By Alvin Schrader
Converging communication technologies offer mesmerizing potentialities for global access to local culture. However, concerns about controversial images and ideas on the Internet have inspired both political and technological challenges to open access. Over the past three or four years, a bewildering array of software products has appeared on the US and Canadian markets that claim to be able to either 'filter' or 'rate' Internet-based content. Typical product claims are couched in the rhetoric of child protection and parental guidance.
The purpose of this article is to describe and critique emerging issues about Internet access in schools and school libraries. In the cyberspace universe of instant access to information and images of all kinds, how should school librarians around the world respond to these commercial products? What is the role of school librarians in the Internet content transmission chain? How can they reconcile the sometimes conflicting goals of parental responsibilities with children's educational and developmental interests, media literacy and community standards?
More specifically, what is the purpose of Internet filters? Are they sensible tools for librarians in all sectors to use to identify and describe creative content on the Internet, in the interests of child protection and social responsibility? Or are they merely the latest technologies for censorship?
The topic of Internet filters is an exciting one for librarians in all sectors because it represents the intersection of our roles as advocates for intellectual freedom, as organizers of information and as promoters of media literacy. It gives us the opportunity to share our knowledge and expertise, and to increase our contribution to society at large and around the world.
Software products for filtering and rating expressive content on the Internet
Filtering software products are designed to perform at one or more levels of computer configuration, ranging from the individual computer workstation or local area network, to a remote vendor server, an ISP (Internet service provider) and other arrangements.
These products offer a rather bewildering array of software options for controlling and suppressing expressive content on the Internet, including such things as "bad word," "bad phrase" and "bad syllable" stoplists, "bad site" lists, "bad topic" lists and content rating systems.
The magnitude of the task that the producers of filtering and rating software have undertaken is formidable. With one estimate putting the number of new sites appearing each day at 3,000 in the US alone, the Internet is a dynamic phenomenon that leaves product owners shooting at moving targets—speeding targets, actually. The most recent estimate of the size of the Web is 320 million Web pages currently accessible to casual browsers, a number expected to grow by 1,000 percent in the next few years.
In this rapidly changing technological climate, product manufacturers are targeting widely divergent materials based on widely divergent criteria. This variation is reflected in the number and range of Internet sites that are blocked, with some products reporting as few as 15,000 and others as many as 138,000 sites (Oder 1997, 41). One Internet rating product reports that it has rated 1.5 million URLs (NetShepherd 1997).
And they all claim to have qualified staff. Nothing is disclosed, however, about the professional qualifications of this community, how they are selected, who selects them, what they are paid, what sort of quality control over their work is in place, or what sort of retrieval testing is done to ensure accuracy and consistency in the resulting product.
The most egregious blocking makes the offending words, sites and topics disappear, utterly invisible to searchers, so that they are completely unaware that suppressed information even exists. For example, targeting "sex" blocks the NASA site marsexplorer.com, the works of poet Ann Sexton, sexual harassment sites and information about sexually transmitted diseases. Also blocked and invisible to the searcher using some filtering products is anything that remotely concerns homosexuality, lesbianism or bisexuality. One product prevented access to the entire library Web site of the Archie R. Dykes Medical Library because it blocks homosexuality and therefore the term "dyke" (Chelton 1997).
But most products do not stop there. Some also block numerous feminist sites such as NOW, the National Organization for Women feminist newsgroups, and sites such as alt.feminism, soc.support.pregnancy.loss, soc.support.fat-acceptance and Planned Parenthood. One product blocked the important Holocaust archive and anti-revisionist resource site Nizkor for a time, because it contained "hate speech" (Wallace 1997). Another blocks all URLs containing the tilde sign (˜). These examples serve to illustrate the variety of problems that are equally inherent in accurately identifying negative targets for Internet blocking programs as in identifying positive targets for conventional retrieval systems.
Society is intrinsically complex, and complex concepts do not fit into simple compartments. The word, phrase, and site identification strategies of the blocking products pigeonhole ideas and impose ideological agendas. Is all violence of the same kind? Is a punch the same as an execution? Should nudity and sex be categorized together? Is erotica the same as the sexually explicit?
