We have a custom inside our company, which is to make one of the first orders of business for new employees a meeting to share our mission and values, those important things intended to create value for all our stakeholders. They are summarized this way: 1) a commitment to enabling the work of web publishers, 2) a dedication to providing superior service to all our customers, and 3) a desire to help change the world -- we hope, for the better. The Fourth of July gives us a chance to think about all of them -- especially, perhaps, the third.
Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy and all of us who labor in the media space, online or off, help to preserve that cornerstone even as we may spend most of our time concerned with how to reap the financial rewards of its bounty. We take it for granted in free countries that we have the right and opportunity to publish and express our opinions, but it is always worth remembering that in substantial parts of the globe freedom of the press is a rumor.
As a device of freedom, the internet has done more to chronicle the aspirations and interests of people than anything since the printing press. While the last age of communications including, of course the television, helped bring us more together as a world, too much in the way of devices and equipment went into those vehicles to put them into the hands of the people. They were -- and are -- as much as the monks on whom the world once relied for all its texts.
The internet is the people's medium and so it should remain: free, open and protected from vested interests -- political and commercial -- that might be fearful of its collective power. The internet is the people's medium and as people go, it is variously washed and unwashed. Unless we deprive it of its liberty it will stay that way, as we have, as a country, for over two hundred years: washed and unwashed, enlightened and depraved, sure and unsure in the real or impossible pursuit of happiness here on earth.
No power of the press has ever stood a better chance to affect the freedom of people around the world than the internet. It makes no endorsements. It favors no outcome. It espouses no point of view. It is unaligned. Unconstrained by boundaries it seeps between the cracks and under doors. It is free and must remain free to keep up the challenge to anyone that would try and contain it for less than the common purpose.
What interests us, describes us, and no where can we satisfy the impulses of those descriptions as much as online. The internet gives us freedom to be ourselves. It helps people tell their own stories and the stories of others and, finally, allows us to discover the contributions of people who in ordinary and not so ordinary ways are truly changing the world.
For all of us, it is a good reason to come to work every day.
Happy Fourth of July.
There then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, 'tis right.
Thomas Paine, "Common Sense", 1776