My Word's
Worth:

a weekly column by
Marylaine Block
vol. 2 #40, May 16, 1997


TO: LIONS
FROM: CHRISTIANS


I was asked recently to give a talk in a constitutional law class about the first amendment and the internet. Now, I know some students must have wondered why a librarian was speaking to them on this issue. Lawyers, yes. But why would librarians be authorities on first amendment law?


Like most people, they didn't understand that librarians have a deep and passionate interest in the first amendment, for the same reason that Christians who are about to be thrown to the lions have a passionate interest in both Christianity and the behavior patterns of lions. When powerful people want to restrict access to powerful ideas, we are often the first human sacrifices. Not a day goes by but there is at least one librarian in court, defending the right of an idea to be in the library, or asking to be reinstated in a job she has been fired from because of the books she has placed in her library and insists on keeping there.


This is because of the historic mission of libraries, especially public libraries--to provide equal access to information. No matter how poor you are, or how dysfunctional the family and neighborhood you come from, if you truly want to learn, the library is there to help you find out whatever you want to know.


Now, what you want to know may well include dangerous knowledge--ideas that are officially discouraged. But our profession takes literally the words of the first amendment: "Congress [and by extension, government] shall make NO law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press..." The official code of ethics of our profession is the Library Bill of Rights, which states that we may not discriminate on the basis of ideas against books or journals, or the groups who wish to use our public meeting rooms.


Nor may we discriminate among our users. We are there to answer your questions to the best of our abilities, whether you are black or white, teacher or student, lawyer or janitor, adult or kid.


The whole issue of equality of access to information becomes even more critical when a powerful and expensive new technology offers previously undreamed of amounts of information. The internet extends our ability to answer our users' questions, because things we cannot possibly afford to buy are available online. Most libraries, for instance, cannot afford to buy books about every individual artist, even if they are masters, and their paintings classics. But since these artists' works are available on the internet, we can meet our patrons' needs there when our own collections come up short.


But it's not only a matter of making additional information available through the internet. It is clear that some forms of information in future will ONLY be available on the internet. I can easily envision there being no Government Printing Office ten years from now, since most government publications are already being made available online. And if online is the only way to get information, it's a no-brainer: OF COURSE we'll make the internet available to our users.


Enter the people who are frightened of the net and want to control it. This includes the government folks, who are worried about national security. And business executives who would like to protect their copyrights and their secrets, like the folks at Brown and Williamson who fought a losing battle to keep their private memos off the internet. And journalists, who want to protect their power to define what constitutes "news." And law enforcement types who would like to keep the bomb recipes off the net. And all the people who want to keep pornography off the net. And all the protectors of children, left-wing and right-wing alike.


Control, I think, is the central issue. After all, if a source can be localized it can be targeted. If all smutty material is only available from adult bookstores, you can legislate rules for those bookstores, and you can have the cops patrol outside them at regular intervals. But if you have no idea where sites in cyberspace even are, there's no good way of patrolling them. So the censors try to control the internet itself.


The notion that all these people have in common is that the internet CAN be controlled. And that is a fundamental failure to understand what the internet is.


Which is: the world's only functional, working anarchy. When a student said to me, "Would they allow such and such on the internet," I had to ask her who she thought THEY might be? Who is it that's in the allowing business? Nobody is in charge here, except in the loosest sense. The governing body of the internet, such as it is, establishes technical standards and registers IP addresses and domain names (and it's considering farming even the domain name business out to smaller organizations). It is in the process of developing standardized content coding that users may if they wish voluntarily elect to use.


That's it. Your entire internet government. There are hardly any rules, and any number can play.


Were it not for the prohibitive cost of the technology, which schools and libraries can offer a way around, the net would easily be the most democratic medium of communication that has ever been created. All it takes to play is a computer and a service provider. And unlike printing presses, the net is inherently interactive--put something out there on the net, and people will respond on the net. It's an interactive free-for-all. All ideas are fair game. It's not just a place but a culture, created by hackers, for hackers, a culture that not only loves freedom, but insists on it.


