Why your library is not a library.

Has your library become a "meeting space"? A "community center"?  If you answered Yes, then your library isn't a library.

You can yell and shake your Doctor Girlfriend action figure at the screen, but it won't help to turn your community center back into a library. All it will take is one asshole handing out pamphlets for some movement and your library will forfeit any protections it ever earned in any court decision.

What keeps a library from becoming a sidewalk or a park or an abandoned lot is that it's not a public forum. What keeps your library a library is that the librarian has the power to enforce behavior. Out on the sidewalk, cops do it. But in the library, you do it. If you lose that, then only the police will be able to regulate what happens in your library.

I think that's a big something missing from library training: "When you become a librarian, you will be the police." But if you're done shaking and you still think your library is better off not being a library, just think about this: Shhhhhh.

If the library is about Free Speech, it's also about No Speech. Free Speech should be communicated quietly, in your head, between you and the author/creator of whatever you are reading/viewing.

When the fuck did you think the shushing started? It started when people walked into the library from off of the loud and busy street and needed to be reminded to Shut the Fuck Up. And do you really want to go back to doing that all day?

When people are giving public speeches in front of the check-out desk in your community-center-not-a-library, you'll be shushing your ass off. It's taken years to get out that message, mostly by doing something even more offensive to get the talkers to stop: shushing.

"I will shush you" is not a fucking joke; it's our legacy. Because in public spaces, each one of us has the right to fuck with other people. We can get right in their faces and shout, "Did you know...?" And then follow with some insane conspiracy theory or mathematical proof or muffin recipe and no one can stop us.

When you give up the quiet, you give up the library. Why do you think cats are associated with libraries? Because they are fucking quiet. Not because their shit smells like roses. That's why you let smelly people in your library.

 I can see a day when libraries will need sound meters to gauge the loudness. 35 decibels is okay. 60 decibels: Shhhhh. But if we're lucky, they'll let us use that water bottle we use to squirt the cat to shoot the talkers right in their agitated faces.

We've finally figured out the internet

We all know that I Love Lucy was originally used to sell cigarettes.  And we know that soap operas sold soap to housewives.

There has always been a debate about television and whether it only exists to sell us crap through commercials.  But like roads littered with billboards for lawyers and casinos, television is only moderately evil, delivering Downton Abbey sandwiched between promotional bumpers for ADM or the Ford Foundation or other mentions of corporate sponsorships.

I'm not aware of any spam in the days of the text-based web browser, but as soon as mouse clicking became the primary mode for moving through the internet, people found ways to make the journey pure agony.  And in the pre-teen years of the web, everyone agreed that pop-up ads were a major pain in the ass, so we found ways to blow the shit out of them.

But with the move to mobile internet access, we've finally learned what the internet wants from us: everything.  And we give it, gladly.  The internet wants to collect our data to sell us ads and it finally found a way that we can't block.

We have no control over our mobile devices.  There is no choice.  If we want an app, we need to understand that it will track us: it will log our GPS location, our cell tower location, our phone use, contacts, keystrokes, and the temperature of our testicles while the device rests in our pants pockets.

So if you want to use a smart phone or ereader or tablet, you should understand that you will be tracked.  And then don't care.  Because caring would mean that you won't be able to have that app that is so essential to making your life whole because having it would make your forfeit a significant amount of your privacy.  So against all common sense, you download the app.

So in finally figuring out the internet, it seems the internet has finally figured out us.

Me, I don't put any questionable apps on my phone.  I put them on my tablet which knows very little about me and can share all the secrets it wants.