BFTP: Why internet filtering by bad words is a bad idea

Like most Internet content filters, my district could have choosen to block sites and searches on the basis of them containing "bad words" alone. And indeed, most Internet content filters allow blocking a rather uncomfortable list of words and phrases. Since I am not sure how proprietary the list from commercial filters might be, here is a link to a generic list that contains many, if not all, of the naughty words that filters suggest be blocked. (Maybe you can find a new one or two to use in your next Twitter rant.)

I had thought that our Internet filter by word was disabled until these tweets came to my attention one fall:

Ouch.

A quick glimse at the first page of "bad" terms suggests the biggest problem with filtering by word alone - innocent words often have a sexual connotation in specific contexts. Amateur. ass, bastard, bitch, cock, dick... well, you get the idea. (As a result of this list, you may well need to read this blog post from home instead of work.)

A second problem is suggested by the Twitter exchange above. Perfectly legitimate searches which may have sexual overtones may be restricted. While there may be a prurient interest in searching on "breasts" if you are an 8-year-old boy, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for searching on the term as well. I like to use the example of how flies is used differently in each sentence below:

• Time flies like an arrow.
• Fruit flies like bananas.
• She unzipped flies like there was no tomorrow.

A word's meaning often depends on its context.

A third problem is that legitimate questions about the definition of words and sex itself may be blocked. I have always thought that if a child is old enough to ask a question, she is old enough to know the answer. As a parent and grandparent, I believe my kids and grandkid are better able to survive this world having good factual knowledge than being kept in the dark. But perhaps that's just me, having learned a lot erroneous facts about sex from my equally misinformed 12-year-old Boy Scout peers.

A fourth concern I have is that kids may not know the "proper" term and only know it by its more vulgar name. If one is curious to know if HIV can be transmitted via oral sex, the more likely search term many kids will use will be "blow job" rather than "fellatio."

Finally, separating kids from information about sex through blocking sex sites at school allows those kids whose families can afford home Internet access to live healthier, safer lives than those without home Internet access. That's just not right.

In the column One Big Room I wrote:

Anyone who thinks he or she can control kids' access to online information or experiences through legislation or a filter is spitting in the wind. We are not facing a simple technical challenge. We are swimming against a cultural tide.

Neil Postman explains why in his book The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). It's been a while since I have read this book, but as I remember, Postman's arguments go something like this: Childhood is a social construct. Before the Industrial Revolution, children were simply treated as small adults. They dressed like adults; they worked like adults; they lived where adults lived; and they saw what adults saw. Adults and children before the second half of the 19th century all pretty much lived in one big room.

The rise in industrialization also gave rise to the concept of "childhood." Society started treating children differently than it did adults; separating them by dress, by activity, and especially in experience. We kept kids in their own rooms with very limited access to adult rooms -- for their own safety, of course.

Postman argued that with the ubiquity of mass media (pre-Internet days), society no longer has the ability to keep children away from adult venues, sights, and experiences. We've all been pushed back into one big room, as it were. Once again, kids see and experience what adults see and experience.

For many adults this is an uncomfortable reality. And poor Internet filtering practices won't change it.

Original post 11/2/15

Emigration empathy

Unless all your ancestors were enslaved, indentured, or indigenous, you are at least in some part descended from immigrants if you are a U.S. citizen.

Family records tell me that I have at least two great grandparents who came to the U.S as children in the late 1800's. I vaguely remember my Great-grandma Fyfe teaching me how to count to five in German. It is easy to forget that my Gotsch, Brady, Fyfe, and Johnson roots in this country are fairly shallow. And that makes it challenging for me personally to empathize with today's immigrant population.

However watching a couple movies this weekend helped me understand, I think, a little better the challenges all immigrants face. Produced in the early 1970's, The Emigrants and The New Land, two Swedish films directed by Jan Troel do a great job in telling one family's courageous decision to leave a repressive country and start fresh in the wild frontiers of Minnesota. Slow paced, in Swedish with subtitles, and very long (each film is 3 hours plus), these films are realistic, gripping, and quite moving. While sympathetic toward blacks and Native Americans, the director creates no great heroes or villains, but simply shows human beings with both virtues and foibles.

Human beings want and need comfort, familiarity, and safety. Anyone who voluntarily leaves the country of one's birth is surely lacking one or more of those. A lack of job opportunities, a totalitarian government, and/or a lack of physical security for oneself and one's family are why humans are willing to risk everything, dive into new cultures, learn a new language, and bear the too-often shown displeasure of longer-term residents of a strange land. 

I admire my great-greats for taking the risks these movies so vividly portrayed. And I will remember what was true for my family years ago, is now true today for the many new members of my community who are also seeking a better life.

PS - I obtained the DVDs of these movies from my public library.

BFTP: Improving the quality of tweets

Written long before we had a Twitterer-in-Chief...

Blogorrhea noun. An unusually high volume output of articles on a blog.

So Ole joins a monastery where he is required to take a vow of silence. Each year monks are allowed to speak only two words.
At the end of Ole's first year, Abbot Lars asks him for his two words. "Bad food," says Ole.
At the end of his second year, Ole replies "Hard bed" when the Abbot Lars asks.
At the end of the third year Ole's two words are "I quit."
"I am hardly surprised," remarks the Abbot, "all you've done since you've been here is complain, complain, complain.

Here's my proposal - there should be a five "tweet per 24 hours" limit to any one Twitter account. Period. No exceptions.

My guess is that the quality of tweets would rise fantastically. Right now for many twitterers, blogorrhea has a companion condition - Twitterrhea. Really does any really have 10-20 thoughts that are THAT worth sharing? Have thought others would REALLY find valuable?

Wouldn't all of us be more discriminating if there were a limit?

For most people I talk to (and for myself), the big information issue is not a lack but a glut that makes it difficult to discriminate the useful and provacative from the mediocre and useless. Twitter is not helping with this in the least. There is too much "I read it and now I will pass it on and get a Twitter point" mentality.

Not that long ago, print journal editors provided a valuable service - they, fairly or unfairly, helped distribute only the "best" ideas in the profession. Yes, I am sure they practiced with a bias and that some really good stuff got lost in the process, but I didn't have to spend half my evenings scanning posts, articles and applications to determine if they had value to me. The editor did that for me pretty accurately.

What would happen if every tweet cost a quarter; every blog post cost five dollars; every e-mail a dime to the writer. Wouldn't we all be a bit more discriminating in what we sent?

I would be. You may well have been spared reading this post...

lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com

Original post October 14, 2010