About 6 am, some months ago. The Film Location for BBC TV series Lark Rise to Candleford. The tiny orange figure is a security man who has just started to run towards me, as I stand on the bonnet of a jeep taking photographs. Funny, the whole security man thing. You always find it in societies constructed for the rich, or on the slide. Seen it in so many countries.
10/01/09
Update to this
Just been in to a local library, the Campus, Weston-super-Mare, sit down, sign in at PC, about 15 seconds later, a burly uniformed security man walks up, glances at what is on my screen, then proceeds down all the other internet PC's.
I immediately got up and walked over to the assistants' desk.... "Excuse me, would you kindly tell your security man to stay away from me. Your computers are already filled up with your ghastly surveillance software, and I'm not having some guy peering over me. "
Feel like a criminal in my own library. Thought a library was somewhere you could relax, study, work, read , develop....
Instead they seem to be turning into places for the thought police. A while back, I typed in 'Heresy' on a screen just to see what happened, and instead of search results, up came huge red letters ACCESS DENIED . I've used libraries in about 6 UK counties, and North Somerset is about the most blatant, although the surveillance system introduced by Somerset County libraries about last April is very much its equal.
I do know that professional librarians, at least in Australia.. itself not exactly a place of liberal attitudes..., are very, very unhappy at the amount of censorship and surveillance that is now taking place in libraries. Here in the UK librarians have just gone along quietly with all the censorious crap. Unfortuneately, far too many qualified librarians have been quietly removed and replaced with people who, in the name of 'community', don't know much more than how to wield a bar-code reader. Oh, and 'business managers'. I wish someone would say to them....
"You're not a business. A business, any business, exists to generate a profit. You're here to give a great service to members. You are not a business."
Library, security man has wandered off. When I'd finished what I was doing, and headed for the exit, there he was .., leaning on the counter , joking with the staff. Whose library is it?
The more security men, the sicker the society, imo. And I particularly don't want them in libraries.
