Given the attention of Governments to file sharing, it would
appear that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was obviously caused by you
sharing a copy of Lily Allens “Fuck you very
much”.
We have Ministers flying all over the world to discuss how
to criminalize 15 year old kids who can’t yet vote.
These same kids don’t bother reading political manifestos, or
if they do, have no idea how the restrictions being discussed on their
personnel freedoms will impact them in the future.
What the world does not need is an unworkable trade
agreement facilitating third party interference with the choices of any one
country’s citizens.
What it does need is a system that recognises the validity
of claims for payment by artists, authors, publishers and distributors and
renumerate them according to their contribution to the creation of the content.
In the UK,
the BBC has had the benefit for years of Television Licensing fees. This has
enabled the UK
to become one of the eminent producers of quality content.
In fact, it could be argued successfully that UK TV licensing fees have created the only real competitor to Hollywood
and the American TV networks.
I recently viewed a BBC show called Wild Down Under. One of the
best representations and photography that I have ever seen of outback Australia. Into one hour, the BBC packed what it took me over 15 years of weekend adventuring to view firsthand.
How is it that an English company can outdo Australians at
pictorially representing our own country?
There is but one answer. Experience and talent created by content creation funding. Paid for
by the annual £142.50 household UK
Television license fee.
Twenty-six million Brits paying an annual license fee adds
up to an impressive £ 3,804,075,789 (or $6,805,659,118
AUD) Quite a nice windfall for any production company.
That works out to $ (AUD) 110.84 per man woman and child in the UK.
In comparison, the Australian ABC funding
of $ (AUD) 1,070,900,000 (Gov 800+ M, other sources 200+ M) works out to
only $ (AUD) 50.61 per citizen.
That extra sixty bucks a
year would help produce an awful lot of viewable high class content.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the Internet highway is being redesigned
into an Internet super highway (Trademark Al Gore . See References) or in Australian parlance, the NBN.
Mind you, the proposed ACTA legislation will make most fun
things illegal, so there is some doubt about the eventual profitability of the
service. i.e.: if one is unable to use the internet for what it was designed
for – sharing content, (and reading newspapers for free) then what good will it
be?
The parallel is winning a brand new Ferrari and being told
that there is no way you can drive it on the freeway at full speed.
You might as well buy a two stroke Trabi, and paint it red.
To Create your own
Customized Trabant, click on the image.
Let’s talk about highways and motorways for the moment.
Travelling time between the southern suburbs of Sydney
(Liverpool) and the city used to take about an hour.
Then along came the M5. For $1.50 you could drive between Liverpool
and the airport at speeds of up to 110 kilometres per hour with no traffic lights.
Now with peak congestion, the trip takes only two hours and twenty minutes. (As per my experience last week when I left the house at 5:50 am to ensure that I would be in town by 8:30. I made it to College Street via the Williams Street offramp with only ten minutes to spare.)
The difference?
Three things, land prices in the outlying areas rose because
of the motorway;
a company now receives the toll for the privilege of being
allowed to queue up on the morning city bound carpark;
and public transport by comparison looks REALLY good. (It only takes an hour from Liverpool by train to Museum station and for less than the return tolls.)
The M7 was then developed as a ring road to benefit outlying
areas of Sydney.
The cost to drive on the M7 from (let’s say Blacktown)
to Sydney and back again?
M7 $ 6.67 M2 $4.95 Lane Cove Tunnel $2.73 Harbour Tunnel $4.00 = $18.35 each way
or $183.50 per week.
Even the RTA know they have a problem with Tolls.
Visiting http://sydneymotorways.com/
and selecting Plan your trip and calculate tolls
will allow you to Select for example Sunnyholt road as your entry and Beecroft
road as your exit. A nice little 10 Km drive. Nope, the official RTA route
wants you to drive 94 kilometres. (So much for Government databases.)
So it would appear the NSW Government have totally stuffed
up the economy of anyone living in the western suburbs who works in the city.
(The only good thing I can say is that those responsible have retired from politics.)
But the Toll companies are getting rich.
With the average weekly travel cost now about two hundred
per week, who the hell can afford to buy music or rent DVD’s?
Certainly not the greater population of Sydney.
So scratch 5 million from Australia’s
population for the purposes of music and movie purchases. They're too busy paying tolls to buy any music.
So here we have an example of Government, Lobbyists and Companies
allowing the economy to be damaged for the benefit of private interests.
Never a good long term economic plan.
But enough about motorways, let’s get back to the National Broadband
Network.
It is proposed that eventually we will have fibre to every
home (FTTH) in Australia
at a cost of around $4456 per home.
This fibre will allow the population to turn off their
televisions, disregard their newspaper deliveries and receive all of their
content via interactive means.
If we calculate the available bandwidth per consumer (by the
time the FTTH is delivered in about eight years time) on the basis of Moores
law, Australians will have available approximately 640 MB per second of access
to Australian content.
If we utilize Standard Definition television resolution, (with
one hour of programming being 400 MB) then the average TV viewer requires 11.2
GB per week. In a previous article I suggested that the obvious solution to the
file sharing problem was to propose a per Gigabyte viewing tax of one cent per
Gigabyte.
This of course could be ameliorated via advertising.
So for those that are well heeled, one cent per Gigabyte
would be a pittance that few would object too to be able to be masters of their
own viewing choices.
i.e.: Imagine being able to download all the Star Trek
movies and episodes in a few minutes to be able to watch whenever you wanted too,
without having to wait for “To be continued…..”
For those to whom this taxation impost was an anathema, the
choice to accept voluntary advertising would still allow them to participate in
the future download spree but assist in retaining the economy’s necessary
consumer retail programming.
Benefits to Government
Benefits to Consumers
Benefits to Content Creators.
Benefit to Australian Content Creators
No longer the meat in the sandwich between the people and
the Content Creators.
Guaranteed payment for the NBN without relying on xharging high access fees.
Choice.
Payment for all content
Enhanced Funding for local content creation.
I can hear the doubt, but lets do the numbers.
9.2 million homes in Australia. (Future number)
2.3 persons in each home.
Standard Definition TV picture @ 400 MB per hour.
11.2 GB per week per person (based on 4 hours and 11 minutes
of TV viewing time)
1 cent per gigabyte.
Total weekly Broadband license (Tax) $ 2,369,920,000 (Assuming each
person in the home has separate screens. As we do in the Koltai household.)
Annual Total? $ 123,235,840,000.00
(Boy - wouldnt that fix the budget deficit?)
To Do List:
Develop an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) that scrapes all
content from all sources.
Develop a set-top box that sits between the LCD/Plasma
screen and the media storage device.
Develop a tracking regime as to what content was viewed by
whom when.
Organise advertising companies to fund the development of
the set-top box.
Pass legislation that mandates a set-top box media device with
one cent per Gigabyte billing (with appropriate exemptions for pensioners and advertising
recipients).
And…. Develop a methodology for tracking royalty payments to
ensure they actually get paid to the creators and not just those with the most
lawyers on board.
C’mon Australia,
let’s solve the financial crisis, create a huge pile of jobs, eliminate criminalization
of our younger population and obtain better content all in one go.
What say you? Let's not make the same mistake with our content that we made with the NSW motorways.
Allowing private corporations to dictate Government policy leads to financial suicide or at the very least financial hardship, for our future citizens.
Senator Conroy, Prime Minister Rudd, I call on you and the Australian Labour Party to follow the innovative leadership initiative created by the announcement of the NBN and to implement a sensible, meaningful solution to the file sharing problem and not blindly follow the direction of the American lead, driven by corporate greed and led by individuals whom are scared of technological advancement.
ACTA will not put any money into the pockets of Australian corporations, or benefit Australian citizens.
