by GEOFFREY NUNBERG, New York Times: "It has taken the St. Louis Public Library 135 years to build its collection of 4.5 million holdings; the Web adds that many new documents every three days. No software can identify a large portion of the pornography on the Web without taking down a great many innocuous or useful sites on the way. In testing several filtering systems used by libraries, I found them blocking access to everything from teenage sex advice sites posted by Planned Parenthood and Rutgers University to a dollhouse furniture site, Salon magazine and the home page of the Canadian Discovery Channel. IT is true that the law permits librarians to unblock access to forbidden sites that patrons want to consult for "bona fide research." But many patrons are understandably uncomfortable about asking librarians to unblock sites: think of a 15-year-old girl searching for information about sexually transmitted diseases. Advocates of filters argue that they will get better, but there is an inherent trade-off in such systems: the more complete you try to make the coverage the more innocent sites you flag."
They're called "books." Kids can find them in "stacks." Reading one once in a while might do them a world of good. I have absolutely ZERO problem with libraries restricting access to kids/internet on unsupervised computers. Perhaps they need an "adult" research room with no filters.
Given teen pregnancy rates, I suspect it would do kids a world of good to hear what Planned Parenthood has to say about teenage sex advice, as well. A pox on these filters and a pox on these ridiculous laws. What, precisely, is the big freaking deal about the possibility of a thirteen-year-old kid looking at porn? Teenage boys are curious. If everyone who sneaked the occasional peek at nekkid ladies before the magic age of 18 became a slavering sex maniac, we'd be living in a society half-full of slavering sex maniacs.
we have the same problem at my work. sometimes i can't even get to stuff using the keywords of our own chemical product line. you have to call the IT people and wait forever. it's really embarassing and dumb.
(1) The likelihood of kids going to Planned Parenthood (before there is a problem) is about 0.00% (2) There's some pretty sick stuff on the internet. Infinitely worse than a peek at Playboy. I want public libraries to continue to provide low-income people with internet access. The last thing we need is a scandal involving kids looking at some sick porno site. Lastly, the comment by Nunberg, ""It has taken the St. Louis Public Library 135 years to build its collection of 4.5 million holdings; the Web adds that many new documents every three days. " My goodness, this guy gets paid to write stuff like this? What % of those 4.5 million documents are worth reading? Virtually none.
Dr said rightly "They're called "books." Kids can find them in "stacks." Reading one once in a while might do them a world of good." Bravo I never was encouraged to read as a kid just watched TV, and look how I turned out. I did not turn out good over all end up a little twisted. My youngest son is 21 now and was a chip of the old block unlike my other children. Somehow at about 17 he just started to read books. First it was just things he had an interest it, but now he is always reading all kinds of books. He got hooked on it some how. He was always a good guy in a tough sort of way, but now he is a better person in every way. I wish i could take the credit for that, but he did it on his own. My oldest son is thirty never reads except the sports pages. He is a smart guy outside of this, but he can't hold a conversation about anything else besides his job and sports.
The exact standards for what we consider "sick" are pretty slippery and notoriously difficult to pin down, and these filter programs tend to nix pages based on the possibility that they might contain material which could offend someone. Most sane people would be up in arms if libraries were refusing to shelve books because an algorithm determined that they had too many naughty words in them. To a computer program, Huckleberry Finn is hate speech and Portnoy's Complain is hardcore porn. Why are we OK with the notion of that same algorithm doing this same task for web sites? Let us stipulate that a kid who has an insatiable desire to watch mpegs of fat german guys getting pooped on by anorexic teenage models has a problem. Having said this, exactly whose problem is it? Mandating filtering puts the onus on libraries (who have enough problems these days) to make sure that their patrons are on the up-and-up, which is hardly fair. I've been using the internet since the mid-90s and I've never been accidentally assaulted with "sick" porn, which leads me to conclude that if kids are accessing this sort of material, it's because they're looking at it. Shifting the blame to the libraries enable us to comfortingly pretend that 13 year old boys aren't curious about sex and that a lot of them don't like to look at bizarre and gross things, but it hardly suffices as a real solution.
While in college, I enjoyed reading the school paper. Many times in the "campus police reports" you could read about some poor slob who was caught at the main library stacks masturbating. If you have ever been there, up on, say, the tenth floor, all alone, it can be scary. Sick people will get their freak on no matter the filters.
It's not that I'm ok with filters, but that it's a worthwile compromise to get public internet access. I'm not willing to risk millions of people's only access to the internet.