CULTURE: Censoring Cyberspace

The steam began rising for Carnegie Mellon University four weeks ago, when one of its research associates, Martin Rimm, informed the administration that a draft of his study of pornography on the computer networks was about to be released. Rimm had made an elaborate analysis of the sexually oriented material available online. Not only had he put together a picture collection that rivaled Bob Guccione's (917,410 in all), but by tracking how many times each image had been retrieved by computer users (a total of 6.4 million downloads), he had obtained a measure of the consumer demand for different categories of sexual content, some of them, as a faculty adviser put it, "extremely rough."

The problem, from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, university's point of view, was not that Rimm had found sexually explicit content on the computer networks; there is sex in every medium, from comic books to videotapes. Nor was it even that he had found some of it on CMU's own computers; every university connected to the Internet is a conduit, however unwitting, for gigabytes of salacious words and pictures. The immediate issue was that Rimm had brought it to the administration's attention, pointing out that some of the images on CMU's machines -- digitized pictures of men and women having sex with animals, for example -- had been declared obscene by a Tennessee court a few months before.

William Arms, vice president of CMU's computing services department, spent an hour reviewing the questionable material "with the law of Pennsylvania in one hand and a mouse in the other" and decided that the university was in deep trouble. It is illegal in the state to knowingly distribute sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 -- as many freshmen are -- or to distribute obscene material at all, no matter what the consumer's age. Fearing that the university would be open to prosecution -- and the worst kind of publicity -- CMU's academic council hurriedly voted to shut down those areas of the computer system that carried discussions or depictions of sex. The plug was scheduled to be pulled last Tuesday.

Thus the lines were drawn for a battle over the preservation of free speech in the new interactive media -- a battle that not only raised tricky questions about how to balance openness with good taste, but also managed, on a campus not noted for activism, to rouse something resembling a student protest movement. CMU casts a long shadow in cyberspace. It was one of the first ^ universities to join the Arpanet (the precursor to the Internet) and the first to wire up its dorms. It even provides Internet access to some of its bathrooms. Using the computer networks to spread the word and muster support, the students quickly organized a "Protest for Freedom in Cyberspace" that drew 350 students and faculty members. (Pittsburgh in the 1990s, though, is hardly Berkeley in the '60s: the protesters last week politely applauded their opponents and then retired to a reception with cheese and fruit.)