Word: smolan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thanks to coincidence--and a turn of political events--the 24 hours Smolan chose to document were anything but a celebration. They fell on the very day last week that President Clinton signed a telecommunications bill, which contains easily the most reviled piece of legislation in cyberspace, the Communications Decency Act. The law imposes stiff penalties for posting or transmitting "indecent" material online--a provision that strips from online communications the First Amendment guarantees that protect the written and spoken word...
...Smolan's team of 150 professional photographers (and some 1,000 amateurs) fanned out around the world with digital as well as conventional cameras trying to capture images showing how the Internet is making a difference in people's lives, another group of Net pioneers was preparing to save the network from what they see as an all-out government attack. And while Smolan's editors worked feverishly to construct a colorful series of Web pages out of the flood of photos pouring in to "Mission Control" in San Francisco, hundreds of Internet protesters turned their Websites black...
...Back in Smolan's Mission Control, though, the Decency Act was mostly a side issue. Smolan declined to drape his pages in black, although he did include a fiercely worded attack on the legislation by Internet activist John Perry Barlow, and he did agree late in the day to add to his "Welcome" screen a blue ribbon signifying solidarity with the protesters. But he did not go out of his way to cover the protest; it is mentioned only briefly in the story that accompanies an electronic image of the Clinton signing ceremony...
...Indeed, Smolan's site gave few indications that cyberspace is anything but a realm of bliss. Among the thousands of images that streamed into San Francisco were ghetto kids in California playing computer games, Buddhist monks spreading the word online and wheelchair-using students in Thailand communicating with disabled kids all around the world...
...photo project proved anything, it was that nothing leaps over national boundaries like the Net. The pictures showed that, whether American, Vietnamese, Malaysian or Albanian, computer users hunched over their screens all look pretty much alike. Indeed, however inadvertently, Smolan may have advanced the protest against cybercensorship. At least some of the 1 million people estimated to have visited his Website last week saw, perhaps for the first time, that despite what some politicians would have us believe, the Internet carries much more than dirty pictures...