This proposal will create jobs, ensure the content creators are reimbursed for their content on a user pays basis with a substantial amount left over for the further funding of the ABC and the NBN.
Hat tip to Jan Whittaker for the ABC Piracy Reference.
References:
Is the Trabi, East
Germany's Clunker, On the Comeback?
When I was four years old, my family constructed a house. I
asked my father how the builders knew what went where. And he told me about the
plans and showed me the blueprints. I was enthralled, here was a method to
build something. Draw up a master plan, order the lumber, roofing iron, and
nails and construct the family mansion one nail at a time.
Some years later I resided in the Northern Territory of
Australia and discovered the indigenous bush “Humpy”. A “Humpy is a shack built
of bits and pieces. It may have nails holding it together or it may be string. The
elements of a Humpy are essentially a mismatch of scavenged building materials.
A humpy keeps out some of the rain, some of the wind and
some of the sun. It doesn’t do any of these very well, but it does provide the
owner/builder with the perception that one is protected from the tropical elements.
Until the cyclone arrives.
In the manner of the traditional Humpy, our copyright
legislation has been cobbled together overthe last 34 years into the quagmire of citizen vilification
it is today.
Globally, legislators have been coerced gradually through
large campaign contributions into gradually altering our copyright vista.
“Just this one little step, congressman”.
Followed by, “Well it really is only a small thing. After
all, we employ thousands of people to make movies.”
Each small step seemed reasonable at the time.
Unfortunately these little steps have turned copyright from a
beneficial regime designed to protect the original creative talent, into an
oppressive regime designed to benefit only the litigants.
Copyright and Trademark issues already take up far too much
of our legal system and now with the onset of the criminalization of users and
service providers our economy is about to be stifled seriously by this one
single factor.
Using a torrent client little Johnny downloads a song or a
movie from the internet, little Johnny should be fined $150,000. Little
Johnnies parents will need to each take on an extra job to make the payments.
However, because unemployment is running at almost 20%, they won’t be able to,
so the house will get repossessed, the parents will get a divorce and all
because some planner at the RIAA decided that it was a good idea.
Does anyone in charge see a problem with this? No?
OK, how about if little Johnny is your son.
“They weren’t good parents.” (RIAA Spokesperson)
“They should have ensured that little Johnny wasn’t downloading
illegally.”
Obviously the RIAA spokesperson, has never been a parent.
The Internet is the worlds largest playground. It is full of
fun exciting adventures and traps for the unwary. It is physically impossible
to watch every action of little Johnny.
Son, don’t use Torrents to download music mp3’s OK?
He probably seeks the council of his peers, who also happen
to be twelve year olds. Result, the peer consensus is to not use torrent but to
download via firefox from Rapidshare.
Johnny gets his movie or song and tells all his friends how
good Rapidshare is.
DTECNET develop a Rapidshare interdiction program and start
sniffing packets at Internet exchanges worldwide.
Result?
The RIAA send little Johnny an infringement notice and sue his
parents for $150,000.
N.B. In Australia
we don’t have the RIAA and our local equivalent organisation, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), don’t sue consumers.
The Solution.
The world’s economy is loosely based on a capitalist system
of demand induced by advertising.
The more advertising, the more retail sales. The more retail
sales, the healthier the economy.
For sometime I have been railing against action stopping
advertising as the method no longer desired or accepted by viewers. Around twenty-three
percent of viewing time (in Australia)
is now advertising.
Technology innovations that remove adverts at the push of a
button (TiVo and VideoRedo) are now
threatening the entire entertainment ecosystem.
The file sharing networks, rapidshare were the enemy, now good old sneaker
net is changing that. Those USB sticks/SD Ram cards that are always in your
kids pockets? They’re the new file-sharing medium.
The marketplace? The school playground.
Rip, Copy Swap is the new mantra. Who the hell wants those
poorly videoed camera copies?
Of course, the conundrum is that with the youth of today
watching less then two hours of Television (down from four hours and eleven minutes),
advertising is loosing it’s effectiveness.
This is having a nett result on our economy through
decreasing retail sales.
Free to air broadcasters, cable companies, and radio have
all discovered that technology is impacting their ability to sell premium priced
advertising.
Yet, the content companies think the merry-go-round ride
will last forever.
They think they will always have a ready market with the broadcasters.
The content creators don’t particularly want advertisers messages
to interfere with their content (as an overlay format).
However, there may be no choice.
Thinking needs to change. The adverts need to be overlaid
and not inserted.
This will achieve two benefits.
Advertisers will once again trust broadcasters and filesharing
downloaders now become part of the advertising ecosystem and no longer need to
be criminalized.
As the advertiser do you care whether your advert is seen on
a television, computer screen or phone?
Nope. You merely want the eyeballs and the resulting sales.
The concept does need some work, for example, content being
distributed via file-sharing from small town locations are likely to have non
national advertising included.
Well, that would be a bonus. Joe’s Carwash is now famous
because the current version of Heroes that was aired in Podunk, Missouri (OK,
Podunk Alaska) just happens to have a higher trust value on the file sharing networks
than the version from Durban S.A. or the version from New York.
In fact if done correctly, the innovation could be a feature
of the entertainment.
Already practiced by some stations for advertising upcoming attractions
First aired in the USA
last Friday, the 23 of October, 2009.
Also available from Syfy.com as a direct stream – on the 24th
of October.
Downloaded via ED2K networks an estimated 182,000 times.
Downloaded via Torrents an estimated 310,000 times.
As the technology for content moves away from set-top boxes,
and into the realm of self programmed viewing from home video libraries, quite
possibly our legislators could have a look at this solution to one that is far
preferable to locking up fifty percent of the population.
As the indigenous man says in the above Youtube video, it’s
in the nature of people to share with everybody.
Like
in the shops they don’t share things.
Too much money.
Possibly he doesnt watch Stargate Universe, but how is ACTA going to help him?
I just can’t believe that big business doesn’t yet understand
the guaranteed formula for failure.
Interdiction of an activity that is desired by the majority
of the population will be met by alternative technological means.
Each time Governments, Lobbyists and the partnered Judiciary
(well they have no choice really, most judicial appointments are politically
motivated) attack the Internet, something changes.
Technology is updated. Methodologies alter and the activity
continues regardless.
is the new way of saying: The.Big.Bang.Theory.S03E03.The.Gothowitz.Deviation.HDTV.XviD-FQM.avi
All of those take down notice machines hired by the media
companies e.g.: DTECTNET et al are now broken.
People are no longer downloading a TV program, they are
downloading an ANSI code.
They may receive a TV program, but is that what they wanted?
Yet another test for our courts to rule on.
I must say, when I first signed up for my first uucp
account, the internet was a much nicer place.
I didn’t have to worry about Trojans, Advertising Company designed
and sponsored by major companies Malware.
There was no need to encrypt my data stream.
I didn’t have to pretend to be anonymous to post comments on bulletin boards or
discussion forums.
I didn’t have to buy a prepaid phone from someone else so
that Telcos wouldn’t listen in to my important commercial in confidence
telephone conversations.
And I didn’t have to bounce emails from an SSH server on the
other side of the world to make sure they were not all intercepted and read.
Whatever anyone says about the Internet, the restrictions
currently being implemented on our freedoms and activities are not because it’s
good for you. They are an attempt by Big Business to take over the internet.
Legislators and enforcement agencies, please leave our
internet alone. Is that election campaign contribution really worthwhile selling
out the future of your country and it’s people?
The recent campaign contributions by Village Roadshow to the
Australian Labour party would appear (at least to this 51 year old cynic) to have predetermined the outcome of the iiNet
trial. I hope I'm wrong.
I wonder it it’s not time to disallow all commercial
campaign contributions.
