If you think censorship is just a lofty issue raging on the Web’s most powerful sites and in the halls of Congress, or if you consider blocking software a rational way to deal with speech on the Internet, fly over to the Pet Bird Web site. There’s a battle on bird chat groups.
Zara Heartwood of Madison, Wisconsin, assistant editor for the Canadian Lumber Reporter, a part-time psychic, and a bird-lover, fears being run off the cockatoo topic on the bird chat.
Her transgression?
Triggering the site’s filtering software and arousing the site’s webmaster by using a Latin word that the software misinterpreted as profane.
The bird chat works on IRC – Internet Relay Chat, where anyone with Net access can go for real-time, free talk 24 hours a day – and is part of a BBS hosted by a group called “Up At Six” via Pet Bird’s site.
Communications Decency Act or no, the feathers are flying right here.
Pet Bird bills itself as “The Internet’s most complete source for pet bird care and information,” and it delivers on the claim. Bird-lovers, uh, flock there to buy food and treats and toys and books; they peruse listings of avian associations and learn how to market their aviaries. Breeders connect with buyers and lost birds with their bereft owners.
The bird chat ‘Too Ville operates under this site. In the proud tradition of the Web, bird people have formed a strong community where they share information, argue about avian issues, and help each other through their bird crises.
The bird chat forums on Pet Bird are lively, sometimes intense. I was taken with the “bird saddles” topic, linked to a Web page on which a woman displays the bird saddle her cockatoo wears. Elsewhere, I noticed an effort to quell the panic over “zinc hysteria,” in a topic devoted to reassuring exotic bird owners that the zinc used to manufacturer cages wasn’t as dangerous as some feared.
Some people have argued that sex is the killer app driving much of the growth of the Web culture, but animal lovers are probably as strong a contender.
On the Up at Six topic, bird chat posters were commiserating over the sleep disruption that Zara’s Goffin cockatoo, named Miraq, was enduring because of Zara’s work schedule. Like so many other 18-week-old infants, Miraq wasn’t sleeping through the night.
Since Zara does psychic readings at night – she also draws people’s auras, she keeps weird hours. “I’m not noisy,” she messaged, “but I can be a distraction for a birdie who needs things absolutely quiet.”
Eventually, Zara wrote, she hoped Miraq would accept that the sound of her voice on the phone was reassuring. “Her cage is beside my cockatiel’s in the dining room,” she wrote, “which I have turned into a study-cum-bedroom.”
Whoops. That was enough. The system administrator’s monitoring program picked up “cum” in her message, Zara reports, and decided it constituted profanity. After receiving warning that she could, as others had in the past, be banned from the system, Zara posted a cautionary farewell to her fellow chatters: “I was just labeled profane by the system for posting a Latin word which means in English ‘the same as.'” It had been wonderful sharing information, she wrote, just in case “I get banned from this chat room.”
Her fellow aviaphiles begged Zara to stay on. One reported that she too had gotten in trouble for using a “word that starts with ‘H’ and rhymes with ‘corny.'” (She didn’t explain the bird-related context for this word, but I’m investigating).
The bird-chat battle is a terrific example of the nutso phobia about pornography that rages around the Internet and mainstream media, fueled by clueless journalists and mindless politicians.
Bird chat, of course, is not about dirty words but community. And Zara is an unlikely pornographer. Next week she’s heading to LA to fulfill a lifelong dream – she’s going to spend four days with the Dalai Lama.
The members of bird chat worry not only about their avian pets, but about one another, in ways that the Internet makes possible.
“Best wishes with Miraq,” posted one member to Zara. “Don’t give up on the chat. It is a good place with lots of good people, even the webmaster. I am sure he will reinstate you and remove that word from his bad word list.”
This poster had it right. Bird chat is a good place. For it to be threatened with this kind of pointless conflict says nothing about the site itself, but much about the culture outside its boundaries. Just a few weeks ago, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut joined the ranks of the underemployed legislative blockheads in Washington, making front pages all over America by announcing the findings of yet another study tallying how many out-of-wedlock sexual references there were on TV during the “family hour.”
This type of sleight of hand – continuously tinkering with freedom in the name of advancing morality – was ruthlessly chronicled by H. L. Mencken in the days when journalists were allowed to express opinions and torment pious politicians.
Mencken wrote often about the collision between freedom and society, between free expression and probity. One of his metaphors was especially apt:
“There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.”
Mencken says the impulse of the free spirit to speak “his own mind freely, to be his own man, comes into early and painful collision with the democratic dogma that such things are not nice – that the most worthy and laudable citizen is that one who is most like all the rest.”
Zara deserves better. She hasn’t yet heard from the webmaster, so her fate – and her access to bird advice – hangs in the balance.
As of this week, Zara is still able to message about Miraq. The Webmaster may, in fact, be a nice person. But she is braced for the worst. You can email her, or visit her homepage.
“I am still able to post on the chat, so it would seem the sword is not as swift as the keyboard,” she messaged me. But she’ll be more self-conscious whenever she uses the Net in the future, she says. “The cyber-censor preempts us all.”
