To BR from Harold Thimbleby (quoted in full):

Brian,

You copied me your correspondence to the Conference on Professors and Heads
of Computing list.

Here is my initial response.

I did not appreciate your chosen method of comment on my talk nor its
juxtaposition with, for example, the comment that I once did some good
work. I took this more as a patronising slur on me rather than as
supporting your case, though you may not have meant it as such.

You have since anonymously copied email originally sent to you for me to
read. I would rather have had an open discussion than one with fragments of
comments from third parties. (When I have been invited onto TV and radio,
as I have been, I have asked the programmes to invite you.) Normally open
discussion would enable all those concerned to search for balanced, mature
views, leading to action as appropriate. It would be a great shame to avoid
such discussion now when the future is still in our hands. I have taken the
liberty of copying this email to colleagues some of whom I know have been
in correspondence with you; you are free to copy this email further afield
if you wish.

I don't find it helpful to confuse my ethical concerns (which were quite
properly aired at the BAAS meeting in an appropriate forum) with any other
abilities or flaws that I may or may not have, technical or otherwise.
Moreover, as you pointed out, there is a distinction between the message
and the medium. The facts of my message are not challenged by attempts to
discredit the medium, in this case, myself.

On a personal level, I am sorry you found my factual talk so upsetting and
that you were worried that it might be unconstructively linked by your
local newspaper to the activities of your University Computing Services. Do
keep me informed. You also said in your posting that Newcastle's facilities
were organised "at *very* short notice." Why that might be is nothing to do
with me, I'm afraid.

Now for specifics.

You said [you] felt that [my] overall talk was extremely unbalanced and
sensational

It was a talk about the topic, no more no less. If you had arrived at the
beginning of the session you might have understood the context a little
better. The session was organised by the Student Section of the British
Association and its aim, broadly, was to consider what we can do about the
future. I had been asked to talk about a topic in computing and/or
communications, and I accepted the responsibility to do so.

I started by saying computer science was exciting because it was an area
that brought together maths, science, technology and very real social
issues, that need solving by members of the audience and people like them.
I then described some of those issues. Had I not somewhat lost my way due
to interruptions and a rather grotty Newcastle University OHP nor had my
hands covered in glue from an extension lead, I might have had more time
and energy to devote to the interesting technological ideas such as public
key encryption. Instead, you talked a lot about Rimm's study. Some of what
you said in the lecture was news to me (I had not been on the Internet for
a couple of weeks), though I have not been able to substantiate all that
you claimed even now. Maybe you got carried away?

The talk itself is, I hope both of us would agree, of less concern than the
issues raised, including the media's portrayal of the issues.

To move on, then, your email's two main points seemed to be as follows:

(i) the false picture he conveyed of the Internet by such statements (in
the lecture and in his text) as "The Internet has very little interesting
material; it needs more."

I have always been clear that the Internet is a powerful force for good,
and also that it needs more good material. It requires us all to look at
the cost of providing and supporting worthwhile information and how we
should go about doing it. Currently, British 'culture' (we can define this
word elsewhere) is badly represented.

You continue: "His defence of this particular statement later was that he
really just meant "little good-quality British-originated material of a
recreational nature that would appeal to 18 year olds" - yet even this is
disputable to my mind."

I have said that the Internet has very little interesting material; it
needs more. I stand by this comment. There is certainly a lot of material
on it; but by the single word 'interesting' (as made clear in my talk, if
not spelt out in the abstract of it) I refer to culture and material that
is better than one-off home pages and advanced academic discussions.

There is a lot of glossy sub-coffee table stuff, sure, but is it really
that interesting? There are, in some areas, very useful sites (e.g., if you
are into a specialist subject that happens to have a computer scientist
sponsoring it in their spare time). I'm not being cynical, I want to think
seriously about how things are going to be sustainable in the future.
Writing decent material involves grappling with complexity, and it is not
easy. Not many people write good books, and I conclude that not many people
are going to devise good Web material, of the present sort, at least. (I
have yet to see much that has any structure more interesting than a tree or
maze, but that's a separate point.)

Getting stuff from, say, Sidney is momentarily exciting, but most of it is
the sort of stuff that, if it was on paper, would be given away free and
thrown away as soon as possible. Aren't we all being taken in, just a bit,
by the pretentiousness and hype? I don't think we know what the public
access to the net is really for, and we should be debating it openly. (I
gave the example of early telephones in my talk: people were once
encouraged to buy them to reduce fire insurance premiums, because there was
no one else to ring up but the fire service. Nowadays we still dial 999
from time to time, but it's not the motivation of the phone network! I
suspect the future use of the net will be as different.)

