We’ve all read stories about the people who have been reprimanded or lost their jobs due to inappropriate use of the Web at work, ranging from viewing entertainment sites to selling pornography online. Whatever the offense, our bosses know that the Web can be used for, as Obi-Wan Kenobi might put it, evil as well as good. No argument there. The relevant question is: Who should determine what online is good for us and what will rot our virtual teeth?
Having dodged the careening bullet of the Communications Decency Act, many of the large computer hardware (Dell) and software (Microsoft, naturally) companies are putting their money behind the Recreational Software Advisory Council, or RSAC, an organization that would monitor a self-labeling plan that encourages sites to rate their content according to a preset list of criteria comprised of the usual suspects: violence, nudity and obscenity. The ideal intent of RSAC is to protect free speech since sites subject themselves to a ratings system, rather than another agencygovernment or privatedetermining what is violent, obscene or otherwise inappropriate.
Unfortunately, that idealism evaporates almost immediately upon contact with the real world. Let’s say you run a site devoted to the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, that giant of contemporary literature. Let’s say you get the rights from Pynchon’s publisher to reprint the full text of his recent novel “Mason & Dixon.” Well, you should know that the 774 pages of “Mason & Dixon” include roughly half a dozen uses of a common word considered obscene in some circles. As a result, these six words (out of nearly 200,000 in the entire book) would force you to list the site as including obscenities, according to the RSAC’s rules. As soon as you do this, a host of browsers and third-party filtering programs make your site unavailable. This may not be censorship in the classical sense, but it does illuminate how our technical abilities to sort content are still several hundred light years behind our ability to create it. It gets worse. This summer RSAC experimented with a news label that would make the coverage of an event involving violence, nudity or obscenity on a legitimate news site less likely to be filtered from widespead access. (The project has since been abandoned.) Once again, the power to decide both what is news and what is legitimate remains the hands of a larger organizationthe RSACwhich would decide whether the analysis of current events on my homemade Web site is as legitimate as that of a major newspaper. And which news enterprises are to be deemed legitimate? We know the “New York Times” is a real news organization, but what about “E! News Daily”? Once the labeling starts, forcing an infinite group of topics and approaches into a limited ries of categories, it doesn’t stop. Once again, American business is relying on seemingly objective organizations to relieve parents (and, in the business world, managers) of some of their most essential tasks to ensure absolute innocence when accusers look for easy scapegoats on which to assign blame. Unfortunately, the RSAC solution raises far more problems than it solves. So watch where you go on the Web. Someone may have tossed your favorite site into an inappropriate category that just might cost you your job.