Further, I wonder if it’s not time to disallow all campaign
contributions over $500.00.
I think that if we want open and honest Government, it
probably is.
Allocation of PTS apparatus licences in the 2.1 GHz band
Unfortunately in our enlightened world, no-one likes to be
criticized.
This includes big business, Government and the next door
neighbour.
Thousands of Bloggers choose to write their opinions and
interpretations of current events.
Even more choose to hide behind pseudonyms, avatars and
anonymous commentary.
Why?
Because we as a world are scared. We are scared that the big
end of town will come after us and punish us for speaking our minds.
Because Government and big business combined own a very
large steam roller that is capable of squashing a mans entrepreneurial efforts,
lifestyle and opinions faster than any car-crash.
It used to be that only academics and a few Journalists were
brave enough to speak up about the injustices occurring in the world. (The
draft for Vietnam
as an example.)
Throughout history, men that have wanted to change the world
have met with resistance and threat, dis-creditation, incarceration and worse.
The threat is invisible. Covered up by a media that wants
you to see only the sanitized approved censored version of the news.
What about letters to the editor?
Letters to the editor have always been censored to reflect
the opinion of the media owner.
Besides have you actually tried to send a letter to the
editor on any of the Media sites? Try
it, then come back here to read on.
Anti threat deployment is usually not for publicity related
reasons. Individuals are targeted and then taken out in a variety of ways.
The attack could be via the IRS or via the SEC or in fact
the FBI, (or the equivalivents in your home state).
The attack is usually designed to totally discredit the
individual in a manner designed to have nothing to do with the subject matter.(Example.)
The recent wikileaks document that expounded on the threat
to investigative journalists was unfortunately not a
fairy tale.
Most countries globally would consider me a radical element
throwing a spanner in the works of rational and good government.
The question is not whether or not I am a radical, the
question is what made me question the modus operandi of elected officials that
allow companies that operate as a monopoly to dictate legislation.
So one must ask:
Does good Government depend on a few corporations reaping
the exclusive rewards of their legislative engineering efforts?
Does good Government include negotiating secret trade
agreements behind closed doors?
Does good Government require short or no notices of public
involvement in matters affecting the entire country’s economy?
Does good Government mean refusing to listen to the people?
When a Government targets it’s population, some would say
that is a human rights issue.
I say, it is actually a warlike tactical skirmish, carefully planned and executed. Unfortunately a skirmish
that the incumbent political power will always win against an individual.
The Blogsphere, Twitter and Anonymous are making sure that
the individual has support. Mainly from people that are scared to put their names
on a comment or article for fear of
retribution from the Government.
Koltai, are you not worried that by writing this article,
you will be targeted? Why aren’t you hiding behind Anonymous?
Because we currently have a Government that is forward
thinking and responsive and I don’t believe that I have to hide.
Let me put it another way. If the Libs were still running
the show, I would be so anon, encrypted and SSH’ed that I would be totally invisible.
Only history can answer whether Australia
currently has a good Government or not. With the exception of the rabbit proof
internet filter, I think the current Government have shown that they are
prepared to engage with the people of the country in what most see as still a
one way discussion (blog postings from government departments, officials and
political representatives with comments mode turned off). However the one way
nature of some Government representatives is changing.
Projects like the Kate Lundy Public-sphere
series give me a very real reason to believe that open, transparent and real
Democracy is gradually infiltrating government.
In an essay in the current version of UPGRADING
DEMOCRACY INSIGHT EDITION
From the Centre for Policy Development in an article
entitled “Promise versus Practice: The Dilemma of Open Government”, Michael
Richardson writes:
“Openness can make life tough. Transparency opens the
door to criticism; ending secrecy increases risk and exposure; accountability
means being held accountable.
The reflexive progressive response is to recognize the
obviousness of these claims and nevertheless assert the need for the principle
to triumph. It’s thus tempting to dismiss Prime Minister Harper as having a
penchant for secrecy, much like his political role model John Howard.
Such an analysis isn’t helpful. It fails to recognize the
pressures and dynamics at play in putting promises of open government into
practice.
One clear factor is that the pay-offs from increased
accountability are often deferred: avoiding scandal and corruption; increasing
citizen and civil society engagement; making it tougher for the opposition to
wield the same blunt tool of ‘no accountability, no transparency’. All
benefits, but ones that can feel distant to a new and surely-virtuous
government. By contrast, the risk of mistakes and negative stories overwhelming
the government’s message and narrative seems immediate. Given the dominant role
of communications and media staff in many political offices, it’s not
surprising that short-termism dominates. The prevention of immediate damage is
often more highly valued than potential long-term benefits. In a media culture
transfixed by scandal, openness in action can seem like a very big risk to spin
doctors, press secretaries and strategists.”
I would like to quote the whole essay as it touches on the
subjects mentioned above about issues of national security versus the public
right to know and is a fascinating discussion of the long term benefits of
Freedom of Information and transparency in Government.
I highly recommend the article (commencing on page 7) that
can downloaded here.
The conclusion that I reached from Michael Richardson’s
article was that it takes a brave politician to institute open Government.
Just as it takes a brave blogger to not hide behind
anonymous.
Will these efforts at open Government eventually create a
better more economically sound Australia?
In fact without dismissing any of the serious contributions
from many individuals, John Smith, Karl Marx et al, I can say that it is rare
for me to devour a declaration or series of notes more than once unless it
falls into the category of any of the above listed documents.
Today, I shan’t pontificate in my usual “I know more than
you” style. I shall merely say….
America
elected President Obama.
Obama appointed Julius Genachowski to head the FCC. Along
with some of his pother appointments, it would seem that the President whom
appears to be doing nothing is actually planning on instituting meaningful and real change. The FCC asked the Knight Commission to prepare a report, which they did.
The Knight report recommends sweeping changes in terms that
are almost not quite carefully enough couched to let big business know that
President Obama is thinking of buying a BIG broom.
This report is so full good of good intent, smart and forward
thinking policies that I consider it has earned it’s place amongst those
documents that I consider are society changing and civilization forming.
OK – here’s the recommendations portion of the report in its
entirety. Long but OH SO GOOD.
(The links to the introduction, foreword, and status can be found at the end of this article).
Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age.
Recommendation 1: Direct media policy toward innovation, competition,
and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality
journalism.
Throughout American
history, the main source of journalism has been private enterprise. The
Commission does recommend below that the United States intensify its commitment
to public media. But the journalism supported by marketplace
incentives—including both for-profit and not-for-profit models— is likely
always to provide the lion’s share of original and verified reporting.
The health of the private media sector is an important public-policy goal. So
too is the independence of private media from governmental intervention on
content grounds.
Existing companies
and start-ups are busily searching for business models to sustain local news
operations. Government’s first role should be to let experimentation thrive.
Governments should avoid regulations that distort incentives. Rules should not
make investments in traditional media artificially more attractive than new
ventures, or vice versa. Governments should be careful not to pose barriers to
innovation. Agencies
should regularly re-examine whether rules serve the proper ends of public
policy in light of changing economic and technological conditions. This
includes rules regarding property rights, ownership limits, and the legal
obligations of media firms.
In the Commission’s
view, the central tenets of media policy should be innovation and competition.
Federal agencies that regulate electronic media should make it possible for as
many economically viable competitors as possible to gain access to local
audiences. It is important to improve citizen access to the information sources
of their choice.
Policy makers should
promote competition both within and between different media platforms. There
should be sufficient competition among providers of new and traditional
information services to meet the needs of information consumers with the
greatest effectiveness and at lowest cost.
