What started with my urging readers to boycott Wal-Mart in response to the massive chain's refusal to carry albums with lyrics or cover images it finds objectionable became a week of furious emailing, Threads discussion, and follow-up columns. The journey started in middle America's one-stop shop, but it quickly delved into the political world of questions of freedom and censorship, our fears for our country and children, and who controls culture.
In my last column, I began to guide you on the Digital Freedom Tour I was treated to by my readers and correspondents in the past week. Today, we forge ahead.
Liberals and conservatives alike who contacted me seemed to share a common notion that they wanted to make their own choices about morality and values. Although people defining themselves as liberal were generally less phobic and disapproving about culture than those calling themselves conservative, both groups were suspicious of a corporation like Wal-Mart, with a hidden political agenda, forcing choices on them they wished to make themselves.
My mail showed that the libertarian streak on the Web is profound and ingrained. There was enormous concern for the rights of Wal-Mart or other corporations to buy and sell what they wanted. As the week wore on, however, many of the libertarians perceived that Wal-Mart was going further than making simple sales choices. Borders, for example, doesn't stock pornographic books, a move that isn't controversial.
Many offered to write Wal-Mart and urge them to moderate their cultural crusade, while expressing support for the idea that nobody should tell a company what or what not to sell.
The digital community is often criticized for creating narcissistic enclaves in which the like-minded talk to the like-minded. Not true. My column moved through many stratas of society, from college students to Wal-Mart employees to parents crusading for "decency" in teenage Web sites, mailing lists, and conferences. I heard from cops, priests, small retailers, music industry executives, rabid evangelicals, outspoken libertarians, rural gun people. The notion of the Web as a hive that sends ideas whizzing through different levels of politics and culture was borne out here.
Despite the fact that I got plenty of it, I concluded that hate mail isn't effective. Although I was plagued for days by mail-bombing campaigns and sometimes vicious mail sparked by groups used to bombarding politicians, TV networks, and businesses with protests, and other campaigns, this assault was so transparent and, in some cases, repulsive, that it was counterproductive - a genuine waste of time. Its primary impact was to galvanize support for the opposing point of view.
Nothing was more clear over the week than the fact that people approach freedom from many distinctly different perspectives. For older Americans, their wish was for freedom from contemporary culture and its sometimes ugly, raucous messages. They did not believe in the freedom to create offensive material, and supported any company or politician who wants to take it away.
After years of listening to phobic journalists and pandering politicians, the idea that pop culture is dangerous and is undermining life in America is deeply ingrained and widely shared.
For kids, the issue was freedom to access the culture they want and resentment at media and political stereotyping of them as stupid and vulnerable. Many parents are almost panicked over the wealth and diversity of information and culture now available to their children. The idea that the information flowing into children's view is no longer as controllable as it was may be one of the most frightening political ideas in contemporary American life.
Web libertarians I heard from simply don't want anybody telling anybody else what to do. The lefties are inherently suspicious of moral crusades. The conservatives don't like anybody telling them what choices to make. The gun owners want the freedom to buy and use firearms.
Was there a common ground in these messages? I thought so. In different ways, and from vastly different perspectives, the overwhelming bulk of these messages ended up saying the same thing: Freedom is important to people. They're willing to take the trouble to fire off messages about it - and keep on talking about issues like this, even when there is enormous disagreement.
The week left me with the strong feeling that there is great potential in this kind of political communication. Probably not many minds were changed. Rather, there was a softening of positions. I had the sense that if this discussion were continued, we could locate a position most of the people writing me could be comfortable with.
As I've learned before by writing on the Web, if the combatants get through the initial wave of posturing and declaration, more often than not they're able to actually communicate once some sort of personal - and respectful - link is made.
Many messages came from people of all ages who seemed almost completely unfamiliar with the way in which popular culture is controlled and shaped by large media, music, and entertainment conglomerates in conjunction with ever larger corporate outlets that control an ever bigger slice of the distribution of creative products.
In particular, many emailers seemed not to know that even though TV networks, movie studios, and record labels seem powerful, they are extraordinarily vulnerable to pressure from political, religious, so-called parents-for-decency groups, and cultural conservatives. These groups threaten legal action, bans, and boycotts against rap, rock, and hip hop music, movies like Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and TV broadcasting from Beavis & Butt-head to MTV videos.
A chain like Wal-Mart that sells more than 50 million CDs a year can substantially affect a CD's sales or a company's revenues. This knowledge now infects the creative process at every level of the music industry, report executives throughout music studios. Thus, while Wal-Mart might seem remote or insignificant to the urban music-lover, it is, in fact, one of the dominant influences on the way popular music is created.
The many emailers who scoff at the idea that a discount retailer with a folksy advertising campaign could have any impact on them are kidding themselves.
Scores of emailers had tales of Wal-Mart invading their towns, offering drastically low prices to drive out smaller retailers, then offering sanitized music or video products, portraying themselves as a wholesome family alternative to traditional retailing. Wal-Mart isn't taking a moral risk, any more than movie and music companies will. They are taking a marketing position designed to appeal to the mostly rural, conservative, and phobic customers they serve.
My unexpectedly intense freedom tour through the World Wide Web got a lot of people with radically different points of view talking to me - more than at any point in my life, surely - and then, more importantly, directly to one another.
It would be silly to romanticize or exaggerate the impact of the dialog or its outcome. But when the smoke cleared, what had happened was without question a new kind of political conversation.
It was no longer a dialog that goes on privately among Wal-Mart and the record companies, or that is dominated by pundits, talk-show hosts, priests, or politicians.
It was a conversation very much in the open, for and about us. It is, after all, our culture, our money, and our choice.