While some of the software products acknowledge the existence of a value system or some sort of ideological agenda in their filtering and rating operations, others resolutely deny the charge. CyberSitter, for example, denies that it has a political agenda and that it blocks only sites "that meet a pre-defined criteria...without exception." (CyberSitter 1997). In contrast, CyberPatrol states that it operates on an explicit criterion: "In evaluating a site for inclusion in the [blocking] list, we consider the effect of the site on a typical 12 year old searching the Internet unaccompanied by a parent or educator" (CyberPatrol 1997).
In spite of the denials of some producers of these products, any operation that identifies words, phrases, topics and sites for blocking is of necessity imposing an ideological agenda or value system. In the approach followed by these commercial products, context is ignored and one four-letter word becomes more important than 400 pages of story. Margaret Laurence, the great Canadian novelist, is said to have called this "snippet censorship," the practice of basing one's judgment of a work on excerpts, offending words or phrases, and scenes lifted out of context (Carver 1997). How, for example, would the products treat the Bible? According to what criteria? Would they rate each story individually? Or even individual words within each story?
When blocking and rating decisions are made by unknown third parties with unknown qualifications and unknown ideological agendas, the danger to public debate is palpable. With a broad sweep, these products indict all representations of violence, sex, hatred and other targets as equally bad, and as especially bad for young people.
Reader response theory implications for filtering and rating Internet content
Since meaning is embedded in the context in which information is used, the root of library policy on Internet use must be the concept that the context of the use of information is critical to how appropriate the information is in a given institutional setting (Davison 1996). For example, studying hate propaganda sites on the Internet is a much different intellectual and educational activity than adding racial slurs oneself. Reading is not endorsing.
To a certain degree, therefore, readers participate in creating the meaning of a text based on their own reading history, their own personal filter of cultural, moral and aesthetic values, and their own reading motivation. In this dynamic, the meaning that a particular reader ascribes to a text may or may not approximate the author's original conception - or, for that matter, any other reader's.
According to this view of reader response, then, far from being a fixed and objective thing that every reader perceives identically, a text is somewhat ambiguous, fluid, subjective, susceptible to multiple meanings and contrary interpretations. Reader response theory is captured in a familiar expression: It's in the eye of the beholder.
Reader response theory is especially relevant in considering text for children, taking into account the enormous variation exhibited by children in emotional development and psychological maturity not only at different stages of growth but at the same age as well. Maturity is not a simple function of biological age: one 12 year old is nearly an adult, another is closer to childhood.
To accommodate the vast diversity of needs in young people means that each young child must seek out his or her own level of reading, viewing and listening interests, both individually and continuously, under the guidance of their parents or guardians. Moreover, most young people who are readers tend to "read up," that is to say, they read above the reading level designations assigned by publishers, reviewers, and librarians. Internet content is no different. Filtering and rating decisions that treat it as if it were fixed for all children regardless of age and maturity is an inadequate and flawed approach to child development.
Summary
Internet filtering and rating technologies are theoretically unworkable. It is not that they are technologically unworkable or technologically limited. It is that the essential ambiguities of language, text, reader, rating and blocking methods ensure the failure of automated filtering. The problems of identifying and describing Internet content for purposes of control and prohibition are intractable: new sites, new terms, new issues, the world cacophony of languages, variable interpretations of meaning, variable perceptions of offensiveness, variable perceptions of age appropriateness and variable cultural norms.
These ambiguities and dynamics prevent blocking and rating software from ever being successful in controlling the world of ideas in a way that would satisfy critics, reassure parents, and relieve librarians and teachers of unpleasant encounters with complainants. Human language is just too unstable, words and meanings just too indeterminate, too elastic, too mutable, too imperfect. As one critic has put it, "safe-only access can not happen because individual perceptions of safe are as varied as the number of sites on the Internet" (Crosslin 1998. 52).
The American Library Association's "Statement on library use of filtering software," an explanatory document accompanying the "Resolution on the use of filtering software in libraries" that was adopted by ALA Council on July 2, 1997, concluded that:
Library use of blocking/filtering software creates an implied contract with parents that their children will not be able to access material on the Internet that they do not wish their children to read or view. Libraries will be unable to fulfill this implied contract, due to the technological limitations of the software, thus exposing themselves to possible legal liability and litigation (American Library Association 1997, 120).
