The problem was that the North Central Regional Library District filtered things that people wanted to look at, like Women & Guns magazine. The challenge was that such filtering is illegal under Washington State free-speech laws.

There is nothing good about internet filtering on library computers, let me get out of the way. Sarah Houghton-Jan did a piece on this topic late last week and she says it well with a ton of data and invective to back it up.

The idea with a case like this is that if he law was successfully challenged, no libraries in Washington State would be allowed to filter, hopefully setting up an awkward conflict with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law can demand that libraries do (filter).

All three opinions in the case compare the internet to a library collection. For the majority and concurring opinions, the library selects materials, so it should select websites as well. The dissenting justice opines that the library has selected the internet and shouldn’t refuse to circulate certain sites.

The justices aren’t the only ones robbing this train of thought. In Library Journal, Washington State Librarian echoes the same sentiment, saying “public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.

Here’s my problem: the conversation here is about libraries as repositories of information, and their mythical role as gatekeepers to same, and it doesn’t serve us at all. I see a parallel here with OCLC’s 2008 study, From Awareness to Funding, that says “transformation, not information drives financial support”. In both cases, framing the library as only a provider of content or information hinders our ability to help our communities thrive.

Let’s pretend the problem is only about people looking at pornography on library computers. Porn is bad, right, and kids can’t have it, they’re too young. It’s misogynist too, so long as we’re taking the moral high ground, because pornography is ultimately about male fantasies and dominating women. So what do we do about it?

Lawrence Lessig, in Code gives four techniques for regulation: law, markets, architecture and social norms.

Internet filtering uses architecture to regulate. Filters put physical and logical constraints on what people can look at. Houghton-Jan does a great job describing how poorly this works and has the data to back it up.

Markets regulate through pricing structures and through supply and demand. If there weren’t free porn sites, the market would be a good regulator here. So would getting rid of net neutrality - it would be a lot easier to eliminate nudity on library computers if those sites’ bandwidth was squeezed out by more moral sites like foxnews.com.

Social norms regulate by having a community of people establish proper behavior. People who act outside of the norms are ostracized.

Law regulates by making it against policy, for example, to look at pornography on library computers. The law doesn’t do much on its own. It only works if the law or policy is enforceable.

Houghton-Jan reports that internet filtering doesn’t work:

it’s consistently found that 15-20% of the time, content is over-blocked (e.g. benign sites that are blocked incorrectly). And 15-20% of the time, content is under-blocked (e.g. sites deemed “bad” gets through anyway).

Could we do better with some other regulation techniques?

Here’s an example from a library I have been known to work at:

We patrons over a certain age the choice of filtered vs. unfiltered internet when they sign onto their stations. Unfiltered access isn’t a free pass, there is still a policy that says you still aren’t supposed to look at pornography or other sites that bother the person next to you.

The way it works is that if you are a patron and you are sitting next to someone and you think they are breaking the rules, you tell the nearest staff member. That person calls someone else, who asks the person stop and often to log off.

So this library regulates pornography through a combination of architecture (you can choose filtered internet access) and law. I would also argue that social norms play a regulatory role as well - using the internet at the library isn’t exactly private, and anyone sitting next to you or walking by can see what you see. Patrons are less likely to visit pornography sites in a public setting.

I’m not exactly sure how many computers we have in the building, but we report 483 in the whole system. I work in the big beautiful building that has a lot more space than the others, so call it 60 public computers, very conservatively.

Patrons are limited to an hour a day, and the big beautiful building is open 57 hours per week. Lets say they’re in use 80% of the time, which is also very conservative, so at minimum, 2,736 patrons (57 x 60 x 80 percent) use the internet at our big beautiful building every week.

Over the course of a typical week, patrons get asked to stop viewing “objectionable material” around 5 times. That’s my experience. I’m sure it is under-reported. Some patrons may not care what their neighbor is peeping at, and others may be intimidated or unwilling to give up a few minutes of their precious hour a day of internet to tattle. Let’s say that only 1 in 10 cases of gets reported, or 50 of 2,736 patrons are breaking the rules every week.

Rounding up, 2% of patrons are looking at “objectionable material” every week. Again, can I stress that I am erring on the side of “bad behavior”?

So in this case, the strategy of combining choice for patrons, library policy and social norms is at least 98% effective against pornography, if that’s really the goal, and as a bonus, never overblocks non-pornographic sites. It is far more effective than filtering.

