Filtering the Future? for Most of Human History the Word "Filter" Has Had an Entirely Unambiguous Meaning
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1. Chapter One -- INTRODUCTION Filtering the Future? For most of human history the word "filter" has had an entirely unambiguous meaning. Ask the average person on the street to name a filter, and they will likely point to one of the following mundane objects of everyday life. For those unfortunate enough to live in cities with poor tasting tap water (Boston and Philadelphia certainly come to mind), the dechlorinating, makes my tea tastes better "water filter" will likely be mentioned. Among the Starbucks, and XandO set -- or for that matter, any caffeine junkie -- the "coffee filter" will be mentioned as an irreplaceable invention for the mourning rush to work, or the late night cram session. Finally, for those unable to kick the nicotine habit, "Marlboro filtered cigarettes" will come to mind, as a cough comes to their mouth. All of these everyday, common knowledge filters deal with physical, atom-based particles. The water filter traps chlorine and lead molecules, the coffee filter keeps ground rhines out of the final product, and the cigarette filter removes some of the harmful carcinogenic compounds about to be inhaled. The physical aspect of these filtering processes is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of filter, "To pass (a liquid) through a filter, or some porous medium, for the purpose of removing solid particles or impurities (emphasis added)." The use and definition of filters shows that they are employed to get rid of something unwanted. A byproduct of the last epoch of human history, the Industrial Revolution (focused on manufacturing atoms), has been heavy levels of air and water pollution. As such, we have developed advanced air and water filters to keep our environment more or less livable. 2. In this century, largely following World War II, the Industrial Revolution was replaced by the much hyped "Information Revolution" (Bell, 1973; Toffler, 1980). Negroponte (1995) notes that the central difference between the industrial and information revolutions is the shift from "atoms to bits." By this, Negroponte means, that the economic and cultural forces which shape our society are no longer governed by the manufacture of physical, atom-based goods (planes and cars), but rather the production and dissemination of vast amounts of information (news and entertainment). Due to incredible advances in computing, all of this information can be digitized, thus acquiring the unique characteristics of bits, namely convergence, compression, increased speed of dissemination, and intelligence in the channel (Neuman, 1991), or what Negroponte calls "bits about bits (1995: 18)". All of these factors have coalesced on the network of networks known as the Internet, and its graphical, multimedia counterpart, the World Wide Web. While the net and the web are relentlessly hyped as the answer to all of the world's problems by digital soothe sayers like Negroponte, Howard Rheingold (1993), and Bill Gates (1996, 1999), just like the pollution of the Industrial Revolution, the information society has its own unwanted byproducts. Perhaps the most problematic of unwanted consequences in the Information Revolution, is an overabundance of information. Due to the characteristics of bits described above, literally anyone can become an information producer, and make his/her content, regardless of quality, accuracy, relevance, or appropriateness (all value judgments) available to a world-wide audience on the Internet. While such low barriers to entry may be seen as very democratic, they have produced a situation where the information consumer must sort through more than 5 million web sites (Netcraft, June 1999), 90,000 topical mailing lists (as indexed by Liszt.com, June 1999), 60,000 Usenet 3. newsgroups (as indexed by DejaNews, June 1999), and 51,000 Internet Relay Chat channels (Liszt.com, June 1999), to locate desired material. As anyone who has used an Internet search engine can testify, searching for topical information often produces an overwhelming number of links, many to entirely irrelevant sites. This trend towards more and more information, but less and less meaning and understanding (Baudrillard, 1983) has been called "information glut" by Postman (1992), "data smog" by Shenk (1997), and "garbage information" by Schiller (1976). "All told, the thesis is that enormous amounts of greatly increased information in the modern age are of dubious value. There undoubtedly is more information about today, but its informational quality is suspect in the extreme" (Webster, 1995: 125). What is the solution to all of this unwanted, low quality information? Clearly the answer is filters. However, it is extremely important to note the difference between the physical filters needed for the Industrial Revolution, and the information filters we need today. Atom-based filters deal with physical world objectively defined atoms, molecules, particles, etc. If you do not want chlorine in you tap water, you study the properties of chlorine molecules, and develop a filter system which will prevent these molecules from passing through into the final product. This is in stark contrast to information filters which must sort through ideas which are inevitably subjectively defined artifacts of human experience and knowledge. In other words, describing a bit as relevant, truthful, accurate, appropriate, etc., means making value judgments about the digitized content it represents (with the exception of certain objective characteristics such as time, date, or geographic location). These largely subjective decisions are coded (as we shall see later, who does the coding makes a big difference) into the "headers" of electronic documents, so that machines/individuals on the receiving end of the information can choose what to do with it. Deciding what to do with 4. these bits, means using an information filter itself based on subjective rules about what content to let in, and what content to filter out. Problems arise in such a system when the senders description of his/her bits (an email with "URGENT, MUST READ NOW" as its subject line), does not square with the interpretation of the information filter on the receiving end (which finds the message to be anything but urgent). This information overabundance and description problem is certainly nothing new. Librarians and literary scholars have struggled for thousands of years about how to classify books. To aid in this process, librarians have developed card catalogs, and literary scholars developed the anthology. While these systems have worked well for some time, the advent of the Internet, and the absolute tidal wave of information now available, points to the incredible challenge for, and importance of information filters in the next millennium. Indeed in an age of 500 cable channels, millions of web pages, thousands of printed publications, cell phones, and beepers, information filters will become an absolute necessity for the average citizen navigating his/her path through the wilds of the virtual and real worlds. Our growing dependence on this "filtered future" also means giving up a great deal of power to filters, to define what we will see, hear, and be in the digital future. This new reality points to a fundamental flaw in the logic of the new media mantra that information is power: In the Information Age, we were told, information would be power. It is turning out to be quite the opposite. In the Information Age, it seems, power does not rest with those who have access to information. It rests with those who filter it. (Balkin, 1996) In seeding our information selection power to filters, battles over content definition will inevitably arise. Simply put, people will disagree that this bit means this, and that bit means that. Scaled to the millions of Internet users now on-line, the problem of subjectively defined information filters, means 5. disagreements about content will be pervasive. As such, information filters will become a public, political, legal, and technological problem of massive proportions. The Internet Content Conundrum This thesis will focus on one particular area where the nexus of information filters, public outrage, political policy making, jurisprudence, and technological solutions have converged into a contentious sociopolitical issue. This issue is the filtering of "objectionable" Internet content (mostly pornography) to protect children, an issue I will call the "Internet Content Conundrum." The conundrum is due to the fact that the Internet facilitates easy access to both large amounts of safe and useful information, as well as access to a much smaller amount of "dangerous" material. As Karen Jo Gounaud of Family Friendly Libraries notes, the Internet contains both "gigantic bottomless pits and wonderful playgrounds (cited in Hudson, 1998)." Since the Internet came to the for of public attention around 1994, Americans have been obsessed with the scourge of easily accessed on-line pornography, violence, and hate speech. Newspaper and magazine articles have fed this fear with articles about pornographic web sites, hate groups, and on-line sexual predators (Turow, 1999). This perceived abundance of harmful Internet content, has led Congress to pass two laws, the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and the Child On-line Protection Act (COPA) aimed at defining, and criminalizing Internet content deemed harmful to minors. In conjunction with these legislative solutions, the software industry has developed its own technological solutions, namely content blocking filter