This week, via the wonders of the World Wide Web and email, I got to take a Digital Freedom Tour. It wasn't like one of those narrated Disney journeys into our patriotic past, either. It was much more revealing.
My column last Friday on Wal-Mart, much to my amazement, touched off a spectacular series of responses, from outraged protests, to hateful and destructive mail-bombing assaults, to enormous outpourings of support, especially from kids and younger people.
Initially, I wrote that Wal-Mart was causing the content of music and movies to be altered by only selling CDs and videos that conformed to its notions of morality.
The company's policies have resulted in edited, neutered, and sanitized music (changed lyrics, changed jackets, and deleted songs), and was causing craven music and movie companies to significantly alter the content of music and movies in order to get into Wal-Mart, now one of the largest pop music channels in the world.
I said I wouldn't shop at Wal-Mart in protest, and urged others to do the same. I didn't see the column as particularly controversial. Two days later, my computer (my Mac, then my PowerBook) crashed after a mail-bomb campaign from Wal-Mart supporters.
This assault, which included mail-bomb duplicating programs, viruses, and old-fashioned hate mail, went on for four days.
Apart from these assaults, the column touched the deepest nerve I've ever poked. Even before the mail-bomb attacks, I'd received thousands of messages in protest and disagreement. Over the weekend, as tends to happen on the Web, the tenor of the email gradually changed, and by the beginning of the week had turned overwhelmingly supportive as people got to express themselves and check in in waves.
I couldn't begin to count the total responses, but was intrigued by how different perspectives on freedom are, depending on age, cultural interests, politics and geography. In today's column and the next one, I'll take you along on the whirlwind educational tour:
In general, the older the emailers were, and the more rural and suburban, the more supportive they were of efforts to turn the cultural clock back to a saner, more "moral" time. They saw Wal-Mart as an entity finally willing to take a stand against the corrosive garbage pouring into their communities online, and via music and TV.
Cultural forms like rap generate an enormous amount of fear and anger, and are widely blamed for crime, illegitimate births, and, more generally, the decline of America.
The digirati, like other information elites, are skewed in their perspective, taking enormous freedom of access to culture pretty much for granted. Many in the digital world live in sophisticated urban centers like New York, San Francisco, Austin, or Chicago. Skilled online, they are used to access to whatever they want via the Web as well as retail stores. Most of them have little firsthand experience at censorship.
Many found it ludicrous that anybody would buy music at Wal-Mart, a common theme expressed in the first wave of messages. They were even more startled to learn - many just refused to believe it - that Wal-Mart is the largest pop music retailer in America, having sold 52 million CDs last year, and were also skeptical that a discount retail chain could possibly have much influence on culture, music, or movies.
By far the most powerful email I received was from suburban and rural young people in more remote places - Utah, parts of the South, the Midwest. Their anger and frustration at being dependent on stores like Wal-Mart was striking. Many told stories of seeing Wal-Mart come to their communities and then watching as their favorite music, clothing, and other retail stores - where they could buy things that helped them express their individuality - vanished, leaving them with no choice but to buy sanitized CDs or - in the case of many rap artists - not being able to buy them at all.
Many recounted the experience of buying a Wal-Mart CD only to go home and hear blank spots, interrupted songs, or find songs missing completely. Many talked of angry and fearful parents who would destroy CDs they didn't like on sight, search through their mail for contraband music, search their rooms for CDs with unwholesome lyrics or titles, forbid time online.
For these kids, the loss of music stores, havens, and gathering spots for like-minded kids was profound, their cultural isolation piercing. They reported facing enormous disapproval about the Net, TV, and other forms of culture. For them, getting to favorite artists and TV shows, and getting online were constant struggles, made much worse by the Wal-Marting of their cultural lives.
In many ways, this entire controversy was about them, their cultural lives, and their futures, but they constituted only a few hundred of the many thousands of messages I received, and most of the email talked over and around them, as if they didn't really exist as human beings capable of making moral or rational choices.
The hostility toward the young was palpable, most of the people supporting Wal-Mart either indifferent to what younger people thought or seeing them as too vulnerable and weak-minded to participate in any discussions about their lives.
Gun owners, who made up an impressive portion of my correspondents, were articulate, reasoned, and supportive. I've written about gun violence before, and never found myself on the same side of any issue as the gun lobby. But individual gun users were quite quick to grasp the implications of Wal-Mart's efforts to make culture more wholesome. The gun owners' notion of freedom was elemental: Kids and their parents should have the right to buy uncensored music, and have the right to buy guns.
They also had firsthand experience with Wal-Mart's fluid notions of morality: The company won't sell rap artists it doesn't like, but sells guns, knives, and ammunition. It stopped selling handguns last year after victims of gun violence and their families began suing them.
Next: More parties heard from, and lessons learned from the Wal-Mart controversy.
