Does the availability of labels impoverish political discussions about which materials should be filtered?
Matt Blaze (personal communication) describes this concern with an analogy to discussions at local school board meeting about books to be read in a high school English class. Ideally, the discussion about a particular book should focus on the contents of the book, and not on the contents of a review of the book, or, worse yet, a label that says the book contains undesirable words. There will always be a tradeoff, however, between speed of decision-making and the ability to take into account subtleties and context. When a large number of decisions need to be made in a short time, some will have to be made based on less than full information. The challenge for society, then, will be to choose carefully which decisions merit full discussion, in which case labels should be irrelevant, and which decisions can be left to the imperfect summary information that a label can provide. The following excerpt from Filtering the Internet summarizes this concern and the need for eternal vigilance: “An
Matt Blaze (personal communication) describes this concern with an analogy to discussions at local school board meeting about books to be read in a high school English class. Ideally, the discussion about a particular book should focus on the contents of the book, and not on the contents of a review of the book, or, worse yet, a label that says the book contains undesirable words. There will always be a tradeoff, however, between speed of decision-making and the ability to take into account subtleties and context. When a large number of decisions need to be made in a short time, some will have to be made based on less than full information. The challenge for society, then, will be to choose carefully which decisions merit full discussion, in which case labels should be irrelevant, and which decisions can be left to the imperfect summary information that a label can provide. The following excerpt from Filtering the Internet summarizes this concern and the need for eternal vigilance: “An
