Rober Sawyer's Hominids has an interesting exploration of the impact automatic searchable 'memory' might have on a society. The Neanderthal society calls these 'alibi archives' -- everyone is implanted at birth with an AI helper that, among other things, records all their conversations, activities, etc. to a cube in a centralized storage area, where they are available to the individual concerned and to judicial review after a subpoena-like process.
I'm not commenting on the technology involved in this, but it is interesting to explore a society where such a thing has been implemented in at least one possible way. Not that I'd necessarily want to live there, mind...
Another interesting take on privacy issues as well as copyright issues re: the Internet is David Brin's _Earth_. This isn't my favorite Brin book, but it explores a lot of interesting issues in a new-future basically-our-world setting.
The whole idea of 'Content Monitors' would be extremely hard to sell in the librarian community (I'm using 'librarian' to refer to people who have a degree in Library Science, and who are usually (with the board) the people who make and enforce policy, as distinct from the people who staff the check-out desks and shelve the books, who usually report to a librarian). A central tenet of professional education in Library Science is that public libraries have a mission to provide information to anyone who asks in a non-judgemental way. Libraries are forced to restrict what they actually have on the shelves by budget constraints, so there are selection policies to guide the spending of public money, but there is a world of difference between 'telling people to be quiet' and telling them that they can't read material that is available to other patrons because (in a staff member's opinion) it is indecent/you are not old enough/it is controversial and you can't handle it/whatever.
Most public libraries fight this kind of 'the library staff knows best' censorship tooth and nail, and certainly the American Library Association does. Monitoring what people are looking at on the Internet is, from this perspective, WORSE than filtering software, since it gives all the judgemental power to a staff member.
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Rober Sawyer's Hominids has an interesting exploration of the impact automatic searchable 'memory' might have on a society. The Neanderthal society calls these 'alibi archives' -- everyone is implanted at birth with an AI helper that, among other things, records all their conversations, activities, etc. to a cube in a centralized storage area, where they are available to the individual concerned and to judicial review after a subpoena-like process. I'm not commenting on the technology involved in this, but it is interesting to explore a society where such a thing has been implemented in at least one possible way. Not that I'd necessarily want to live there, mind ...
Another interesting take on privacy issues as well as copyright issues re: the Internet is David Brin's _Earth_. This isn't my favorite Brin book, but it explores a lot of interesting issues in a new-future basically-our-world setting.
The whole idea of 'Content Monitors' would be extremely hard to sell in the librarian community (I'm using 'librarian' to refer to people who have a degree in Library Science, and who are usually (with the board) the people who make and enforce policy, as distinct from the people who staff the check-out desks and shelve the books, who usually report to a librarian). A central tenet of professional education in Library Science is that public libraries have a mission to provide information to anyone who asks in a non-judgemental way. Libraries are forced to restrict what they actually have on the shelves by budget constraints, so there are selection policies to guide the spending of public money, but there is a world of difference between 'telling people to be quiet' and telling them that they can't read material that is available to other patrons because (in a staff member's opinion) it is indecent/you are not old enough/it is controversial and you can't handle it/whatever. Most public libraries fight this kind of 'the library staff knows best' censorship tooth and nail, and certainly the American Library Association does. Monitoring what people are looking at on the Internet is, from this perspective, WORSE than filtering software, since it gives all the judgemental power to a staff member.