children accessing porn; adults turning off filterware

[Mark Stover]

I'm glad that the issue of filtering stays alive on this list.  Even though
the discussion is tedious at times, it seems like we *need* to keep on
talking about it because it strikes at the very nature of our profession as
information providers.

Filters, in my opinion, are controversial because they keep certain kinds of
information away from people.  In our inclusive, free-speech oriented
society, most of us truly do believe that everyone has the right to be
heard.  When we block sites on the Web, we are preventing some people from
having their voices heard.  Should porn be considered "speech"?  Maybe, in
some cases, but I think that most of us would not be as upset with filters
in libraries if it was only hardcore porn that was being blocked.  The
filtering companies, with their secret and uneditable lists of blocked
sites, and with their strange notion that politically controversial Web
sites should be included as a category of potentially blocked sites, could
certainly do a better job of making their wares more palatable to libraries.

The analogy of magazines like Hustler to filters is interesting.  Maybe I
missed someone's rebuttal of this argument, but no one seems to have a good
explanation as to why only 3 libraries in the U.S. subscribe to Hustler.
Are we censoring Hustler, or is the quality of this particular "information
source" so poor that we don't want to waste our library budgets?  But the
flaw in the analogy (and the irony) is that we save money by not subscribing
to Hustler, but we have to spend money (on filters) to keep Hustler-like Web
sites from coming into our library.  

My final comment is this:  a compelling argument has been made by many on
this list that we shouldn't filter out anything at all, because who can draw
the line?  Phrased another way, one could say that once we start filtering
out porn, we will continue down the slippery slope until we end up filtering
out (censoring) some forms of political or religious speech.  This may be
true, but we should mitigate our excitement about this argument by opening
up any college textbook on logic and reading about the Slippery Slope
argument.  Essentially it is a logical fallacy.  That is, at face value it
seems to be true, but it doesn't hold up under critical scrutiny.


Mark Stover





----------------------------

Mark Stover, Director of Library and Information Services
Phillips Graduate Institute, 5445 Balboa Blvd., Encino, CA 91316
Phone: 818/386-5641 / Fax:  818/386-5699 / email:  mstover at pgi.edu