I don't pretend to know the answers. You'll have to make up your own minds. But I have sympathy for both the argument that children need to be protected, and freedom of expression must be preserved. As a society we need to preserve both of these values.
Let's start by reframing the debate though. Censorship is a dirty word. It implies a restriction on the reasonable freedoms that citizens in a free society should have. If we're going to have a conversation about preventing access to child porn, then let's frame the conversation in those terms, rather than talking about censorship.
I had a remarkable day yesterday, defined in part by video. At Pulver's Social Media breakfast, there were Nokia N95's in evidence everywhere and people streaming everywhere. They were streaming others streaming others talking on Qik. At one point I spotted a crowd of 7 or 8 people, all streaming video, standing around one speaker.
Later in the evening, at Pat Phelan's marvelous St. Patricks Day party, there was more of the same. When suddenly the bandwidth fetters are removed, everyone become a recorder and broadcaster of all the things that are happening around them everyday.
I had a chance to chat with the remarkable Bhaskar Roy, the man behind Qik, about this at Pat's party. He told me that Qik's vision was not to be a video calling company, but rather a "show me what you're seeing" company. People are using Qik for a huge range of things from the news to the deeply personal — a family having a chance, for example, to interact with a sick loved one in hospital thousands of miles away.
We also chatted about the potential for abuse. For example, I quietly shot this little video of my friends Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker at an irish pub where we congregated a little later. I know they won't mind ;) In malicious hands, however, the ability to shoot video anywhere might be a powerful blackmail tool. Bhaskar acknowledged the issue, but points out that inappropriate content is a problem of the web in general.
Mark my words — Qik, and technologies like it — are game changers. They'll be ubiquitous before long, and our children will ask us to tell them stories about what the world was like before you could stream video over the phone.