In response to criticisms of software imperfection, apologists are quick to argue that current technology is "good though not perfect," "reasonably accurate," "extremely effective but not foolproof." One public library director calls WebSense "80 percent effective" (Oder 1997, 41).
We need to ask if smoke detectors that worked 75 or 80 per cent of the time would be better than nothing—especially when the timing of the operational phase is unknown and unknowable. Moreover, to extend the analogy, we might ask how acceptable such smoke detectors would be if they not only reacted to smoke but also to incense, garlic, sweat, perfume or other unpredicted and unpredictable triggers. Or, more radically yet, what if the detectors promised home safety but disclosed nothing about what that meant or how it would be realized.
Yet the very names of the software products—nanny, patrol, shepherd, sitter, watch—conjure up images of unqualified protection, safety, guidance and comfort. NetNanny advertising, for example, says: "NetNanny is watching when parents aren't."
But instead of fulfilling these explicit advertising promises, what the new products offer is the illusion of success—an illusion that comes with a high price tag. One price is a false sense of security. Its twin is a false sense of confidence that all appropriate information will still be retrieved when one searches the Internet.
Another price is intellectual freedom. The crude, paternalistic strategies adopted by blocking and rating products should serve to remind us that authority control keeps some voices out just as easily as it lets others in. Internet blocking software is like performing brain surgery with a chainsaw.
I would like to see librarians in all sectors of service to society enter into the public debate about the Internet through their institutions and associations as well as individually by virtue of professional training. I would like to see them help refocus public debate around fundamental social policy objectives and the strategies to achieve them, to work to dispel fear and moral panic about the Internet and kids, and to help instead to promote critical thinking and understanding. As Herbert Foerstel told a meeting called in response to complaints about the inclusion of certain materials in a Maryland library collection: "Tell us what you want to read, rather than what you don't want others to read" (emphasis in original, Foerstel 1994, 30).
We need to implement acceptable use policies, AUPs, that make explicit the respective rights and responsibilities of students, parents and school officials for acceptable behavior on the Internet. Dillon (1996) and Ingvarson (1996) have described in considerable detail the elements and principles that should go into such policies, and the Internet is full of examples easily retrieved. Doug Johnson (1998) has also summarized issues that should be considered in developing AUPs.
We need to expand school library collection development into Internet sites; to educate parents about child safety issues on the Internet and how to raise "Net smart" children to ensure that school library policies on collection development, intellectual freedom Internet access and materials reconsideration are understood; to forge alliances among different types of libraries as well as stronger community links; to provide in-house staff training and regular refresher sessions; to participate in the development of professional association policy statements and positions; and to support research efforts that investigate software product claims.
Above all, we need to expand information and library literacy into the school curriculum with school librarians in the lead to teach the skills of both information searching and critical thinking. As a recent New York Times editorial, critical of a legislative initiative to require anti-pornography filters on school and school library computers, concluded, "Given the limitations of filtering technology, the best way to protect children is to teach them how to use the Internet. A software program simply cannot do that" (New York Time 1998).
The Canadian Library Association encourages librarians to incorporate Internet use policies into overall policies on access to library resources and has produced a best-selling brochure entitled "Have a safe trip! A parent guide to safety on the Internet" (Canadian Library Association 1997, 1998).
I do not believe that bad ideas or bad images produce bad kids. Nor do I believe that there is a shred of evidence to support this simplistic argument. We should worry much more about a lack of information than about too much or the wrong kind. There are no reasonable grounds to fear contagion or uncritical acceptance of ideas if children have strong family values. What should concern librarians is young people who have access to only one view of the world, young people brought up with no knowledge of choice, no awareness of diversity.
By way of postscript, I would like to see school librarians caution parents and individuals about the serious shortcomings of Internet software products that promise protection and monitoring, shortcomings that are not merely technological but more importantly moral for blocking and rating systems do not help young people learn how to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, how to make independent critical judgments, how to say no, how to live vicariously through story rather than dangerously through experience. As one librarian has asked rather rhetorically, do parents really want to turn their children's value systems over to a software vendor? (Crosslin 1998, 52). "What drives the filtering debate," wrote one recent correspondent to American Libraries, "is the question of who will control access to information. Will it be the government, or the individual? (Taylor 1999).
