Building a Better (Critical Democratic) Speech Culture: Feminist Blogs and Freedom of Speech

• Main Author: Dean, E. Michelle
• Other Authors: Nedelsky, Jennifer
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: internet; feminism; blogs; freedom of expression; deliberative theory; online discussion; 0398; 0615
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/30570

This thesis uses our lived experience of speech online to analyse the most common justification for freedom of speech: the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. It opens with an account of a conversation in the feminist blogosphere that explicitly addressed the operation of social power in discussion. The lessons of that conversation is compared to accounts of the marketplace of ideas metaphor offered by theorists like Sunstein, Fiss, and Boyd White, as well as more internet-oriented theorists like Lessig, Benkler and Balkin. From that, and building on the insights of critics like Fraser and Mansbridge, the thesis argues that we ought to reject the "liberal-economic" paradigm of the function of speech and deliberation in a democracy, and proposes that we replace the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor with that of a "critical democratic culture." The thesis concludes by illustrating the usefulness of that new metaphor through the example of hate speech.