While the Commission
clearly does not invite governments to meddle in the practice of journalism, it
is aware of a number of proposals to aid journalistic organizations. A
persuasive case has not been made to the Commission for direct subsidies to
private media enterprises. But there is a social value of
journalism. So, without recommending any particular measure, the
Commission suggests that governments explore modest viewpoint-neutral tax and
regulatory changes to help media ease the burden of rapid change amid financial
turmoil.
For example, state
and federal governments could include a state sales tax exemption for print and
online journalism subscriptions, or a federal tax credit for the support of
investigative journalism.33 Other changes to federal tax law could include
“permissive joint operation of for-profit and not-for-profit journalism
enterprises within the federal tax exemption regime, amendment of the deduction
limitations for contribution of a newspaper business to a not-for-profit
organization, deferral of gain in taxable acquisitions of newspapers by
not-forprofit
organizations, and
permissive use of tax-exempt conduit bond financing in such acquisitions.”34
Not-for-profit news organizations could also be strengthened if their
advertising revenues were at least partially tax-exempt and if rules against
engaging in unrelated businesses were relaxed. Without endorsing these
measures, the Commission commends them for public dialogue.
Local governments
should take note of the civic value of private investment in information
infrastructure. Public policy should encourage local entrepreneurs to fill
local information voids or provide alternatives in local information
flow. Community-focused venture funds and tax incentives may be
appropriate to spur local entrepreneurship in media and technology applications
with civic virtues.
Innovation,
competition, and marketplace incentives will be critical to the growth of both
for-profit and not-for-profit models. Foundation funding will undoubtedly help
to launch and sustain many significant local efforts. Still, the most
successful nonprofits are likely to be those that succeed at developing
multiple streams of revenue that are fed back into the organization. The
Commission thus expects that public policies that support market incentives for
the production of quality journalism will serve the interests of both
for-profit and not-for-profit models.
Recommendation 2: Increase support for public service media
aimed at meeting community information needs.
Like private media,
public broadcasting in the United States has a mixed history of providing local news
and information. On the one hand, a 2007 Roper opinion poll found that nearly
half of all Americans trust the Public Broadcasting Service “a great deal,”
higher than the numbers rating commercial television and newspapers.35 On
the other hand, with some notable exceptions, public broadcasting in America
has been widely criticized as being insufficiently local or diverse. Public
stations do not have a strong record of spearheading local investigative
journalism, and most public radio broadcasters have little or no local news
reporting staff. Finally, again with some promising exceptions, local public
stations have failed to embrace
digital innovations
as a way to better connect with their communities.36
The American
commitment to First Amendment values has long bred an appropriate caution
against reliance on government as a sponsor of news and information. But
public broadcasters in the United States have demonstrated their capacity to deliver
high-quality, fair, and credible news and information programming free of
government interference.
Public broadcasting
in the United States has added a context and fullness to news and
information during the past 40 years. But it has fallen short of its promise.
Breakthroughs in children’s programming have not been mirrored in the
information field. Simply put, our public media do not fully reflect the public
nor engage with it sufficiently on the community level.
It is important now
for public policy in the digital age to play a more determined role in
enhancing the performance of public broadcasting in local news.
Public broadcasting
needs to move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media, one that
is more local, more inclusive, and more interactive. This means pursuing
greater integration of new technologies and communication practices with
traditional forms of broadcasting. It means using digital platforms to engage
local institutions effectively in the public sphere. To advance this,
government as well as private sector donors should condition their support of
public media on its reform. They should support the creating, curating, and
archiving of public media content on the community level.
The Commission
agrees with the recent conclusion of AmericanUniversity’s Center for Social Media that “[w]hat is
needed for the future of high-quality [public media] content is at least
partial taxpayer support for the many existing operations and for innovative
new projects.”37 Other countries with similar commitments to freedom of speech
and of the press make much larger per capita contributions to the financing of
public media. The United States federal government, for example, spends $1.35
per capita for public media, as compared to $22.48 per capita in Canada and
$80.36 per capita in England.38 A modest increase in tax-supported revenues
would not compromise the American model of combined government seed money and
local contributions, and it would recognize that seeding local public media
makes sense in the digital age. Accordingly, Congress should increase the
funding available for the transformation and localization of America’s public media.
Recommendation 3: Increase the role of higher education, community
and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other
information-sharing for local communities.
Nonprofit
institutions are reservoirs of expertise. Local community organizations, such
as community development organizations, churches, fraternal organizations, and
chambers of commerce, are critical in the transmission of information.
All should make a priority of sharing information within the community and
providing the tools necessary to turn information into knowledge.
This is especially
important for otherwise underserved populations. It is critical that all
segments of the community be able to locate useful online content that is
directly relevant to their needs and interests. Whether the institution
provides life-enhancing or civic information, it can strengthen the decision
making of community members by providing information that is relevant,
accurate, and accessible. A genuine community effort to engage all
neighborhoods in effective information flow could entail a variety of
information portals run by different not-for-profits.
An especially worthy
priority for nonprofit institutions, including foundations, may be financing
short-term fellowships for journalists covering state and local government.
Given the connection between serious news coverage of government and public
accountability, the not-for-profit sector should be especially attentive to
addressing reduced coverage of statehouses across the country.
Institutions of
higher learning should likewise regard promoting community information flow as
central to their mission. Community colleges may have especially strong
relationships with adult and working-class students who can be involved in
community-based projects. Faculty, staff, and student bodies can enrich a
community’s knowledge base in many ways. Universities should reward faculty
members who share their expertise through public outreach initiatives.
They should promote the dissemination of research-based knowledge in all fields
and set up or contribute to online digests of research findings.
Recommendation 4: Require government at all levels to operate
transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make
civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the
productive public use of such data.
Public information
belongs to the public. Governments at all levels should adopt a theme implicit
in the remarks of many Commission witnesses: “Make information available;
people will find ways to use it productively.”
Open Government
Laws
In this digital age,
governments should define public information as broadly as possible, with only
very narrow, specific exemptions. Governments at all levels should
ordinarily collect data electronically and in standardized formats.
Respecting individual privacy and other legal requirements of confidentiality,
governments should then place their public information online in standardized
formats, optimized for search with appropriate tags. In short, information
should be
available in ways
that people can remix, mashup, and circulate for private or public purposes.
Achieving this level of openness is likely to entail major investments in the
information infrastructure supporting government at the local and state
levels. Major technology companies could make an enormous contribution to
the public interest by volunteering expertise and facilities that could help
accomplish this ambitious objective.
Federal, state, and
local jurisdictions should clearly identify and train employees responsible for
handling records requests. Laws should penalize government agencies and their
employees who violate their own public information rules. Openness
requirements should apply to all public bodies and government contractors.
Finally, governments should provide for independent oversight of their
transparency efforts.
Transparency in
Government
The public’s
business should be done in public. Open-meetings laws should require that all
public agencies conduct their deliberations and take their actions
openly. The public should be able to witness and participate in the
process of governing. If possible, governments should allow citizens to
participate in hearings or other fact-gathering processes electronically.
At every level,
legislative bodies should operate with genuine transparency. Members of
the public should be able to track and comment upon successive versions of
proposed statutes and ordinances, whether federal, state, or local. Except in
genuine emergencies, legislators should not vote on proposals that have not had
public vetting with a meaningful opportunity for public comment.
Public trust in the
judicial system likewise requires open courtrooms. In criminal and civil
matters, any closing of proceedings or sealing of records should meet a high
standard in terms of the public interests protected. Court proceedings,
particularly at the appellate level, should be open to cameras.
Recommendation 5: Develop systematic quality measures of
community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.
