freedom is as freedom does.

Freedom is a big deal on the Internet today. In her article “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” Tara McPherson details the way in which web sites do their best to give web surfers freedom. “If early television promised to bring us the world, on the Web, our own volition in relation to this travel gets foregrounded. Microsoft asks, 'Where do you want to go today?'” The implication is that we Internet travelers could go anywhere we choose. We can blaze unique trails through the web of hyperlinks, experiencing websites as no one else ever has before. These days, with the explosion of Web 2.0 sites, we can even create and destroy the content of the web as we see fit.

Or can we? McPherson calls this freedom an “illusion.” Our abilities are much more limited then the web site designers would like us to believe. We are only able to go places and change content that they allow us to. For example, we are not free to get rid of the advertisements that run alongside the pages we “create” on Facebook. We do not have complete control over the layout of our blogs on Blogger; we can choose where we'd like the “Blog Archive” to appear, but we cannot remove it entirely. In creating our blog posts, we can only use basic HTML tags. If we want to add more interactive features to our blog (animations, pop-up windows, etc), we are out of luck; Javascript and Java applets are out of the question.

So it appears that we must be skeptical when a web site is presented as a place of limitless user freedom. In reality, our “freedom” is under their control.