Governments may move in and close sites down. But hackers will take the content and set it up somewhere else. Businesses, trying to shut down sites that infringe on their copyrights, are probably in a losing battle. When publishers started moving aggressively against the web sites that were making music lyrics freely available online, somebody simply set up an international lyrics server in Switzerland. That, of course, is another problem in control--it is an international medium, and what is illegal here may be perfectly legal elsewhere.


I am inclined to think that the decisions being made now, about content on the net, and access to it, however they come out, are temporary. I think of the world as being made up of four groups of people: (Well, five, counting those who say "Internet? What's that?")


The first two classes of people--us old foofs--may be making the decisions during the next ten or twenty years. But you know what? We're going to die and get out of the way. That's how change happens. The kids and the hackers will create the new world, and it's almost certainly going to be a world where information is freer and more readily available to anybody.


With one possible exception. Because it seems like almost everybody is willing to censor on behalf of children. Among the determined censors of pornography on the internet are ex-hippies who used to fight for their own right to free expression, now horrified at the idea of children having unrestricted access to the internet in public libraries.


Hence the Communications Decency Act, an act that will That's how badly this law is written.


It's bad enough that indecency is not defined. It's worse that the anti-geographical nature of cyberspace is not understood by the people who drafted the law (there can be no "community standards" when a site may be established in San Francisco and accessed in Tennessee). It's worse that there are no logical exceptions to the law--not for librarians offering information to patrons, not for teachers, or even parents, showing children how to use the internet.


Parents are worried about libraries letting kids use the net, worried about what their kids will see there. Not necessarily worried enough to accompany their kids to the library and explore the internet with them, however. What some parents are asking for, it seems to me, is a safe place where they can dump their children and not have to supervise them. They want everything in the library, and cyberspace, sanitized so that they don't have to worry about what children will learn there.


But there's no way we can run a library that is safe from every idea and image anybody could conceivably object to. There are too many different "family values." What is repellent to one set of parents may be exactly what another set of parents admires. Some hate violence, some hate sex, some hate Democrats, some hate feminists, and some hate Jerry Falwell. If we cleared our shelves of everything somebody objects to, what's left will be contentless tasteless pablum that nobody would want. (Just look, the next time your library sponsors "Banned Books Week, " at the books that people have banned from libraries: Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, the Bible--a veritable honor roll of great literature.)


Parents are the only ones who can properly supervise their children's use of the internet, or any other media, because they are the only ones who know what their own standards are. They know their children's secret fears, and understand their strengths and weaknesses. They are the only ones who can know what their children are ready to learn about. They cannot expect librarians to do this for them, because we cannot possibly know their children this well.


People who want us to "protect" their children for them might even ask whether protection is really our goal as parents. Unless you plan to still be walking your children every place they go when they're 30, there comes a time when you have to say: "cross at the traffic light; look both ways; bye, kiddo, have a nice day." Parents need to teach their kids how to protect themselves from strangers, whether in real space or cyberspace. Parents need to supervise their children's media use, teach them how to evaluate the resources, tell them what kinds of web sites are unacceptable and why. You've heard me quote Suzanne Vega before, and I will quote her yet again, because what she says is important and true: "I would shelter you, keep you in light. But I can only teach you night vision." Teach your children night vision, and then let them loose at the library, okay?


We'd rather it wasn't necessary for us to go to court to fight for the freedom to find out. We are not the natural enemies of parents. We'd much rather be working WITH parents, showing them museums and libraries and zoos and encyclopedias and storytellers they and their kids can find on the net. And, for that matter, in our books and magazines. But if you tell us that adults will be limited to only that information which will not harm or offend a six-year-old, then, yes, we will stand in place and fight the lions as best we can, armed only with the Constitution and our unshakable belief that knowledge is better than ignorance.


And that is why librarians know and care about the first amendment, and about the Communications Decency Act. We're sticking our necks out, standing up for your right to information, as well as your kids'. We're willing to risk our jobs to do this, if it's absolutely necessary; it is an important principle, after all. But we'd sure prefer to turn the lions into vegetarians. In fact, there's this really neat book I could show you...



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