Communities lack
good tools to assess the quality of local information ecologies. There
are no widely accepted indices for comparing different communities’ ecologies
or determining whether information flow within a particular community is
improving or degrading. Communities need measures of both kinds. If
activists, policy makers, and the general public had more concrete ways of
describing, measuring, and comparing the systems of community news and
information flow, it would be much easier to mobilize public interest around
community information needs.
Communities can
begin to lay the groundwork for such indices by conducting systematic
self-assessments of their information environment. As a possible starting point
for such an assessment, the Commission has composed a “Healthy Information
Communities” checklist (Appendix I) that local leaders can use. The
regular compilation of data can begin with charging a diverse and inclusive
community task force to take stock of the local information environment and
offer a public report.
B. Enhancing the
Information Capacity of Individuals
A community may be
awash in timely and relevant information, yet not get maximum benefit from its
information richness. That is because people cannot fully utilize the
information available to them without the tools to access it and the skills to
use those tools effectively. America already faces serious literacy challenges
with regard to making sense of text. The proliferation of digital media raises
further challenges with regard to understanding and communicating through new
and often complex outlets.
America’s current media landscape boasts an
astonishing array of technological innovation for the creation, analysis,
reshaping, and distribution of information:
The online local
news and information ecology now includes local news aggregation sites,
hyper-local information aggregators, citizen journalism sites, local social
networking, and place-specific blogs.
The blogosphere and
other social media platforms have emerged as powerful vehicles for individual
and community expression, for community-building, for news aggregation and
interlinking, and for community discussion.
Tools are becoming
available to improve the journalistic quality of blogs and to link them to
sources of advertising support.
Moreover, the pace
of technological innovation is matched by cultural innovation in the use of new
tools for civic and social purposes. Prominent examples include microblogging
as a tool for emergency response and journalistic reporting, online maps as a
tool for community organizing, and mobile telephony as the basis for citizen
journalism.
Public Media 2.0, a compelling recent report by the American
University Center for Social Media, identified five critical ways—choice,
conversation, curation, creation, and collaboration—in which new tools and
social practices are changing people’s media habits:
Choice. Rather than passively waiting for content to
be delivered as in the broadcast days, users actively seek out and compare
media on important issues through search engines, recommendations, videos on
demand, interactive program guides, news feeds, and niche sites…
Conversation. Comment and discussion boards have become
common across a range of sites and platforms, with varying levels of civility.
Users are leveraging conversation tools to share interests and mobilize around
issues. Distributed conversations across online services . . . are managed via
shared tags. Tools for ranking and banning comments give site hosts and
audiences some leverage for controlling the tenor of exchanges. . . .
Curation. Users are aggregating, sharing, ranking,
tagging, reposting, juxtaposing, and critiquing content on a variety of
platforms from personal blogs to open video-sharing sites to social network
profile pages. Reviews and media critiques are popular genres for online
contributors, displacing or augmenting other genres, such as consumer reports
and travel writing, and feeding a widespread culture of critical assessment.
Creation. Users are creating a range of multimedia
content (audio, video, text, photos, animation, etc.) from scratch and remixing
existing content for purposes of satire, commentary, or self-expression,
breaking through the stalemate of mass media talking points. Professional media
makers are now tapping user-generated content as raw material for their own
productions, and media outlets are navigating various fair use issues as they
wrestle with promoting and protecting their brands.
Collaboration. Users are adopting a variety of new roles
along the chain of media creation and distribution—from providing targeted
funds for production or investigation to posting widgets that showcase content
on their own sites to organizing online and offline events related to media
projects to mobilizing around related issues through online tools, such as
petitions and letters to policymakers. “Crowdsourced” journalism projects now
invite audience participation as investigators, tipsters, and editors. So far,
it is a trialand-error process.39
The Commission
concurs with the authors of this report that “[t]hese five media habits are
fueling a clutch of exciting new trends, each of which offers tools, platforms,
or practices of enormous possibility.”40
It is obvious,
however, that these trends help people only if they have access to necessary
hardware, software, and Internet connectivity, and have the skills to use them.
Americans are potentially excluded from these trends by at least three overlapping
“gaps.”
First is a broadband
gap. Today, broadband Internet service is insufficiently defined by the federal
government at the lowest common denominator, including speeds as slow as 200
kilobits per second. That speed is inadequate, for example, to transmit
video programming at a level of quality comparable to video that consumers
already receive over today’s cable or satellite systems. Quality video on that
order would require Internet speeds at least 10 times faster than the lowest
speed the current FCC standard accepts as “broadband.” Further, only
about 25 percent of American households with annual incomes below $20,000 have
a broadband connection even as currently defined.41 Thirtyseven percent of
adult Americans still do not subscribe to broadband services at home,42 and
roughly one-third of rural American communities cannot subscribe to broadband
services at any price.43 As a consequence, millions of Americans are
simply being left out of the communications revolution.
Within the broadband
gap, there are two especially troubling and widening geographic divides. One is
between some communities in the United States and otherwise comparable communities in
other countries that offer superior broadband service to a larger percentage of
their populations. The other is between rural and urban Americans.
Several developed countries from Asia and Europe offer significantly faster average broadband
services than are available in the United States,44 threatening to put even our
high-penetration cities at an economic disadvantage. At the same time,
within America, the broadband gap often hits poorer and
more rural states hardest. Only about a third of the populations of Mississippi and West Virginia have broadband at home, for example. Median
household income alone explains nearly three-quarters of the variation among
states in rates of home broadband adoption.45
Second is a literacy
gap. According to the 2003 literacy survey of the NationalCenter for Education Statistics, 43 percent of
adults fell short of the standard for “intermediate” prose competence. They
were unable to read and understand “moderately dense . . . prose texts.”
They fell short in “summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause
and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose.” This means, for example,
that more than four in ten adults would
have trouble
“consulting reference materials to determine which foods contain a particular
vitamin.”46
Statistics on high
school graduation rates reinforce this discouraging picture. Across the
country, roughly 30 percent of high school seniors fail to graduate on time,
with graduation rates in some major cities at barely 50 percent overall.47 Of
the 13 percent of adult Americans scoring at “below basic” literacy, the lowest
standard on the NCES survey, fully 55 percent had never graduated high
school.48 This fact strongly supports the intuitive connection between
schooling and literacy. To the extent local information flow remains
largely text-based, adult literacy and high-school dropout rates pose serious
challenges. Indeed, the increasing technical complexity of public issues in
areas like health, the environment, and telecommunications is likely to
intensify the civic disadvantage of citizens with
limited text
literacy.
These two gaps
combine to reinforce what leading media scholar Henry Jenkins has dubbed the
“participation gap.” This is the gap “in social experiences between [people]
who have a high degree of access to new media technologies at home and those
who do not.”49
As explained by
Professor Jenkins, “There’s a huge gap between what you can do when you’ve got
unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only
access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how
long you can work, when there are already federally mandated filters blocking
access to certain sites, when there are limits on your ability to store and
upload material, and so forth.”50 Having a home computer correlates with higher
rates of school enrollment and graduation rates, even controlling for other
factors associated with levels of educational
attainment.51 Home
Internet use also results in higher standardized reading test scores for
children of low-income families, without regard to the age of the children
involved.52
Those not
participating confront both reduced digital literacy—the understanding of and
capacity to use new information technologies—and reduced media literacy—the
capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of
media. The Commission concludes that anyone caught on the wrong side of
these three gaps runs a significant risk of being relegated to second-class
citizenship. Without public-policy intervention, people who are currently
disenfranchised are unlikely to “catch up.” Those Americans advantaged by
geography and personal resources will continue to pursue the cutting edge in
both technology and training. Without public action, however, there will
continue to be gaps between the information haves and have-nots. These threaten
to create a two-tiered society with limited democratic possibilities for too
many individuals and communities.
In short, people
need the tools, skills, and understanding to use information effectively.
