It's a tough call between the storms of email and opinion that have resulted from my columns about censorship, Bill Gates, William Bennett, and new politics, but looking back over my time as an online journalist, I'm certain that it's the great Wal-Mart fracas of 1996 that struck the deepest nerve.
It began with a series of columns I wrote criticizing Wal-Mart for effectively sanitizing music through its store policies. I cited articles in The New York Times and elsewhere pointing out that Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer of CDs, and that in order to get their CDs onto its shelves, record producers were deleting songs, revamping CD covers and altering lyrics - often without the knowledge of the purchaser.
In the few cases where artists and labels refused to alter their work to Wal-Mart's satisfaction, the chain wouldn't carry their releases, and artists and companies risked losing up to 10 percent of potential sales. Wal-Mart not only conceded that it engaged in this practice; it appeared quite proud of it.
A number of mostly younger CD buyers had been emailing me for some time prior to the columns, expressing anger and frustration at Wal-Mart, where certain artists' work was simply unavailable. In other cases, they'd purchased CDs only to later discover that words or entire songs were missing.
The kids grasped instantly what many of their elders still haven't: this corporation, along with other giant retailers including some theater chains and Blockbuster Video, is altering the marketplace so as to deprive us all of the right to make our own choices about what we find proper and offensive.
Since we can't choose or even know about what we can't see, hear, or isn't even produced, we lose one of the most fundamental freedoms - to make our own individual and family choices about morality.
Almost offhandedly, I called for a boycott of Wal-Mart stores. Although I never seriously imagined a widespread boycott of Wal-Mart, I thought it was remotely possible the issue would become enough of a publicity headache for the greedy, expansionist company that they just might let people buy and choose the music they wanted, rather than filter it for them.
The columns did, in fact, generate some publicity in magazines and local newspapers. And a number of Wal-Mart employees have emailed me with the information that the company is playing down its "sanitizing" campaign in the hopes that opposition to their censorship practices won't grow or spread, at least partially because of the publicity generated by the Times, HotWired, The Economist, and other media.
"Wal-Mart is nervous because it already faces tremendous opposition when it moves into new locales, because by now, the local businesses know they're dead if Wal-Mart gets in and that the company will drive as many of them out of business as they can while building a few playgrounds for the town. Since the company isn't acting out of nobility anyway, but because their marketing shows parents like this policy, especially in rural areas, they're not prepared to go over the cliff with it," messaged a retired Wal-Mart public-relations executive.
I also thought it would be unprecedented - and healthy - for advocates of free speech to force a company not to censor something - like CDs. If companies come to fear bad publicity from people who oppose censorship as much as they react to numerous censorship campaigns organized by so-called "children's advocates," they might stick to selling things rather than shaping culture.
The columns brought thousands of supportive as well as critical messages - including mailbombs; the digital social brouhaha went on for weeks.
The controversy transformed Threads as well, providing a peek at the power of digital media to put wildly divergent constituencies directly in touch with one another for the first time. Kids responded to parents. Conservatives fought with First Amendment fanatics. Moralists fought hackers; church ladies went toe to toe with webheads. I heard from scores of businesspeople run out of business as Wal-Mart undercut their prices.
After a few weeks, my editor and I decided that we needed to move on. Yet the email debates have continued. I can't remember logging on when there hasn't been a message about this subject.
Some of my correspondents have only recently read the columns and come after me with fresh outrage and energy - there is no argument against my position that I haven't heard; others have been slugging it out determinedly for months.
The issues involved here are as unresolved online as in the culture and society beyond. The depth of the cultural chasm is revealed, and the related questions it generates are remarkable.
One effect of interactivity, I've found, is that controversy almost invariably leads me to rethink and often soften or alter my position. But the opposite has happened here. I have been surprised at the widespread ignorance about how modern corporations, in and outside the media, limit creativity and pubic discussion.
I've seen that many groups in this country have little understanding about people outside their immediate communities. And, more than anything, the controversy underscores the considerable confusion and division about the impact of corporations on popular culture and about the nature of censorship in America.
From the flood of email that still continues, I've observed:
Few people know or accept that Wal-Mart's practices - the nation's largest retailer of CDs acting as our moral guardian - are profoundly altering the way music is produced and marketed.
Few seem to understand that censorship isn't limited to governmental entities; that large corporations are deeply and continuously engaged in censorship of movies, TV programs, and magazines, as well as music. That when retail outlets as large as Wal-Mart or Blockbuster Video refuse to sell certain kinds of CDs or movies, those CDs and movies are less likely to get made in the first place.
Few people realize how large corporations - using marketing, legal, and other constraints - work to limit our creative, informational, and cultural offerings by pursuing safe, noncontroversial content. One of their many side effects is that smaller retailers who will sell more diverse kinds of creative offerings are driven from business, making the things Wal-Mart and Blockbuster don't like unavailable not only in their chain outlets, but everywhere.
Few Americans see the way large corporations from Disney to Westinghouse have ravaged mainstream media, posing a far greater menace to freedom on the Web than the goofy Communications Decency Act ever could. The Microsofting of the Internet is not some paranoid fantasy, but a multibillion-dollar project well underway.
The most consistent challenges to my columns come from the people who argue that censorship can only come from governments. Thus, what Wal-Mat does can't really be called censorship and can't really be considered dangerous.
They see Wal-Mart's decision to sell only CDs it considers proper as the exercise of good economic citizenship. The fact that it's altering the way music is being made and sold, often in unseen and undisclosed ways, strikes them as a moral marketplace at work, and they approve. Nor are they bothered by the fact that individual consumers are increasingly deprived of the opportunity to make their own choice about morality and culture - it is done for them long before they walk into the store.
Besides, say these Wal-Mart defenders, consumers can always go elsewhere for their CDs. Wal-Mart has the right to sell what it likes, and the obligation as well to refuse to sell anything it considers immoral.
"You just don't get it. Only governments censor," a manufacturer from Missouri emailed me this week. "If people don't like what Wal-Mart is doing, they can sue," said another messager, deriding my argument that for 14-year-olds in Arkansas who unwrap and play their Nirvana CDs at home only to learn that songs are missing, kids whose parents are thrilled that Wal-Mart is doing their supervising for them, a lawsuit isn't a viable option.
"If you don't like Wal-Mart, go someplace else," emailed a teacher, rejecting my repeated arguments that if corporations like Wal-Mart continue to sanitize culture and media, there will be few places left to go.
At the heart of this intense and ongoing debate is censorship itself, and jarringly different perceptions of what it is. My sense is that most of the people emailing me are quite supportive of free speech and open expression. They would be outraged if the government restricted speech - or music.
But like many others on the Net and the Web, they have a curious resistance to seeing censorship as having an economic dimension. And a high threshold for curbs on the creative expression of other people. I've never heard from a music lover who doesn't hate Wal-Mart.
But the disinterested see no common ground. Free to express themselves and not personally interested in the kinds of culture being censored, they're unable to muster much outrage at the premier censors in our country today - large corporations, new to the business of controlling information but already quite good at it.
The notion that only governments censor is a widespread belief on the Net and the Web. Censorship is the Communications Decency Act, something passed by Congress or mandated by the FCC. It involves heavyhanded federal agents, midnight raids, confiscated computers, jail terms.
Anything else is just the free will of individuals and companies or the quixotic nature of the marketplace.
I profoundly disagree.
I would challenge those of you who think that way to do some homework, and to rethink the very narrow definitions of censorship, to recognize the increasing censorship directly and indirectly practiced by the corporations that have taken over much of American media, with little challenge from either the press, Congress, national political figures, or federal regulatory agencies.