Most people aren't up to the  huge amount of effort, skill, and resources
needed to develop electronic information of any sort. With few exceptions
(unfortunately including pornography) there are no resources to do any
better.

In my talk, I gave a precise example of trying to find physical Web
presences in London. I gave a scenario why this was a relevant question.
Exclude Universities and newspapers, what is there left in London you can
physically visit? Where is the National Gallery? OK, so UCL has a
description of it. Who paid, and how long will they keep doing it? How's
the data going to stay current? Where are the pictures anyway? My talk was
a call to start supporting these activities.

Your second point: (ii) his uncritical citation, in his talk, of the Rimm
CMU study of pornography on the Internet (this was the only published study
on the topic that he identified explicitly), and of the Time Magazine cover
story on this study - I pointed out hpw extensively Rimm's study had been
criticised, and that Time had subsequently published a whole pag apologetic
article describing how they had been taken in by Rimm.

I do not depend on the Rimm/CMU study. I did, indeed, express concern over
the methodology of it. In fact, the way in which the study was apparently
used as a vehicle to promote pornography indicates how complex and
difficult the issues are to debate rationally. (Moreover, the CMU study
concerned itself with visual images and their descriptions, an aspect of
pornography that I find less worrying than some text.)

Actually, I would have been a lot more critical of Rimm had you not
interrupted me! You may note that both my talk and abstract refer to Brian
Reid's criticism of Rimm.

The statistics of availability, access and use have to be interpreted
carefully, whether taken from Rimm, my own figures or elsewhere, depending
on what hypotheses one wishes to substantiate. However, my findings do not
depend on exact values. Certainly, if there was only, say, one bad site and
only one proven user, there would be little cause for raising a general
alarm. Yet this is clearly not the case, even if we disagree on statistics
by orders of magnitude.

(OK, so I now need to see a sociologist and statistician to do a proper
study ... but what else would we learn other than procrastination?)

(Several people have told me I don't know the difference between people and
accesses. Of course I do. I merely reported that a site said people. For
all I know, the site mentioned may keep a database of IP numbers. I have
found some sites give counts that decrease, so one might charitably
conclude that their people-counting software is non-trivial! There are many
other distinctions that I have been criticised for not making, some of
which you spuriously raised in my talk (e.g., between downloads and reads).
I am as aware of these distinctions, and others, as any other qualified
person, but they are peripheral to the issues so I won't go over them
here.)

I have pointed out the simple example that my nine year old is simply too
short to reach a top shelf, but he can access the world's worst and best
material with equal ease. In fact, that the highly interconnected porn
material is so vast means there is quite enough of it to occupy people for
a long time, regardless of whether it represents a large or small
proportion of the rest.

It was not a difficult experiment, but I did double check that my son Isaac
(age 9) could do on his own everything I claimed. Fortunately he prefers
dinosaurs and gemstones. He found lots of them in Canada and the USA: why
none in Britain? Yes, I do know North America is biggg, but why next to
nothing from the UK? (By the way, he [also] used Jumpstation, which is in
Scotland, so you can't complain he started looking in the US straightaway.)


By the way, did you notice someone in the audience (apparently from IC)
first accused me of not using British search engines (though I had) and
then accused me of drawing attention to the fact that London theatre
schedules are described in the US and not the UK (so far as I can tell)? He
can't consistently have it both ways. If it really is world wide, it
doesn't much matter where search engines are; if it isn't world wide then
it matters that London is not in London.

I have pointed out that trends are important, and that the current interest
in pornography may be transient. Given other worrying developments (such as
fascism) on the Internet I don't think that human nature is likely to
improve the Internet, though it may shift its outward interests.

We have to tackle these problems in a sensible way. To do so requires open
debate, not denial. The sooner we do so, and work positively to
social/technical or other solutions the sooner we can make progress and
avoid even more embarrassing incidents than me talking about it!

Part of the deceitful coverage includes freely available computer books and
magazines discussing pornography and other issues. For example, some of the
net directories in newsagents contain material that would otherwise be
relegated to adult magazines.

I have had considerable, supportive feedback for the stance I have publicly
taken. I will mention just one example: after reading one article in a
newspaper about me, a father of a 12 year old rang me to tell me that his
son had, without his parent's knowledge, been using hardcore porn from the
Internet and they had now had an extremely positive discussion. He was
grateful that both he and his son could now treat the issue in a mature and
open way, and that it need no longer be secret.

I have had several extensive commentaries on the extended abstract of my
talk. I shall try and tackle the wide-ranging misunderstandings these
people have in due course. But please note that the abstract is no more
than that. Some people have read into it that I know nothing about viruses,
hacking, porn, and so forth. One (I assume) Swede took me to task over my
English, and also pointed out how naive I was to think that hardcore was
anything other than a form of jazz.

