| This study serves as an argument for establishing public libraries as alternative public Internet service providers, directly connected to the Internet backbone. Doing so would allow public libraries to circumvent the commercial Internet service providers upon which they are dependent, and hence, would allow them to reestablish the parameters of intellectual freedom within which they provide Internet access. I begin with an authoritarian communication network pattern, “The Wheel,” as a form with which to analyze the communication pattern of Bentham's Panopticon. Through this effort, I am able to proffer that the Panopticon, as a modified version of the same, or a wheel-within-a-wheel, emerges as a generic authoritarian communications network pattern for efficiently inducing ideological conformity. With this panoptic communication network pattern in hand, I next explore corporate industry's use of it in the workplace, the marketplace, and along the Internet. After exposing corporate industry's repeated use of the panoptic communication network pattern, I then deduce that public libraries, adhering to an ideology of intellectual freedom rather than profit, invert the wheel communication network pattern, and therefore exist as the antithesis to the panopticon.; However, as foreseeable and expected as corporate industry's and the public library's separate and contrasting consideration of Internet access is, one should not be fooled that their opposition infers that comparatively speaking they are competitively equal. The fact is, libraries remain subordinate to commercial Internet service providers when offering Internet access. Yet this could be overcome. I forward that public libraries, as existing structures, are well suited to be directly connected to the Internet backbone and become alternative public Internet service providers, much like PBS is to tv, NPR is to radio, Public Cable Access is to cable television and the alternative press is to journalism. The consequence for not implementing such a plan could mean that libraries may soon become museums to intellectual freedom. |