Outsourcing moral authority to faceless and anonymous Internet guardians is no alternative to family responsibility, librarian and teacher guidance, and individual critical awareness. As Meeks and Mccullagh (1996) have so eloquently written, "Technology is no substitute for conscience." If the analysis presented in this article is accurate, it is irresponsible of institutions such as schools and libraries to use taxpayer money to buy products that do not work as advertised and that do not advance pedagogical goals: first we pay to obtain Internet access, and then we pay again to get rid of it. And when administrators install filters without edscussion and debate, they miss an opportunity to facilitate and promote critical thinking in action. They disempower everyone.
My final word goes, fittingly, to a 12-year-old girl—the typical young person for whom one of the filtering products is explicitly marketed—who wrote a letter to the local newspaper opposing censorship of the Internet at the Dundas Public Library in Ontario, Canada. She said:
I am 12 years old and I go on the Internet all the time, on average 1/2 hour per day. Of all the time that I have been using it, (more than four years now), I have never seen or heard about any pornography pages or sites... To me, the Internet is a way to explore the world without going anywhere. When I am on the Internet, it is my responsibility to pick and choose which pages are appropriate for me.
If you are worried about your child's choices, explore it together (Blonski 1997).
References
American Library Association (1997). Statement on library use of filtering software. Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September, 119-120.
Blonski, Jackie (1997). "The Internet is an important place to learn and explore" (letter to the editor). Dundas Review, June 15, 4.
Canadian Library Association (1997). Statement on Internet access.
Canadian Library Association (1998). Have a safe trip! A parent's guide to safety on the Internet.
Carver, Peter (1997). Battle over novel (letter to the editor). Globe and Mail, February 7, A14.
Chelton, Mary K. (1997). Internet names and filtering software. Email message from March 4.
Crosslin, Donna (1998). Unsafe at any modem speed (letter to the editor). American Libraries, 29, 52.
CyberPatrol (1997). Overview: The CyberNOT Block List. (May 11).
CyberSitter (1997). Frequently asked questions about CyberSITTER.
Davison, Phil (1996). Censorship and the need to develop policy. In Lyn Hay and James Henri (Eds.), A meeting of the minds: ITEC virtual conference '96 proceedings (p. 9). Belconnen, ACT: Australian School Library Association.
Dillon, Ken (1996). Management of student access to the Internet: Issues and responsibilities. In Lyn Hay and James Henri (Eds.), A meeting of the minds: ITEC virtual conference '96 proceedings (pp.16-23). Belconnen, ACT: Australian School Library Association.
Foerstel, Herbert (1994). Conflict and compromise over homosexual literature. Emergency Librarian, 22, 30.
Ingvarson, Daniel (1996). Censorship: Planning a safe ride on the superhighway. In Lyn Hay and James Henri (Eds.), A meeting of the minds: ITEC virtual conference '96 proceedings (pp. 3-6). Belconnen, ACT: Australian School Library Association.
Johnson, Doug (1998). Internet filters: Censorship by any other name? Emergency Librarian 25, 11-13.
Meeks, Brock N. and Declan B. McCullagh (1996). Keys to the kingdom. CyberWire Dispatch. (July).
NetShepherd (1997). NetShepherd responds to the EPIC report 'Faulty Filters'.
(December 2).
New York Times (1998). Filtering the Internet (Editorial). New York Times, March 16, A24.
Oder, Norman (1997). Filtering and its contradictions. Library Journal, 122,41-42.
Schrader, Alvin M. (1998). Internet censorship: Access issues for school librarians in a cyberspace world. Education for all: Culture, reading and information. Selected papers. 27th International Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, Ramat-Gan, Israel, July 5-10, 1998. Eds. Snunith Shham and Moshe Yitzhaki. IASL, 1998, pp. 189-210.
Taylor, Paul (1999). "Let unfiltered freedom ring" (letter to the editor). American Libraries, 30, 34.
Wallace, Jonathan D. (1997). Purchase of blocking software by public libraries is unconstitutional. The Ethical Spectacle. November 9.
Source: Alvin Schrader, "Internet Censorship: Issues for Teacher-Librarians",
Teacher Librarian: The journal for school library professionals, May/June, 1999. Republished with permission.
This article is based on a much longer research paper presented at the 1998 annual conference of the International Association of School Librarianship in Tel Aviv, Israel.
