Stacey Wicker
Profs. Brown and Klein
Beyond Google
2 November 2006

Censorship and the Internet Research Assignment

My research topic is censorship in the 21st century, with a specific focus on the the censuring of the internet under the banner of protecting children for unsuitable content. This topic addresses the issue of internet filters in public areas and the unintended consequences of these filters. The filters that are meant to prevent people from watching pornography in the library are in fact limiting hundreds of sites which may or may not be offensive, including art, health and political pages. As a result, only people who own a computer have unlimited access to the web, further increasing the gap between the poor and the not poor. This topic began as more of a general discussion of censorship as a whole, but in my research I found lots of information about the issue of freedom of speech on the web and regarding children, so I decided to narrow my focus. I find the debate interesting, because most of the arguments that are made in favor of censuring the internet seek to protect children, but what ends up happening is that all people who seek to use public internet (including adults) end up unable to access large parts of the web.
I began my search looking online. My first step was to take the general I idea I was interested in and break it up into keywords. My initial results were found from a simple keyword search via Google; however the amount of content I found was overwhelming in comparison to the amount of actual usable information I was able to retrieve. I next used some of the online sites that link to other useful sites, like the Librarians Internet Index. Using my keywords on this site produced a much high percentage of useful sites with valid information than my basic Google search had. It was at this stage that I found a lot on information regarding censorship of the internet and I decided to narrow my topic to focus more on this area.
My next step was to take my newly narrowed focus and develop a thesis and keywords for it. I developed the following thesis: In today’s political environment freedom of expression and access to information is being limited under the banner of protecting morality and decency, in general and with specific regard to laws meant to protect children. I then broke it down into many keywords, the most useful of which were: censorship, freedom of expression, morality, decency, children, and internet. From this point I moved on to my Library Sources, which included both monographs and peer-reviewed journals. The journals I found through a couple of databases, my favorite of which was the OmniFile Full Text Mega. This was wear I found my best information because the articles tend to be both authoritative and specifically focused on the area I was interested in. I also found several useful books using the Pratt Library Catalogue. I chose to organize my annotated bibliography in 3 categories: Books, Periodicals, and Online Source, to make it easier for people to understand and find information.
All together, I was able to find a lot of really interesting stuff about censorship and the internet that I would not have found had I stuck to the internet solely. I was most successful with the periodicals and I found my topic to be very well represented from multiple points of views. i also found the books useful, but it was not as simple to tell if a book was going to be useful because it contains so much more information to sort through. However I did find several that were very informative. I was also able to find useful things on the internet, but I was less certain of the veracity of the information, so I wasn’t as happy as I was with the OmniFile. I was fortunate in that my topic seemed very well fleshed out both online and in the Library. If I could go back I would head straight for the periodicals at the library because they were definitely the most useful of all my sources
I feel like overall I learned quite a bit from this project, both about my topic and about the process of researching something. I discovered lot of interesting and disturbing facts about the state of censorship in the United States today. I also discovered several useful ticks for tracking down reliable information fast, including online databases, the library’s periodicals databases, and of course, books! I feel that my understanding of these alternative resources will help me avoid sifting through hundreds of Google pages in hopes of finding something worthwhile.

Books:
Heins, Marjorie. Not In Front of the Children: “indecency,” censorship and the innocence of youth. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Heins analyzes the history of censorship under the guise of morality and protecting the innocence of children. She has a lot of really good information here about the history of censorship in America and it’s relationship to religion and idea of enforcing moral “decency.”

Krug, Judith F. Censorship and controversial materials in museums, libraries, and archives. Libraries, Museum and Archives: legal issues and ethical challenges in the new information era. Ed. Thomas A. Lipinski. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
This book discusses the challenge facing libraries and other public institutions. These challenges include the use of internet filters in areas that are public access to the internet. She balances a librarians love of the first amendment with a careful analysis of what responsibilities libraries have regarding access to information.

Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: how pressure groups restrict what students learn. New York: Vintage, 2004.
This book is a little off topic from the internet but still pertains to the concept of shielding children from information. Ravitch discusses the gradual whitewashing of history and how various special interest groups have put so much pressure on the schools that the textbooks are now both innacurate and horribly bland.
West, Mark I. Trust Your Children: Voices against censorship in children’s literature. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1998.
This book takes a look at the various books that have been banned from schools in the hopes of
protecting children from any ideas that are the least bit provocative. As a result, books from the
Huckleberry Finn to the Grapes of Wrath have been banned from some schools.

Periodicals:

Colaric, Susan. “Children, Public Libraries, and the Internet: Is It Censorship or Good Service?.” North Carolina Libraries (Spring 2003): 6-12.
This periodical was mostly interesting to me because it presents the opposing argument to me
thesis: that we have a responsibility toe shield children from disturbing internet content, and that
this is not censorship, it is just doing the right thing.

Johnson, Doug. “Internet filters: censorship by any other name?.” Emergency Librarian May/June (1998): 11-13.
This periodical raises interesting questions about the idea of inernet filters and what the possible
consequences of limiting people access to information could be.

Small, Robert C. “Censorship as we enter 2000, or the millennium, or just next year: a personal look at where we are.” Journal of Youth Service in Libraries (Winter 2000): 19-23.
This periodical is an overview that looks back upon both the gain and losses in the area of
censorship. It also examines new challenges we face in the age of technology.

Taubman, Geoffry L. “Keeping Out the Internet? Non-Democratic Legitimacy and Access to the Web.” First Monday (September 2002): 1.
This periodical examines the idea of the internet as a democratic concept which helps equalize
the equation of power and money. Furthermore he discusses threats to the democratic nature of
the web and how it is on the verge of huge levels of interference.