The Commission
concludes:
All people have a right to be fully
informed.
There need be no second-class citizens
in informed communities.
Funding to meet this goal is an
investment in the nation’s future.
Americans cannot compete globally
without new public policies and investment in technology.
Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as
critical elements of education at all levels through collaboration among
federal, state, and local education officials.
Successful
participation in the digital information ecology entails two kinds of literacy,
or skill sets. One is typically called “digital literacy,” learning how to work
the information and communication technologies of our networked age and
understanding the social, cultural, and ethical issues surrounding those technologies.
The second is “media literacy,” the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and
create the information products that media disseminate.
Although virtually
every school in the United States is connected to the Internet, many local
communities have not integrated either digital or media literacy into their
K–12 curricula. The Internet is offered primarily as a research tool, and
students’ encounters with the Internet are framed by issues of reliability and
censorship. The situation is often little better at the college level and
for adult education generally. There may be more chances to learn the tools,
but only rare opportunities to explore their use and implications more deeply.
In many communities, informal adult-education opportunities to develop digital
and media literacies are often wildly oversubscribed, if they exist at all.
The future of
American democracy demands that we educate our citizens better, starting at an
early age:
With an
ever-increasing range of media messages in so many forms, students need to
understand the process by which authors convey meaning about socially
constructed experience. The use of digital media and popular-culture
texts not only stimulates young people’s engagement, motivation, and
interest in learning but enables them to build a richer, more nuanced
understanding of how texts of all kinds work within a culture.53
It may be tempting
for teachers and administrators who are themselves uncomfortable with new media
to view digital and media competencies as “addons” to basic learning in
“reading, writing and, arithmetic.” These competencies are, however, new forms
of foundational learning.
The consequences of
neglecting this challenge can be dire. Students who are deeply immersed in the
world of online communication outside of school may find classrooms that
marginalize new technologies both tedious and irrelevant. For students who lack
online access at home, schooling that fails to provide digital and media skills
threatens to leave them at a profound social, economic, and cultural
disadvantage.
The federal
government should launch a national initiative to assess the quality of digital
and media literacy programs in the nation’s schools. This should include
efforts made in institutions of higher education to prepare future teachers for
the new literacies. The survey should determine what schools are teaching their
students and measure the needs for both equipment and teacher training. It is
also critical to evaluate the learning opportunities available to Americans who
have already graduated high school and to promote best practices for education
at all levels to help Americans strengthen
their digital
literacy. Only a combination of national leadership and state and local
initiative can successfully produce the reforms needed.
Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other
community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for
adults.
America’s libraries need sufficient funding to serve
as centers for information, training, and civic dialogue. Public libraries are
located in nearly all communities in the United States. Most of them are wired for Internet
service. Nearly all offer public Internet, and almost three quarters are the
only providers of free public computer and Internet access in their
communities.
These libraries need
additional resources to serve the public’s digital needs. Inner city libraries
frequently have extensive waiting times for computer use. Libraries need to
support the software programs necessary to enable neighborhood youth to work on
their homework assignments.
They also need the
resources and support to work effectively towards improving digital literacy.
For example, the Commission proposes that funds should be available to public
libraries for mobile teaching labs to provide digital literacy instruction to
members of the public. Eligibility to receive a mobile teaching unit could be
based on E-rate criteria—that is, the criteria already used to qualify schools
and libraries for discounted telecommunication services under the FCC-directed
Universal Service program. Approximately 10,000 public libraries applied for
E-rate discounts in 2008, and E-rate funds might also be made available for a
mobile teaching initiative. This approach would ensure that the communities
that most need the mobile teaching units would have priority consideration.54
The Commission also
endorses digital literacy funding for community institutions, such as community
centers and community-based development organizations. These
organizations provide crucial services in the area of digital and media
training, and can be useful sites to engage even moderately Internet-capable
adults in sharing their knowledge with those less skilled. Community
organizations that
already serve as
trusted information providers to underserved populations are well situated to
help integrate their clients more effectively into the community’s information
networks.
Recommendation 8: Set ambitious standards for nationwide
broadband availability and adopt public policies encouraging consumer demand
for broadband services.
The Commission endorses the view of the Federal Communications Commission that
all Americans, urban and rural, should have affordable access to robust
broadband services. However, the federal government’s current embrace of
broadband services, including economic stimulus for rural broadband services
improvements, is insufficient to ensure the United States will reach full-fledged universal digital
citizenship.
All Americans should have access to high-speed Internet service wherever and
whenever they need it. In part, this means wireless access that can extend
beyond home, work, and community centers. In their homes, however, consumers
should have access to affordable Internet service capable of receiving and
transmitting video programming with picture and sound quality comparable to the
range of high-definition programming they receive over cable and satellite
television systems in most American communities. To this end, the Commission
endorses the government’s use of financial incentives to help spur broadband
deployment in areas where it has lagged because of market economics. The cost
of such system upgrades for wired and wireless Internet services will likely be
counted in the tens of billions of dollars. But not to make such an investment,
we believe, will cost the nation significantly more in the years to come in
lost competitiveness worldwide.
Government and commercial telecommunications firms have various levers to accomplish
this goal (including subsidies and regulatory policies), but the Commission
does not recommend using any one of these over the others. We simply note that
many nations that lead in broadband deployment have used strategic incentives
to encourage development of high speed Internet service. Toward this end,
the federal government should determine systematically the kinds of Internet
connectivity American households have, looking at speed, cost, the service
providers involved, and whether access is wire-based or wireless.
Communities cannot
realize the full benefit of broadband deployment, however, unless people
actually connect to broadband networks. The Commission thus encourages public
support for the development of applications that will make broadband service
more attractive. If all Americans regardless of age, ethnicity, income, or
geography believe that broadband service will genuinely help them to address
issues of everyday life, they will likely use that service in greater
numbers.55
The Commission endorses these suggestions as elements of an overall leadership
strategy to make broadband adoption as rewarding and universal as possible.
Recommendation 9: Maintain the national commitment to open
networks as a core objective of Internet policy.
The early architecture of the Internet supported untold user innovation,
yielding vast social benefits. Under the so-called “end-to-end principle,”
computing intelligence resided chiefly with users at the ends of the network.
The owners and operators of the networks exerted little control over the flow
of data. Over time, however, network owners and operators asserted that their
active management of networks would also yield benefits, especially with regard
to network security and the ability to support new services. The policy
challenge is to balance these network benefits against the potential risk to
innovation. It is critical that network practices do not undermine the overall
environment for innovation.
The Federal Communications Commission’s embrace of the four Internet freedoms
identified by then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell well illustrates the federal
commitment to openness. The first freedom is the right to access content of the
consumer’s choosing. The second is the freedom to use all lawful applications.
The third is the freedom to attach personal devices that do no harm to the
network. Chairman Powell identified the fourth freedom as the right to receive
full and accurate information about one’s service plan. The FCC broadened that
freedom into an expansive right to competition. These principles are widely
accepted, and the FCC should vigorously enforce them in a way that assures the
public open access to the content and services they desire. The Knight
Commission regards the openness of networks as essential to meeting community
information needs. Legislators and other policy makers should remain vigilant
and committed to maintaining openness.
Recommendation 10: Support the activities of information
providers to reach local audiences with quality content through all appropriate
media, such as mobile phones, radio, and public-access cable.
The uses of new technologies are frequently so astonishing that it is easy to
forget about the importance of all information and communications technologies.
Print is not dead. Broadcast and cablecast, for many Americans, remain the
primary sources of news and information. Mobile phones are ubiquitous. New
technologies tend to supplement, rather than replace old technologies. Public
policy should enable local communities to capitalize on all available tools for
connecting citizens to local information flows.
