Saturday, June 7, 2008

Censorship Rears Its Ugly Head

Because of the illness of a family member, I am currently in Marquette, Michigan spending my days first in ICU, then Intermediate Care/Cardiac, and now the Medical unit of MGH. Thought I'd be able to use my laptop to keep up with work and in touch with the library community with whom I work. However, despite the availability of wireless connections anywhere in the hospital (GOOD!) I have found that many of the avenues that I use to keep in touch are blocked by their filters (BAD!) I am not able to load my Google Home Page completely because Facebook is verboten; same for Twitter. I brought the laptop up for my dad to check his e-mail now that he is able to, and he was unable to access a joke sent by a friend. That also was a n0-no. I guess I was lucky that I can log onto Blogger and post this message. Access to technology-Great! Ability to get where you want to go-we've still got a long way to go! Crippled by censorship! Not allowed to listen to podcasts from Fox News either when I tried that as Dad wanted to listen to Chris Wallace's program.

If any of my NCLC bloggers happen to read this post, I have not been able to read your blogs for a week. Sitting and waiting for doctors and test results is just wearying. I hope to get back to reading your blogs soon. Thanks to Ann Walker Smalley for responding to one of my bloggers for assistance with editing Zoho docs when I was not able to do so right away.

2 comments:

SafeLibraries® said...

"[H]e was unable to access a joke sent by a friend"

Must be a good joke! Will you reprint it here?

Linda said...

It was probably an innocuous political joke, but so far we haven't been able to access it because of the filtering on the hospital network.