Manatee Libraries Block MySpace December 18, 2006
“John Cole III, of Holmes Beach, has been using the computers at the Island Branch Library to keep in touch with his friends and family. Cole’s favorites communicatin tool is the popular social networking site, MySpace. But when he went to the library Monday, he found he could not sign on to his personal page…
Mr. Cole could not sign on because his access had been blocked by the library. Administrators reviewed “behavior problems” associated with use of the site and had decided that MySpace was not a good fit with the library’s educational mission.
This is shortsighted censorship, to say the least. The public library should have an educational mission and inevitably does have an educational function. But in our time, libraries should also have a communication mission, but the functioning reality of that mission is anything but inevitable. Education comes in a variety of forms, and one of the most ancient and unregulated of these is what today is called “peer to peer”. The conscientious administrator should also be concerned about predators who might take advantage of younger MySpace users, but it is difficult to translate the concerns into effective prior restraint; in addition, there is no real evidence that MySpace is any more vulnerable to this problem than is any other part of the internet that attracts large numbers of young people.
The Manatee librarians should rethink their position.
