Digital Democracy? Not Yet!

"Print is the democratic medium." That quotation was attributed to Maurice Line, the great innovator of the British Library. "You know, you can drop leaflets on the streets of Berlin or the jungles of Africa, but you can't drop terminals," said a friend trying to explain Line's meaning to me.

As domination of the information world by electronic impulses moves inexorably onward, Line's comment takes on new urgency.

When Solidarity began the revolution that overthrew the government of Poland, it learned the lesson. The authorities pulled the plug on electronic information -- radio, television, telephones -- so the Solidarity rebels had to resort to that ubiquitous tool of the modern revolutionary -- the mimeograph machine. Recent events indicate that most governments have the impulses to censor, monitor, and manipulate the use of information.

"To protect the children" of Hudsonville, MI, the city council pulled the plug on Internet access via the local public library, indefinitely suspending all access to the Internet through library machines.

When a labor union tried to get information on a company with which it was negotiating, a well-known financial information provider refused access on the grounds that it was an "inappropiate" use of the data.

When the Republican Congress, under pressure from the party's right wing and the telecommunications industry, decided to try to undermine the E-rate that promised discounted prices on Internet connections for libraries, legislation was proposed to make Internet filtering mandatory.

In our obsession with children's access to the Internet and the filtering issue, we have neglected deeper issues that arise from the impact of converting information to digitized, online formats. We have not built protections for such fundamental rights as those to free expression, privacy, and freedom from being invaded, monitored, or watched by government agents, corporate marketers, copyright cops, religious extremists, and other legal or illegal intruders on our electronic connections.

Equally important, and more difficult, we need protection from those who already control or who can break into our online information sources and manipulate the information there to secure a political, economic, social, or religious advantage.

The point is simple: It is easier to shut down, monitor, manipulate, and tamper with online information and its users than it ever was with print. Our top priority must be to build the apparatus, write the laws, and construct the principles to protect us from electronic interference by government and/or those with private agendas.

Right now, the monitors and manipulators from government and private interests are busily taking charge of the online world. In many ways they are even corrupting librarianship. Consider the number of librarians who have been forced to serve as supervisors and censors of the use of Internet terminals in their reading rooms. Look how digitization has increased the pressure for fee-based services in publicly supported libraries, converting librarians to storekeepers and marketing executives. Consider the cost of licensing agreements that provide only temporary use of information that was permanently added to print collections.

Look, too, at the questions of quality, accuracy, and scope, in electronic or digital resources. Some may remember precision in cataloging records, or when you could trust the large commericial trade bibliographies. Now you're lucky if you can find the title you seek in any of them.

Our print history can give us some models of protection in the new electronic age. Until we create a digital democracy, where we're safe from the electronic monitors and manipulators, we must hold on to those books, magazines, and even antiques like the printing press and the mimeograph machine.