed at. But today, a millennia later, they do matter and give archaeologists a sense of how Romans thought about themselves and others. Maybe, if emojis are still in use (which, given the hyper-changing nature of computer technology and the internet, I doubt they will be, ) a thousand years from now, they may tell future communications experts something about computer use and cyber-life in the early 21st century. But I don’t think changing one form for another is anything to be concerned with. At most its a sign of how society plagued with gun violence is trying to reduce it in a variety of ways. It’s true, no one owns the Internet for the same reason no one owns water or air; but if you want access to it, (if you don’t want to be your own Internet server,) you’ll likely have to learn to live with a few restrictions and the exchange of the image of one emoji for another is not really a communication crisis.
Aug 16, 2016 @ 13:57:45
That’s not Zittrain’s argument. What he’s saying is that emojis have become a communication tool and therefore are now in the public domain, not proprietary. I wouldn’t bother to write a column if this was an issue about a proprietary product. It’s a discussion about cultural change.
Aug 17, 2016 @ 14:23:08
Zittrain also notes the potential for confusion here: “…a squirt gun sent from an iPhone will turn into a handgun when received by an Android device, and vice versa.” Thus, one may do more harm than good in sending what turns out to be inappropriate symbolic messages.
Otherwise, a gun symbol is not much different in terms of speech as the word gun, and I doubt Apple or most Internet providers wish to get into the business of, as Zittrain says the Chinese do, police communications on its devices looking for a set of proscribed words. NYAGV is not only exhibiting a bit of hubris when it says it speaks for “the American people”, but it is exhibiting extreme hubris when it tries to police Internet speech on the basis of what would almost certainly be protected content. NYAGV notwithstanding, pictures of guns don’t meet the definition of obscenity.
I really doubt most Americans have a Maslow’s Gun syndrome. I wonder if tactics such as working to ban cartoon characters of guns on smart phones actually backfires in the benefit to cost ratio for the GVP community. As far as GVP, we have much bigger fish to fry. Now, I will have to go find that emoji.