Black home pages (fwd)

[MARY N. HERNANDEZ]

With Maryly's permission, I am forwarding this to you.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 19:00:05 EST
From: Maryly Snow <slides at ced.berkeley.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list ARLIS-L <ARLIS-L at UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject: Black home pages

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I sent email earlier about this protest, but the following
letter is so eloquent and interesting that I am posting
it as well.  Thanks,
Maryly Snow
UC Berkeley
Architecture Slide Library
slides at ced.berkeley.edu
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                              FEBRUARY 6, 1996
>                                             Contact:  Steven Cherry
>                                                      (201) 596-2851
>                                                         stc at vtw.org
>                                                      Shabbir Safdar
>                                                      (718) 596-2851
>                                                     shabbir at vtw.org
>
> New York, NY
>
>
>           INTERNET DAYS OF PROTEST TO BEGIN WHEN
>                PRESIDENT SIGNS TELECOMM BILL
>                           INTO LAW
>
>
> When there's a funeral in New Orleans, they don't just stand around
> looking at a casket, there's a marching band, and when they mourn on the
> Internet there's lots of noise as well. Virtual noise that is. Inside the
> casket lies the First Amendment, and the noise is people turning their
> World Wide Web sites black.
>
> The last gasp for the First Amendment will be heard later this week when
> President Clinton signs the long-awaited Telecommunications Reform Bill.
> Buried just below its surface, like a bomb waiting to explode, lies the
> descendant of the Communications Decency Act, legislative language that
> will ban "indecency" in cyberspace. George Carlin-style indecency,
> broadcast-media style indecency. An FCC-enforced ban on indecency, as if
> the government could monitor the millions of Web pages, Usenet postings,
> email listservers, and chat messages generated across the Internet each
> day. As if American law could restrict what's available on a global
> Internet, where pinup photos, cancer support-group advice, and currency
> exchanges can move at the same speed and in packets that are essentially
> indistinguishable, and servers can move around the globe in a way that
> physical goods manufacturers can only look at, black with envy.
>
> Black, as in the traditional color of mourning. The Grim Reaper wears
> black. Judges wear black -- black robes symbolize a lack of favor to one
> side or the other. The black of the "Day Without Art."  The black that
> people wear at funerals, to underline the loss of something important to
> them.
>
> On the Internet, a network, a networked community, based entirely on
> speech, nothing is more important the freedom from censorship enjoyed up
> to the moment when President Clinton's pen puts an asterisk next to the
> First Amendment, an asterisk that says, "except on-line speech," an
> asterisk it will probably take the Supreme Court months, if not years
> to erase.
>
> That black can be seen at http://www.surfwatch.com/, a popular site on
> the Internet, and an especially ironic one to see it in. Surfwatch is
> devoted to perfecting just the kind of parental controls that work far
> more effectively than any government regulation could, and which
> facilitate free speech instead of criminalizing it.
>
> That black can be seen at sites large and small, commercial and
> noncommercial. Christopher L. Barnard, who maintains Illinois Virtual
> Tourist, says that his black pages are all ready to be loaded as soon as
> he hears the bill is signed.
>
> Turning the pages black, involves changing the backgrounds so that light
> text appears on a dark background. It may not be aesthetically desirable,
> as some, who are changing their pages anyway, have pointed out. It can
> involve proprietary extensions to the formatting language of the Web,
> complain others. It's been characterized the "Paint it Black" campaign by
> some, and the "Thousand Points of Darkness" by others.
>
> All in all, just the sort of free-wheeling, outspoken, opinionated
> activity that has characterized the Internet since its inception over
> twenty years ago. "What can we do?" asks Shabbir Safdar, co-founder of
> Voter's Telecommunications Watch, one of the many on-line activist
> organizations organizing the campaign. "It also can't be seen by
> text-only Web browsers, or by people with net-access that doesn't include
> the Web. But we couldn't let the day go by unmarked." The campaign asks
> Web-based information providers to turn their pages to black for
> forty-eight hours after the President signs the telecomm bill into law.
>
> Sometimes it is easy to comply. Josh Quittner of Time-Warner's
> Pathfinder, says, "Heck, our pages are black half the time anyway. But
> for those two days they'll be black because of the telecomm bill."
> Pathfinder is one of the largest and most-used sites on the Internet.
>
> Sheryl Stover, marketing director at Internet On-Ramp, Inc., of Austin,
> Texas, said her personal page is already black. But all non-client pages
> are being altered from Monday February 5th through the two day period
> after Clinton's pen adds a black-ink graffiti scrawl across the Bill of
> Rights.
>
> SurfWatch can be contacted at http://www.surfwatch.com/ or 800-458-6600.
>
> Christopher L. Barnard and the Illinois Virtual Tourist can be reached at
> 312-702-8850, ilinfo-www at cs.uchicago.edu, and
> http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/html/external/illinois/index.html.
>
> Pathfinder's Netly News can be found at
> http://pathfinder.com/Netly/nnhome.html
>
> Sheryl Stover and the Internet On-Ramp, Inc. are at 509-624-RAMP and
> http://www.ior.com/
>
> Voters Telecommunications Watch is a volunteer organization, concentrating
> on legislation as it relates to telecommunications and civil liberties.
> VTW publishes a weekly BillWatch that tracks relevant legislation as it
> progresses through Congress. It publishes periodic Alerts to inform the
> about immediate action it can take to protect its on-line civil liberties
> and privacy.
>
> More information about VTW can be found on-line at
>
>   gopher -p 1/vtw gopher.panix.com
>   www: http://www.vtw.org
>
> or by writing to vtw at vtw.org. The press can call (718) 596-2851 or
> contact:
>
>    Shabbir Safdar         Steven Cherry
>    shabbir at vtw.org        stc at vtw.org
>
>
>