The dangers of unlimited access: Fiction, the Internet and the social construction of childhood

• At of the turn of the 20th century, childhood was constructed as a time of education and preparation for adulthood.
• Libraries were constructed as extensions of the home and librarians as surrogate parents.
• At the turn of the 21st century, childhood was constructed as a time of protection from the dangers of society.
• Librarians constructed libraries as sources of unrestricted access to information to all.
• This created a conflict over unrestricted Internet access by children and adolescents.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, librarians, teachers, and parents wrote about the dangers to children of unlimited access to what was termed “sensational literature.” At the beginning of the next century, they struggled to deal with the dangers to children of unlimited access to the Internet. Although separated by a hundred years, they appear to be making much the same argument about the much the same issue, that of the public library providing unlimited access to minors to what some view as inappropriate or dangerous materials. However, a closer analysis of the discourse in the professional media regarding these two controversies, one that investigates the mechanisms underlying the changes in attitudes and practice, reveals that any similarities are primarily cosmetic.Such an analysis reveals that different issues were addressed and debated utilizing different social constructions of childhood and different social constructions of the public library and public librarians held by society as a whole and by librarians at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.