Now, there are all kinds of problems with my anecdote. What I consider conservative estimates about computer use and “mis-use” might be dead wrong. These social norms might only apply in the library with the big room full of computers. Looking for information in a public space may constrain the freedom of inquiry we are trying to enable. And did I mention we have security guards who sometimes help enforce library behavior policies?

But the point is that the conversation about pornography and other “objectionable material” in the library should center on behavior, not content.

Oracle is all about the information. She still has all of the geek-cred, the photographic memory, the advanced degrees - everything that Batgirl had. But now, she uses it. Wikipedia tells me that Oracle made her comics debut as a member of Task Force X in the series called Suicide Squad. I’m not going to talk about that Oracle, because I’ve never read it. There’s also a whole host of appearances with the Justice League and a whole romance thing with Nightwing, and I’m not going to talk about Oracle there either.

When it comes to comics, I’m pretty much a dilettante. I read what I like and I don’t seek completion - I haven’t worked through all of the zillion Justice League trades to find the Oracle depictions and I probably will read some but not all of the many places she appears throughout the DC universe that aren’t Birds of Prey. Yes, I’m going to write about Birds of Prey!Oracle as depicted by the awesome Gail Simone.

Which means that I’m not even going to write about all of the Birds of Prey series, since Gail Simone only wrote the ones in the middle. Oracle and the Black Canary join up in a 1996 standalone by Chuck Dixon, Gary Frank and John Dell called Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey. Gail Simone took over the series in 2003, adding Huntress make a group of 3. Oracle runs the show, getting her field operatives the information they need.

(She plays a similar information-broker role for the Justice League, and even for Batman himself)

But this Oracle doesn’t just search databases really well. She hacks her way in, and gets the stuff people are hiding. She uses her mad information skills to attack –

from Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds (TPB)

And no shrinking away from the Librarian Label here. In fine superhero tradition, most of the DC world doesn’t know Barbara’s true identity — or even if she’s human or computer — instead of a cowl and cape, this green mask is what she shows the world.

Oracle has the potential to be the librarian superhero - where the librarian part and the superhero powers are coming from the same place. What I wanted from Oracle was a story (not all the stories - but a story) where she is Barbara Gordon, kick-ass librarian and information superhero, front and center as the primary action figure in a Birds of Prey story. Not in every story - I also like behind-the-scenes-string-puller Barbara. But some story. I want librarian superhero where librarian power is the active power, where the intellect and the action are melded instead of understood as an either/or.

And she never really *quite* gets there - she’s usually the broker behind the scenes, feeding the active agents what they need to succeed. When they start pushing her story further, it’s still interesting but it’s not exactly what I was hoping for. And isn’t it all about me? But it does get at the physical/intellectual thing that started this whole thing off…

Oracle gets possessed by Brainiac, best known as a Superman adversary, who seeks to use her super-intelligent body to become embodied, or biological, in form. And the subtext of that is interesting, right? Barbara Gordon has been hailed by many as an example of an interesting disabled character in the DC universe, and the idea that an A.I. entity like Brainiac would pick a differently-abled body with which to become embodied is interesting and says something about the centrality or power of the intellect.

Equally interesting to me is the way, though, that Barbara’s physical disability is a necessary precondition to her using her intellectual/ information powers as such, to making them the focus of her action - to making them active. With most superheroes, at least in my admittedly limited experience, bouncing back after being paralyzed wouldn’t even be an option, at least not without a major character backstory overhaul. With most it is hard to even imagine how they could come back and continue to fight crime and evil without the active, physical power that made them initially famous.

Those for whom that is not the case - it’s mostly the same people who were in Southern Fried Scientist’s comics post, the inventive, science geniuses with the brains (and, let’s face it, usually the bankroll) to invent something to make up for any physical gifts they might lack or lose - Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Bruce Wayne himself.

Barbara’s a little different, isn’t she? I mean, she’s still got the fighting chops - you’re not going to knock her out of her wheelchair without getting at least knocked back yourself.

She’ll fight you from the chair; she’s an expert in some kind of martial arts that uses weapons. But for the most part, she’s not building a suit or a weapon or something physical that will replace or enhance the physical skills she lacks. Instead, she’s more like Daredevil, the blind person who loses one sense and gains in all the others - she loses physical skills and that leads her to push the other skills she has to crazy heights.