Those who regulate
broadcast and cable should prioritize policies to allow as much news and
information as possible to reach local audiences via these channels. The
Commission notes significant initiatives, such as those of Denver Open Media,
Public Radio Exchange, and pegmedia.org, which are creating model programs for
sharing high-quality community programming. Public, educational, and government
cable channels belong in a favored tier in terms of ease of access. As
much as possible, the federal government should fashion spectrum policies to
accommodate low-power FM and other innovations that increase the number of
voices over the local airwaves.
Community-based
technology centers can provide the training and equipment for citizens to take
advantage of all the available media for creating and sharing community news
and information. Enhancing the capacity of individuals to produce,
organize, and disseminate information should not be limited to online
platforms.
C. Promoting
Public Engagement
Skilled people,
appropriate technologies, and reliable and relevant information are the
building blocks of a successful communications environment. What generates news
and information flow in that environment, however, is not just those building
blocks. It is engagement—specifically, people’s engagement with information and
with each other.
Engagement within a community can take infinite forms. People engage when they
watch, listen to, or read the news, discuss local affairs with neighbors,
attend community celebrations, and volunteer for civic projects. They engage in
formal ways, such as voting and running for office. They engage in informal
ways, such as writing letters to the editor or to their elected representatives
or blogging. The process of engaging does not mean that everyone must be active
as a citizen at every moment. Engaging does mean, however, that people regard
their geographically defined communities as communities in a deeper sense. They
see their neighbors as a network of shared information and sustenance bound by
feelings of mutual obligation and support.
What engagement means to a democratic community is that citizens genuinely
participate in self-governance. Communities thrive when citizens are motivated
to accept responsibility with respect to community issues. Communities are
sustained when people feel themselves empowered to organize in order to achieve
positive outcomes either through their own actions or the responsiveness of
their elected representatives. Information is essential to this empowerment
process, and personal involvement in community issues can provide the critical
context in which information becomes active.
In a democratic community, any citizen who wants to should also have
opportunities to exercise vigilance over those who conduct civic affairs. The
network of people who engage daily with civic information may never include
everyone, but ideally, the groups of citizens who engage seriously with civic
information should represent the entire community. Otherwise, community problem
solving may not fully reflect everyone’s interests. Engagement opportunities
should not arbitrarily exclude anyone.
Engagement is important because of what its presence provides and because of
what its absence portends. Engagement builds what political scientist Robert
Putnam has famously called “social capital.”56 Social capital is the stock of
trust, reciprocity, and habits of cooperation that allow people to collaborate
successfully for common purposes. Research suggests connections between social
capital and indicators of community success such as public health, economic
sustainability, and low crime rates.57
Strong Community Problem Solving Requires “Bridging Capital”
Putnam’s work identified two kinds of social capital, “bonding” and
“bridging.” Bonding social capital arises within fairly homogenous and
close-knit groups. Bridging social capital arises among groups. Bridging
capital helps knit together different neighborhoods, different social classes,
and different subcommunities as they may be defined by age, religion,
ethnicity, or culture.
Where strong bridging ties exist, people maximize their prospects for
exchanging information or developing information collaboratively. No one is
expert in everything, but everyone is informed about some things, including
their own experience. The public’s diversity of information and perspective can
contribute mightily to a community’s sense of shared identity and collective
knowledge. When people engage across group lines, they share the diverse
levels of information that all citizens possess. They inevitably strengthen a
community’s capacity for problem solving.
What follows from disengagement is the flip side of these community assets.
Instead of trust, there is alienation. Instead of cooperation, there is
indifference. Instead of knowledge, there is ignorance, misunderstanding,
and higher levels of social conflict. People do not contribute to the larger
community because they do not feel a part of it. They potentially suffer not
only as citizens, in their public role, but as private individuals as well.
They have less information about available opportunities. They have fewer
connections to address issues in their own lives. There is even evidence that
reduced social capital can be injurious to personal health.58
Despite the vastly different demographics of Silicon Valley, the state of
Montana, and the city of Philadelphia, the Commission’s forum in each locale
revealed a lack of, and yearning for, bridging capital. Speakers in Philadelphia addressed gaps in understanding and
communication across racial and ethnic lines, and between working-class and
wealthier Philadelphians. Speakers in Montana spoke of the relative “information
isolation” of rural communities, including Native American communities.
Speakers in Mountain
View, California, addressed the need to
bridge ethnic and economic subcommunities, but also gave voice to the
alienation of young people.
The Commission is aware that the testimony it received represents only a slice
of America’s story. The consistent impression left,
however, was that many Americans do not see themselves fully represented in the
“mainstream” information flows of their local communities.
The witnesses who spoke to the Commission about their experiences as workers,
as members of ethnic minorities, or as advocates for young people all believed
that mainstream media convey too little information about—or relevant to—their
subcommunities. They also see their concerns portrayed to the larger community
in ways that are superficial, misleading, and negatively stereotypical. A
common theme is that readers learn about poor people, labor unions, ethnic
minorities, and youth only through stories framed by conflict.
Members of minority groups may engage less with mainstream media because they
doubt whether mainstream media reflect the reality of their communities.
Minorities own approximately eight percent of the full-power radio stations in
the United
States, three percent of the television stations.59 Since 2000, minority
journalists have never accounted for more than 14 percent of the total
professional print journalism community, with the percentage in 2009 amounting
to 13.4 percent. And more than 42 percent of print newsrooms in America employ no journalists who are African
American, Asian American, Native American or Latino. Of the 6,000
journalists who lost their jobs in 2008, 854 were members of racial
minorities.60 These are stark figures considering that, within the next 35
years, it is likely that America’s “minorities” will come to represent the
numerical majority in the United States.61
Yet, it is clear that people want to engage. The impulse to share information,
to create and be part of a larger information flow, is powerful across all
groups in society. Raj Jayadev, a youth organizer who helped create Silicon
Valley De-bug, a multicultural, youth-produced magazine, told the Commission
that, in the current decade, “‘youth organizing’ and ‘youth media’ have become
synonymous.” He reported:
Young people who are not from the dot-com fast track—having either not seen
themselves in the traditional media or only saw themselves portrayed as
criminals, drop-outs, or detractors to the community—have taken this work to
another level through an embrace of newer technologies… A consequence of not
being included in the news world is an abandonment of it all together and an
impulse to simply have your own.
In a similar vein, although witnesses testified to insufficient bridging
between ethnic and mainstream media, ethnic media are in many ways thriving
within the subcommunities they serve.
The Commission believes local communities can significantly strengthen public
engagement by addressing two issues: opportunity and motivation. Because
increased engagement has significant payoffs for both individuals and
communities, it behooves institutions to address what makes engagement
plausible and inviting to the general public, and to expand opportunities for
constructive engagement where feasible.
To pursue their true interests, people need to be
engaged with information and with each other.
The Commission concludes:
Creating informed communities is a task
for everyone.
Young people have a special role in
times of great change.
Technology can help everyone to be part
of the community.
Everyone should feel a responsibility to
participate.
Recommendation 11: Expand local media initiatives to reflect
the entire reality of the communities they represent.
Media institutions,
old and new, will inevitably continue to be major players in the information
networks serving local communities. As democratic institutions, they can serve
their communities most effectively, however, if they reflect and help give
voice to all segments of the public in the way news is gathered, analyzed, and
shared. Mainstream media have an unusual capacity to foster the “bridging
capital” that is critical to community welfare. This may be especially critical
where communities are fragmented along social, economic, or political lines.
Local media have the unique potential to enable citizens to see how life looks
from the perspectives of multiple groups and to engage people in conversation
across group lines.
