And for the most part mine is, and I have no problems with that. I have dropped family members from my Facebook feed because I couldn’t bear to see their aborted fetuses and gun-toting jingoism another day. For me, Facebook is a retreat into an ongoing conversation with my friends. I want it to be fun, moderately informative, but really I want it to be an opportunity to connect with people I rarely get to see. For many people they have diverse lives, and diverse enough interests that I can gloss over an occasional comment. But if the only thing they share is something that I find personally offensive, I’m dropping them.

There was a period of several years in my life when I stopped reading the paper and watching the news entirely. I needed to live in a vacuum away from the drama of the second Bush administration, because the daily disgust that I had, living in DC and constantly being surrounded/assaulted by the constant stream of rage inducing apoplexy was making me physically sick. Seriously. My blood pressure was skyrocketing and I was on the verge of having a stroke. So I took steps to shield myself from reality, embracing only fiction and wilderness retreats for as long as I needed to do so. I’m not going to put myself back into that condition, under any circumstances. And if that means I don’t talk to a second cousin or some random person I met at a conference, I have no problem with that.

Does this affect my work? Not in the slightest. Because in my personal life I am entitled to have my own personal opinions and associate with whomever I please. When I am in my position at work, I will answer all questions to the best of my ability regardless of the effect that it has on me. Yes, I have answered conservative Christians who come looking for biblical justification for discrimination against homosexual people. I showed it to them in the concordances, and where to search online to find that. And then I walked away. As people we have the ability to be impartial in our dealings professionally, regardless of our personal politics. You may be agnostic, maybe, but I’m definitely not.

To be clear, the decision to promote discourse is not a neutral value. It takes a stance against anyone who would use power to enforce uniformity. Librarians make a space for the plurality of thoughts not because it is a received law that we follow, but because it is the most efficacious way to promote human flourishing. In order to make this space available, we must not be neutral towards the necessary architecture of the public sphere; discourse, civility, empathy. We aught to promote them actively, since they’re the foundation of intellectual freedom. Newton refused to feign hypotheses, but he was brash in his insistence that he had the right method for turning ignorance into truth. In this way, librarians remain neutral to the merits of the various recorded products of civilization, but never doubt that civilization must be protected, so that those products may continue to be produced.

As for the concordance between the public and private speech of librarians, we are allowed to be complex beings. Professional ethics are just that, ethics that guide the action of the professional while we are acting as agents of the profession. When you are outside that domain, other ethics will naturally apply. It doesn’t mean that you’re being a bad librarian, it means that you’re being a good you, in all your complexity. If, however, you find that you’re acting spontaneously on a case by case basis, without the benefit of a fully formed ethical system, you could do a lot worse than the ethics the profession holds dear.

It helps to listen to all opinions. Now if that person is actively discriminating or bullying? That’s another story. That’s why the internet gods created the block function.

As far as how this affects librarians, I think it’s a learning experience. Most librarians, while passionate about many different issues, tend to think that we’re above the fray. We pride ourselves on being defenders of free speech and expression, and facilitators of critical thinking and informed debate. However, when an issue really touches a personal nerve, it turns out we’re a bunch of hotheaded, irrational humans just like everybody else.

This, I feel, is a different issue than the public de-friending of those with different beliefs. It seems imperative for the future of public discourse that we learn the lost art of disagreeing amiably. Shutting down the views of those we disagree with is just not particularly helpful. It neither convinces anyone, nor grows understanding between sides. I find it very difficult to deal with sometimes. As a person who lives in a part of the country famous for beliefs that are different than my own, I would be constantly embattled if I were to respond to every post I disagree with on Facebook, but for people I care about, there’s a chance that I could start to humanize the opposition just by stating my point of view, and perhaps start to help people see that “I don’t agree” is not an attack.

I don’t believe that libraries are neutral institutions – what they (should) do in their aim to provide resources that don’t promote certain items over others, their reaction to attempts of censorship etc., mean that they make inherently political choices on a daily basis, and their policies simply can’t be neutral. They have educational and egalitarian goals that are in themselves political. We make value judgments about what we don’t give a platform when it’s of such a low quality or so hateful that it doesn’t deserve the light of day.

I think agnostic pluralism has the potential to be incredibly valuable to society, and public spaces like libraries and online venues for discussion offer us the opportunity to engage in debate, disagree with people, work to change people’s minds when we think they’re mis- or uninformed about a topic, in a constructive way. There comes a point, though, when I personally have to walk away. When someone challenges a view you’ve expressed, or if you feel the need to challenge someone’s view, you can be as polite as possible and provide factual information, but you’re not being impartial or neutral, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to be, librarian or otherwise, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to unfollow or unfriend when you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall (or are offended/hurt by someone’s behaviour towards you). I think when you mention you’ve done it and point out someone’s ignorance or hateful behaviour could be a warning to others? I don’t know, I’ve not done it myself.

As a librarian, I didn’t feel like I could be impartial about things like social justice. It’d be neglecting an important aspect of the work I did. As a researcher, I certainly don’t, because it’d be intellectually dishonest. As a citizen, I feel like I should stand up for certain things when I believe them to be worth standing up for. As an internet user…I have to pick my battles. But they’re battles that need to happen.