But the Brainiac storyline never quite takes a stand on this - she defeats him, knocking him back out of her body, but he leaves behind a virus that … allows her to telepathically connect with her computers. So it enhances her non-physical, intellectual gifts - making her an even more kick-ass librarian than before. But before you get to attached to the idea of intellect as superpower (a la Charles Xavier) there’s an operation, the virus is gone, but hey! she can wiggle her toes. So there’s lots of things to think about about the larger question throughout this arc, but the whole adds up to something less than the sum of its parts.

Enter - this guy. So when I started reading the Perfect Pitch trade paperback on the plane back from Denver, I was happy. Calculator is also described an information broker, but, you know, evil.

And with an attitude like this - who better to fight this particular evil than a librarian?

And the resulting storyline is just what I wanted - there are active agents out in the field, but the real battle is between these two brains.

(I hear Calculator comes back after Gail Simone left Birds of Prey, but I don’t know what happens with those because I haven’t read them. My point is just that in this moment - yay kick-ass librarian superhero!)

(and then I turned the page and found a message saying - hey! because of our lame crossover event Infinite Crisis, everything in the DC universe has advanced a year! Okay, I am paraphrasing. But everything was all gone. It might as well be a new series. I might be a little bitter, still.)

Which brings me back to the physical/intellectual divide I was talking about before - the one that never quite gets resolved, or even fully explored in Birds of Prey. One of the big questions where Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl/ Oracle is concerned is - will she/should she walk again? I mean, we all know that crazier things have happened in comics.

There are a lot more than two sides to that question. Her maiming was not a good moment - The Killing Joke may have been a good book but that was not a good moment. Turning back the clock happens in the comics, so why not do it here? She is a unique and positive portrayal of disability, why take that away? Or, I love Misfit!Batgirl, and don’t want Barbara Gordon to take the title back. Or, I hate Misfit!Batgirl, bring Barbara Gordon back! And so on and so on and so on and so on.

And my thoughts about that are all mixed up with this whole question of what makes Barbara’s powers super. See, to me the Barbara Gordon of Batgirl, Year One, the one who was on and on about OMG my life of the mind is so boring and tedious and I must do something physical to really matter - is so annoying. I like Barbara who can’t walk, Oracle who has rejected that ridiculous premise right at its root SO MUCH BETTER.

Which gave me a lot of pause, when I saw my Birds of Prey Oracle talking like that other Batgirl - but it didn’t bug me. Why? Why was I not annoyed?

But here’s the thing. This whole arc happens when Barbara is all excited about the toe-wiggling. But for all that, I don’t think it’s about a return of her physical skills. This whole arc is also tied up in the question of what being the all-knowing, in some ways all-powerful leader of the Birds of Prey is taking from Barbara Gordon.

There are lots of comparisons to Batman, how making the hard choices all of the time - making those hard choices for everyone else even when they didn’t ask because that’s what loner vigilante heroes do - makes him hard.

Barbara here is talking, I think, not about being able to go back to the hitting, kicking, punching form of crime fighting so much as she’s talking about going back to a time when she didn’t have to make those tough choices, when she didn’t have to decide for other people when she was, in short, less powerful. When she could just be one of the capes, working on a smaller scale, able to focus on the hands-on day to day and not having to think about the big picture. And I find that fascinating.

So there is probably a lot more out there - good, bad and indifferent - in all of the Barbara Gordon stuff I haven’t read. Maybe someday this will be continued, maybe not.

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p.s. There is also a Birds of Prey TV show, but include that in the list of things I’m not talking about, even though I have seen some of it. They made Barbara Gordon a high school teacher for one. And for another, they talk about her amazing information skills but they sure as heck don’t show them. There’s one horrible moment early on where they all sit around waiting for someone to get back to them with something - an address I think - and it doesn’t even occur to information-maven Oracle that she could, you know, look stuff up.  Argh.

Why do heroes so rarely hold advanced degrees? And why are villains so often among the highly educated?

And there are bigger cultural questions, of course -about how we feel as a culture about knowledge and learning, especially book-learnin’ and perhaps even especially especially science-learning: “[t]he message is clear. Power corrupts, and knowledge is the most powerful force in the world. How could someone so educated not become twisted and evil by their own knowledge?”

Shaun and I were coming at it from a different direction - looking at the number of scientist-heroes in the comics world, most of which are mentioned in this post: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Reed Richards (actually Reed Richards isn’t mentioned in the post, but Batman is, though it’s an earlier vision of Batman as world’s greatest detective) — there is definitely a strata of comic book superhero types who develop or enhance their power because of their big, inventive, science-y brains. And we couldn’t think of any female superheroes who fit into that mold at all. Now, of course, the sample size for female superheroes is pretty small, but still, not one?