Wang, Chih. “Internet Censorship in the United States: stumbling blocks to the Information Age.” IFLA Journal (2003): 213-21.
This article also analyses the concept of web information and the way in which internet filters and other things stand in the way of both progress and equality.

Online Sources:

“ACLU Urges Supreme Court to Reject Law Mandating Internet Censorship in Libraries.” 5 March 2003. ACLU. 28 October 2006 .
This webpage contains a lot of various useful information explaining exactly why internet filters in
libraries will be damaging. It discusses the disparity between people who own computers and those who rely on public internet for information.

Heins, Marjorie, Christina Cho and Ariel Feldman. “Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report.” 2006. The Free Expression Policy Project. 30 October 2006
This page is a report put out by The Free Expression Policy Project. It provides a long breakdown
of what internet filters do and how they work. It finishes off by exposing many of the nagative
attributes of internet filters and the ways in which they are actually stopping us from seeing a lot
of worthwhile site.

“How To Comply With the Children’s Online Protection Rule.” November 1999. Federal Trade Commission. 30 October 2006 .
This is a fact sheet for business people explaining what needs to be done to comply with the new child safety law. It had a lot of interesting information about the requirements of the laws.

“Index For Free Expression.” 2006. Index On Censorship. 17 October 2006 .
The index for Free Expression is an extensive database that over all aspects of censorship and
freedom of expression. It has hundreds of links and is primarily useful as a place to start to find
more information.

“See No Evil “How Internet Filters Affect the Search for Online Health Information.” December 2002. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. 30 October 2006
This was a very interesting report that showed that internet filters in libraries and schools are restricting teenagers access to some health information, specifically pertaining to reproduction, sex and std’s.

“Standing Up For The Internet’s First Amendment.” Censorship News. Summer 2006. 25 October 2006 .
This was published by the National Coalition against Censorship and it discusses the relationship
between the first amendment and the internet. It also discusses the gradual increase in
censorship around America and attempts to raise awareness of this phenomenon.

Mokoto, Rich. “Who’s this guy Dylan who’s borrowing lines from Henry Timrod?” TheNewYorkTimes.com. September 14, 2006. October 26 2006.

{Mr. Dylan could not be reached through his publicist for comment. A spokeswoman for Columbia Records, Mr. Dylan’s record label and a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, did not return calls for comment.

Because Timrod is long dead and his work has fallen out of copyright — you can find his collected poems on the Internet — there is no legal claim that could be made against Mr. Dylan.

But some fans are bothered by the ethics of Mr. Dylan’s borrowing ways. “Bob really is a thieving little swine,” wrote one poster on Dylan Pool (pool.dylantree.com/phorum5/read.php?1,642969), a chat room where Mr. Warmuth posted his findings. “If it was anyone else we’d be stringing them up by their neck, but no, it’s Bobby Dee, and ‘the folk process.’ ”

Authors who have been caught copying from other writers have been accused outright of plagiarism. Earlier this year Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore who had written a first novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” was attacked when readers discovered that many passages in the book nearly exactly replicated portions of “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” novels by Megan McCafferty. Ms. Viswanathan’s publisher, Little, Brown, pulled the book from shelves, and the author was disgraced in the press.}

Paraphrased version:

Although Mr. Timrod’s poems are a part of the public domain, some member of the public are still bothered by Mr. Dylan’s use of them. Other authors in recent times, such as Kaavya Viswanathan, have been criticized after being caught plagiarizing.

This book analyzes the moral developement of children and debates the validity of censorship in the name of protecting children’s inncoence.

Krug, Judith F. “Censorship and controversial materials in museums, libraries, and archives.” Libraries, Museum and Archives: legal issues and ethical challenges in the new information era. Ed. Thomas A. Lipinski. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

This is a large collections dealing with a variety of issues but the essay by Judith Krug addressed the issue of censorship within public places like libraries.

Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: how pressure groups restrict what students learn. New York: Vintage, 2004.

This book describes how the different groups who put pressure on the way that textbooks are written has led to a revised version of history that is at best boring and at worst completely wrong.

Colaric, Susan. “Children, Public Libraries, and the Internet: Is It Censorship or Good Service?.” North Carolina Libraries Spring 2003: 6-12.

 This article provided the opposing view by supportingthe limitation of the internet in libraries.

Taubman, Geoffry L. “Keeping Out the Internet? Non-Democratic Legitimacy and Access to the Web.” First Monday September 2002: 1.

 This article discusses the democratic principles of the web, and the limitation that are being introduced in todays day and age.

Wang, Chih. “Internet Censorship in the United States: stumbling blocks to the Information Age.” IFLA Journal 2003: 213-21.

This discusses why censorship of the internet is negative, even when it initially seems like a good idea.

Johnson, Doug. “Internet filters: censorship by any other name?.” Emergency Librarian May/June 1998: 11-13.

 This discusses the limitation of filters and how they can filter out more than they were intended to.

Small, Robert C. “Censorship as we enter 2000, or the millennium, or just next year: a personal look at where we are.” Journal of Youth Service in Libraries Winter 2000: 19-23.

I tried several of the e-reference tools available on the Pratt Libraries website, but I found the OmniFile Full Text Mega Search to be the most useful as it allowed me to refine my search to peer-reviewed articles, and also full text articles.

Keywords: politics, freedom of expression, morality, decency, laws, children

Other synonyms: (politics) legislature, government, policies (freedom of expression) censorship, restriction, whitewashing, suppression, ban (morality / decency) conventional, ethical, righteous, ethicality, virtue, integrity (laws) legislature, rules, regulations, requirement, ruling, constitution (children) juvenile, youth, child, underage, innocent.