[timthebeaver]

Some speech issues that come to mind which, I sometimes wonder, how they would have gone down today:

* The 6.001 porn

* The ghetto party

* The Reg Day porn (particularly Deep Throat, but many)

* The Visualizing Cultures display (with CSSA opposition)

* Some 10% of the day to day traffic on senior-house@, bexley-minus-fascists@, and ec-discuss@

Norms around speech have evolved a lot even as the fundamentals of ethics and laws on the electronic frontier have stayed the same. I often think that folks in the 80s and 90s enjoyed, for better or worse, considerable latitude in their speech which wouldn't fly today.

[ghaff]

>The Reg Day porn (particularly Deep Throat, but many)

Today? Clearly not.

But you don't need to fast forward that far. They were discontinued in I think 1980 or 1981 when things went from "we don't think you should do this" to "this is no longer a polite request."

[jeremyis]

Uhm what was the 001 porn?

[coffeeisyummy]

http://tech.mit.edu/V118/N8/aporn.8n.html

Prof. Abelson wanted to hammer home the point porn was a problem on the internet back in 1998 and thought putting up a porn site for the first slide of a lecture would make his point.

It was pretty shocking when it happened.

[vanusa]

Was his flashing the room like that a free speech issue - or a thoughtless dickhead issue?

Independent of his legal "right" to conduct a class in that manner - it's basically kind of asinine to assume your students need to have their buttons expressly pushed in order to appreciate the basically obvious point he felt he needed to make. Or that if people object his resorting to such a stunt - that means they're "offended" by it.