Information commons

[ewt]

I wasn't very clear what I meant in this post.

So:

The practicalities of making internet access (or books, for that matter) free for a certain amount of public access are many and complex, however this does not mean that they should become facilities available only to those who have the money to pay for them.

Discuss.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I find it weird that the ONE social justice thing that the United States seems to do better than Europe is libraries.

Of course, how well we do libraries varies immensly from place to place -- libraries are all funded locally, with some help from states, so a town that doesn't fund their libraries doesn't have one, while a town that does, does. Still, on the whole, my town is fairly typical: unlimited Internet access (time limits if there's a line waiting; people who have research to do have priority over people who want to play games -- but if the computers are free, you can go ahead and play online games, so long as it doesn't involve installing programs to the library computer), free WiFi in the building.

We are terrible with most other social justice things -- support for the poor, health care, and so forth -- but we do libraries extremely well. I don't know why, unless it's that the United States has some of the most rabidly fanatical librarians in the world: our library schools train librarians to look at their work as a holy calling that is fundamental to the existence of a free society.

Which, of course, it is.