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Library column ************ I’d wondered about this years ago when Internet filtering began, but the industry grew, filtering became standard, and I haven’t given it much thought since. You can get a job as an “internet content reviewer.” But then again, you might not want to. Filtering by software robots that scan for key words, phrases, and images has never worked well. The only way to catch most of the evil stuff is for people to look at it. After all, we define “evil.” It’s hard to tell a computer what it is. So, human beings have to look at millions of images a day looking for bad stuff, and it’s a never-ending “arms race.” They can never catch up. Looking for bad stuff means looking “at” bad stuff, and it takes its toll. A growing number of workers around the world spend every day looking at not just classic pornography but every manner of twisted human behavior. These days, there is likely a camera at nearly every instance of human depravity, so why not take a pic and post it on the Internet? Filtering is a big industry now, and it’s not just about filtering your home, work, or public library computers. Big, big companies that host Internet service sites want to keep these images off their servers. You can imagine that Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube all engage in this arms race. They have to do it or their services will spiral down under the weight of the lowest common denominator of human expression. It’s not fair to call it “common denominator.” It may be uncommon, like a poison, but it doesn’t take much to ruin your day. But what about these workers? Many sign on as a lark, to get paid to look at porn, but sex is not the problem. The problem is violence, heartlessness, and the attendant suffering (animal and human). These workers quickly find they are screening images of human depravity that haunt them the rest of their lives. We all know, in a sense, that awful things go on every day around the world, but most of us live lives that preclude regular exposure to these things. The Internet is a kind of filter itself, collecting and concentrating this behavior so that it can be more easily found, whether intentionally or not. A recent New York Times article looked at this issue. One company’s 50 workers look at a combined total of 20 million images a week. The volume itself is numbing, not even accounting for the content. The screening companies are starting to offer counseling support. Moderators employed by YouTube have contracts of only one year and access to counseling support. The Internet really is a virtual version of our real lives. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine anything truly safer physically, since all you have to do is switch it off, in contrast to wandering into the wrong neighborhood in a troubled city. But it’s also an uncontrollable marketplace that concentrates human behavior of all kinds and makes it instantly available. And we click and stare for hours. So now we have Internet content moderators joining others in our society whose jobs present them with a concentration of human suffering, misbehavior, or depravity: police, social workers, psychiatrists. The list goes on: medical personnel of many kinds, firemen, EMTs, and these days even teachers. Somebody has to move the sewage, collect the garbage, bury the dead. In our new virtual world, we now have the content reviewers, and they are perhaps most like soldiers. Although it’s all just on a screen, in their heads it must feel like war. |