(Which doesn’t take anything away from the post’s overall point that these big, science-y brains are usually not the first thing thought of when we think of these heroes, and even if they are it’s not the advanced degrees that we focus on in the same way that we focus on, say, Dr. Doom, PhD.)

Which brings me to Batgirl, our own librarian superhero extraordinaire, who should be the exception that proves this rule and who, well, kind of sadly is. I want to love Batgirl, despite that unfortunate “girl” in her name. And a lot of the time I really do like Batgirl, but that liking is despite her librarian-self, not because of it.

Shaun bought me the Showcase collection of classic Batgirl comics a while ago, and I did read the whole thing. Batgirl’s origin story is kind of silly. She doesn’t exactly get a Big Bad that inspires awe or fear - Killer Moth is not very intimidating. And the whole librarian thing is obviously, painfully played for contrast - Batgirl is awesomer because when she is not!Batgirl look at how not-awesome she is.

from Showcase presents: Batgirl, v. 1

Now, leaving aside that Princess Leia hairdo which means her aesthetic probably has a very different impact on my generation than it did in the 60’s, I find it interesting that they make sure to put the brain part in - she’s not just a shy, or mousy, librarian. She’s super-smart.

So super-smart that she even has a Dr. title! That’s one super-smart librarian.

But I expect that we don’t have to worry about her absolute mental genius power corrupting absolutely because she is, in fact, a mousy female librarian type of brain.

Though perhaps we should worry about her power corrupting, because she didn’t have to work very hard for it — she has a lot of knowledge from literature to martial arts — but her intelligence is of the fact-retrieval kind and it enabled by a photographic memory.

And we also can’t rely on professional ethics to set any limits. She can instantly connect people to the dicey books that they check out and use that memory to fish the criminals’ personal information out of patron records.

She might not turn that information over to her police commissioner father, but that’s only because she is going to head off and nab the evil-doers herself.

All that aside, though, I still like this Barbara Gordon. She is smart, she’s also sassy. She stands up to Batman and even though her behavior is frequently explained by 60’s female stereotypes painted with a very broad brush (see Batgirl and Supergirl fight over Batman!), sometimes there are twists where they go - see, she’s not a stereotypical female at all! Most of all, she’s positive. And proactive. Good librarian traits.

Which brings me to the updated Batgirl - who I don’t like nearly so well. In Batgirl, Year One she spends a lot of her time moping about what other people won’t let her do. Now, part of the mopiness may be related to the fact that they update everything but leave her with the silly Killer Moth origin story, but a lot of it is just morose. Not fun at all.

And what’s really frustrating about it all to me, is that it didn’t have to be that way. See, Batgirl circa 2003 has all of the pieces - she’s got her geek-girl chops -

(She’s getting rid of her comptuers there to make sure that no one will be able to trace her breaking and entering into the Justice League Headquarters back to her)

She’s got a good sense of the significance of information - knowledge is power - information is power -

This Barbara Gordon is not all about instant perfect recall of esoteric facts - she’s not all bound by what is in her collection. She’s developed important information gathering skills - science-y ones even - that mean she is has to go out and proactively do stuff to gather the esoteric facts.

And more than that - she has the skills to do stuff with information. To use it as power and to use it as weapon.  But she really, really doesn’t. All she does is mope. And her dad laughs at her for wanting to be a cop.

And yes, she does invent Batgirl and she does start at least doing something.

But for all that knowledge and understanding she seems to have - the something that she does involves running as far away from actually using knowledge or information as any kind of power ever. “I need something physical,” she moans.

.

Because working here would suck, right?

Now - spoilers ahead - not for any book I’m going to talk about, but for Batman: The Killing Joke…

One of the things from that post way up there that started this off was a discussion of Charles Xavier, who does use his academic credential, but who is in a wheelchair and thus more human and less absolute-power In the Killing Joke, Barbara Gordon becomes one of many female superheroes maimed in the service of plot advancement and making a bad guy seem even badder.

What does a punching, kicking, hand to hand fighting superhero like Batgirl do when that physicality is taken away from her? Because that is one of the things that this all comes down to - try as we might, we just don’t let go of the idea that we’re physical/powerful or smart/wily. But not both.

Well, this is mega-long already. So check here tomorrow as we continue this theme with Oracle.

ETA - Link to part 2

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p.s.  The post title doesn’t come from the comics at all - it comes from here. Never aired, and they kept Killer Moth dude around too!