By Jackie Leong

Globe Editor
Welcome to the Internet: the place where there is absolutely enough room for anyone and everyone, and then some, and where it’s easy to find most anything. Forgo the dictionary, the stationary, the whole paper hassle. After all, why bother when, in the digital realm, everything one could ever want is just a click away? It’s constant, it’s instant, and it is enormously gratifying.
Enter the people. About 20,000 new web domains get added to the Internet each day. The Internet is essentially a forum –and a very free, uncensored, sometimes questionable one at that- so let the debate begin. The founding fathers, whose idea of “free speech” was fairly vague, probably never even fathomed that any of this could have existed. We think: a printing press and leaflets? Bah! Try Facebook, email, Google, blogs, Twitter. Twenty-first century free speech has, frankly, never been quite this free. After all, Obama is known as the first Internet president. What on earth could be possibly wrong with that?
Let’s dig a little deeper. First off, there are the chain messages- the ones that, for a lack of a better phrase, have “bashed” Obama, Palin, and countless others. Then, there’s the recent “Birthers” controversy, which, using the sheer power of the Internet, the group brought mass scrutiny to the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. Later, a forged Kenyan birth certificate was published on the Web in a rather obvious crack at Obama’s legitimacy. In the midst of this was a whirlwind of media, despite the fact that Obama’s (very American) birth certificate had already been produced during campaign season.
Now pause for a moment. Without the Internet, where would the Birthers be? Their desperate operation would have (probably) not even gotten off the ground. After all, in the old days, one had to raise money to mass-produce flyers, then stand outside for hours handing out said flyers. Then, those who had gotten a flyer would have had to read, believe, and then join the cause, to create such a massive upheaval.
It seems that with the Internet, where it’s easier than ever to get anything, it’s also easier to give information as well, be it one’s opinion or something completely fabricated. There is no requirement that we must confirm the information- we just have to know how to get it out to the widest audience possible. More and more (be they extremists or not) are finding a voice- and getting heard. Just check out Wikipedia.
Is it right? Where do free speech, and speaking just because we can, clash? How free is too free? We may have condemned the Birthers’ claims that Obama isn’t an American, and dismissed their opinions that he is thus unfit to be president. We may have uncovered the forgery in the so-called “real” birth certificate, and we may have written the Birthers off as a bunch of desperate people clutching at straws. We did all this rather good-naturedly (or perhaps were simply happy to have our talk-show ratings go up) but should we have had to?
It seems that the more opened-up our world becomes, the stranger the filler material turns out to be. And because we live in a world of free speech, the views that would have once been immediately discarded as illegitimate are now being given genuine, albeit unwarranted, attention.
Not to be a bit clichéd, but it’s all fun and games until something like this comes to pass: a ridiculous debate, magnified and blown out of proportion. It’s not to say that free speech shouldn’t have its place on the Internet, but something about these latest events hits a wrong chord. As the Internet is constantly making it easier for anyone to say anything and everything, we find ourselves having to sift through more and more garbage to get to what we were looking for in the first place.
It is safe to say that as readers, we, too, have a responsibility. It’s easier to get and give information, and in all of this, it is easier to believe as well- to look at anything we’ve read and take it as fact. The Internet, wonderful as it is, can’t be our one-stop. It can make or break someone: just look at Obama, our Internet president, picking his way out of this latest Internet “conspiracy”. We have to be wary. After all, if all the world’s a stage, then every crazy extremist with a WiFi and a blog (which, remember, is free) just got the luckiest break they could get, and, given the opportunity, they’re going to milk it for all they can get- every time.