Ann Althouse has a problem with sitting next to someone on an airplane who is looking at porn on a portable DVD player. Call it a failing, but I would have a similar complaint. My complaint would become even more volatile if that person was sitting next to my wife or mother.
I caught two of our regular customers on porn today. It's a routine affair. Anyway, as a service to public library customers who do not wish to be caught looking at cyberporn, I advice that you do not:
1. sit in the corner and turn your monitor away from a walkway
2. look about suspiciously as though you don't want people to know what you're doing
3. masturbate
These are tell-tale signs to the library staff that the customer is up to no good. Especially the third, which even other library customers can recognize as problematic. I recall that the main library of Ohio State University actually had signs up around their labyrinthine stacks which said "No Masturbating" (I am not making this up). Perhaps they should proliferate in public, as well as academic libraries, since apparently the rules are not quite clear.
Jeff adds his thoughts.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Were public libraries different before PC's and porn, or did they have problems with porno magazines and patrons?
Well, my library work experience does not predate the Internet, but I doubt that porn was a problem. After all, the libraries didn't subscribe to porno mags, so if the customers wanted to view pornography in the library they would have to bring in the magazines themselves. And they are more likely to stay at home for that.
I actually convinced someone that more supervision was needed at public libraries because of Internet content. He thought that it would be obvious when people looked at porn, so there shouldn't be much of a problem. I told him about one experience at my local library when I glanced at the monitor of the teenager sitting next to me. He wasn't viewing full-on porn, but he was in a chat room talking about what he wanted to do with the chatter on the other end of the conversation.
A friend of mine used to run the computer system at a Christian college. He said that most of the top ten websites visited each day by students were porn sites. Of course most of that would be accessed through dorm room computers, so signs in the library wouldn't accomplish much.
We don't even bother supervising chat -- so as long as customers don't download chat software onto the hard drives.
One of the nuttiest solutions to library porn that I've heard is to put each computer in a separate cubicle so that no one could see the person inside, or what he was looking at on his computer screen.
Post a Comment