To avoid confusion and misinterpretation, let me add some brief personal
information.

I first came across porn on the Internet when it was raised as an issue by
some students' activities at the University of York. I first came across
porn on the Web itself when browsing home pages (at York, in fact). I
thought no more of it till BBC radio asked me to join in a chat show on
computer porn in early 1995. I agreed provided I had a few days to find out
more about it! Apparently I was the first academic who had been prepared to
discuss the issues on live radio. I spent a few days surfing, and I was
horrified by some of the material I found and how easy it was to obtain. I
have since obtained a million search engine queries, and seen that many
people are actively looking for nasty material; of course, the many
personal home pages on the Web that link to porn is another indicator.

I have no problem with most porn itself (the human race would not be around
but for an interest in sex). However, some material on the net is extremely
abusive, dangerous and criminal. Perhaps it is like speeding: driving a car
at 70mph is, in the right circumstances, fine; driving a car at 300mph is
never right on public roads, and is certainly dangerous even when done in
private. In road safety, adults are largely responsible to ensure that
children are supervised and/or properly trained; and drivers are
responsible not to drive on the pavement. Speed isn't that good an analogy,
however, because there are natural limits to it, both in engineering and in
finance. No limits apply to nasty material on the Internet. I think that
many people who oppose my views have not taken much trouble to look for
some of the nastier material.

Some papers reported me inaccurately; I was disappointed with the Guardian
in particular whose reporter seemed to have his own agenda. I would hope
that most academics are mature enough to distinguish between the issue and
its representation in the popular press.

One journalist (who claimed to be the Guardian reporter: why do you read
this paper?!) wished to make the point that all programmers are perverts, a
view that I strongly denied (I know of exceptions!). Nevertheless, we teach
most of the UK's programmers and if they create or help create this
impression then we have largely ourselves to blame for not educating them
(or anyone else) in the human issues relating to technology. Porn (etc.)
raises issues we should be handling. I think it is even a great opportunity
to get more students involved in their subject, to see its vivid social and
ethical issues, and to see how and to what extent technology can improve
the future. They might be motivated to know that they can play a useful
part in our future.

I shall look forward to your continuing this correspondence. I shall
consider my views public.

------------------------------------------------------

Your second email to me started:

>Amongst the numerous responses I have received to my message about your
>talk, all but of a few of which have supported the stand I took, one of the
>most thoughtful contained the following comments:
>
>>Your email saddened me greatly, for much the same reasons as it saddened
>>you. Has Harold turned into a right-wing zealot in his middle age (a common
>>enough phenomenon)?
>>
>>More likely though that this is just the normal reaction of a nice
>>middle-class over-protected academic on first being exposed to the seamy
>>side of life, which can admittedly be very unpleasant to our sensibilities.
>>I remember well the powerful culture shock (with real physical symptoms) I
>>experienced when I first saw the unbelievable poverty that exists in India.
>>Perhaps he'll get over it, most other people do.
>>
>>But this doesn't excuse his ignorance of the exposure of Rimm, which has
>>been widely enough broadcast on the net. FYI, I'll send you by separate
>>message what is the most complete version I came across; you can forward it
>>to Harold if you think it appropriate.
>
>The account referred to is attached. In fact a much larger and more
>uptodate account can be found at
>http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.cgi
>
>This provides ample evidence of how Rimm's "statistics" have been
>misunderstood/misused by the press. I'm afraid yours have already been
>similarly misunderstood/misused by the UK media, following up the Guardian
>story, exactly as I expected/feared, and it is clear that there will be
>more coverage in the days to come.
>

I copied your second email, because *if* it was an example of one of the
most thoughtful responses you got, there is a lot of work to do.

>I leave it to you to decide how whether and how to try to correct these
>false impressions and exaggerations. You of course may choose to do
>nothing. But I'm afraid that, in the eyes of many of your colleagues, that
>will cause you to be viewed as taking on the mantle of Rimm.

Education is one way that I am trying. I hope that in the eyes of many of
my colleagues I am not confused with the unfortunate Rimm, though you seem
to be trying hard. Why?

-----------------------------------------------------

You have just sent me further email, this time just about Rimm, and you say:

>(I am blind copying this to various people who have responded to
>my original message about your talk.)

Why?

Your whole attitude appears to be to conceal a real problem, and to try and
character assasinate me from a position of speciously benevolent authority.
So far as I can see the subject needs a bit of light throwing on it, and I
am trying to do that. I don't understand in what way your broadcasting
behaviour can be construed as constructive, nor for what ends.