Access to credible and knowledgeable sources from all segments of the community
will be easier for newsrooms whose journalists are connected to all of a
community’s ethnic, social, economic, and political subnetworks. If any segment
of the community is unrepresented among the people who do the work of
journalism, the accuracy and credibility of that journalism suffers.
Conversely, a news organization’s commitment to represent the entire community
can help overcome the sense of social exclusion that exists in many communities
and discourages engagement.
Just as the
diversity of a newsroom can bridge across a community’s various constituencies,
so can and should diversity in a community’s media ownership. Achieving
diversity in the ownership of mainstream print and broadcast media has proved a
difficult challenge. Communities would benefit if the evolution of new media
provided significant opportunities for minorities and other underrepresented
groups to achieve a substantial ownership stake in the news and information sector.
Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the
digital information and communication capacities of local communities.
Media habits of
Americans vary greatly with age. Younger Americans, especially if relatively
well-off, tend to integrate advanced information and communication technologies
into their daily lives in ways that seem largely alien to their elders.
To be an innovator in the social uses of digital media, it helps to have had
early and lifelong experience. At the same time, many technologically savvy
young
people have little
connection to the ideas and challenges of local democracy. This uneven
distribution of knowledge across the generations actually creates a unique
opportunity.
Imagine a “Geek
Corps for Local Democracy” where, as a post-college opportunity, American youth
volunteer to help connect a physical community to the networked infrastructure.
They would be assigned to diverse communities to help local government
officials, librarians, police, teachers, and other community leaders leverage
networked technology. Geek Corps participants would teach community members how
to use technology. They would help local leaders to understand technological
shifts and how they can leverage new technologies for community practices. Participants
from all the communities involved would be connected into a national network of
participants to share best practices, develop collectively usable code, and
build a network of information systems for local democracy.
Programs are already
underway in which high school students volunteer to help with technology
efforts. But the local nature of such initiatives means that there is little
coordination among communities. A Geek Corps would weave together the local and
the national through networks of passionate youth. Ideally, such a program
would have the same stature as the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, such that
participants would be welcome into jobs with open arms. Yet, the real benefit
for most youth would be a deep understanding of how different communities work
and how democracy plays out at the local level. Those who invited Geek Corps
participants to their community should relish the opportunity to help these
youth understand local democracy and governance. The result is
cross-generational civic education.
Geek Corps
participants would need to have varying types of technological skills.
The pay would not be overly generous. The unique quality of the opportunity
would make up for the low level of income in the short-term. There would need
to be a process for assessment to assure that local needs were met. A national
staff
could help
coordinate local participants and provide a technological backbone to the
project.
To work, this
program will need support at both the local and national levels. It would
make most sense for communities to fund a portion of the costs and for their
contributions to be matched either by foundations, corporations, or the federal
government. Local communities would also have to provide a structure for the
Geek Corps participants to engage with the relevant community players.
Recommendation 13: Empower all citizens to participate
actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to
address community affairs and pursue common goals.
As powerful as the Internet is for facilitating human connection, face-to-face
contact remains the foundation of community building. Indeed, recent years have
seen an explosion in the use of the Internet not only to create “virtual
communities” among strangers, but to enable people who know and encounter each
other offline to sustain and deepen their connection. To build the “bridging
capital” that American towns and cities need in order to prosper, local
communities should pursue opportunities for citizens to share responsibility
for addressing community needs and to organize on a community-wide basis to
discuss common problems and to pursue common goals.
Community summits can be important catalysts for such self-governance
activity. To be successful, local summits will have to make sense within
the context of an actual decision-making agenda. Such gatherings should have
the potential to lead to constructive action and to help identify and empower
citizen leaders who can move the common agenda forward. Engagement should be
motivated by common awareness that what the gathering decides will create an
action agenda that citizens can and will pursue. Inviting citizens to engage
with one another and then offering an experience that is accessible, energetic,
and constructive can overcome the barriers to opportunity and motivation that
too often keep people at home.
A good start for initiatives in community dialogue would be summits directed at
creating community action agendas to improve the local information environment.
Mayors’ offices and city councils could lay the groundwork for such summits by
using the Healthy Information Community checklist in Appendix I as a framework
for gathering the basic facts about the community’s information environment. A
follow-up summit could then bring together the public, private, and
not-for-profit sectors in a united search for specific local steps in pursuit
of the “informed community” vision. They could collaborate to map additional
community information assets and determine voids that need addressing. They
could design initiatives to promote information availability, citizen capacity,
and public engagement.
Recommendation 14: Emphasize community information flow in the
design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces.
Survey research shows that the physical aspects of place will often drive
people’s sense of attachment to their local community. Concern for the
environment is converging with strategic planning around issues of social and
economic development to renew interest in the creation and redesign of inviting
public spaces. Such spaces can become inviting hubs for social contact within
and among community groups. They can also become key spots for information
sharing.
In addition to architectural measures, information technologies can help bring
people together in a common space. It is easy to imagine public digital
displays of news and culture becoming a major attraction in many communities.
Public transportation venues, parks, community centers, and shopping malls could
become the sites for kiosks featuring local information.
These efforts would not be a substitute for home access to broadband, but they
could promote community information flow by encouraging citizens to be out and
about. They would be interesting and aesthetically appealing ways for local
residents to connect to the larger community.
Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community has at
least one high-quality online hub.
Given the volume of information on the Internet and the infinite diversity of
user interests, it is not possible for any one Web site to aggregate all of the
online information local residents want and need. Just as communities depend on
maps of physical space, they should create maps of information flow that enable
members of the public to connect to the data and information they want.
Communities should have at least one well-publicized portal that points to the
full array of local information resources. These include government data feeds,
local forums, community e-mail listservs, local blogs, local media, events
calendars, and civic information. The best of these hubs would go beyond the
mere aggregation of links and act as an online guidebook. They would enable
citizens to map an effective research journey by letting people know what is
available and where. The site should leverage the power of new forms of social
media to support users in gathering and understanding local information.
Where private initiative is not creating community online hubs, a locally
trusted anchor institution might undertake such a project with the assistance
of government or foundation funding, or support from those who also support
public media.
Conclusion and a
Call to Action
The United States
stands at what could be the beginning of a democratic renaissance, enabled by
innovative social practices and powerful technologies. With multiple
tools of communication, dynamic institutions for promoting knowledge and the
exchange of ideas, and renewed commitment to engage in public life, Americans
could find themselves in a brilliant new age. People would enjoy unprecedented
capacity to fulfill their individual aspirations and to collectively shape the
future of their communities. Community discussion, collaboration, and accountable
public decision making could make life better in every neighborhood, town, and
city.
To thrive in a democracy, America’s
local communities need information ecologies that support both individual and
collective community life. They need accurate, relevant news and information to
fuel the common pursuit of the truth and the public interest. Improving local ecologies
requires public policies that support the production and dissemination of
relevant and credible information, enhance the capacity of individuals to
engage with information, and promote people’s engagement with information and
with one another. Informed communities require well-designed strategies to make
these objectives a reality.
The questions America
faces at this point in its information history, however, go beyond questions of
strategy to questions of values. The Knight Commission has recommended a series
of strategies that, in various ways, exhort our major public and nonprofit
institutions to give new priority to values of openness, inclusion, and
engagement. The values questions posed are equally profound, however, for
individual citizens and for the institutions of the media.
Communities throughout America
need for their members to re-examine their individual roles as citizens in the
digital age. The opportunities of the current moment are conspicuously
interrelated with new technologies of human connection. More than ever, these
technologies enable each citizen to be a productive part of the community.
Those opportunities, however, and the social benefits they
offer, imply a reciprocal responsibility to participate. Americans’ sense of
their very identity as citizens should entail a sense of responsibility to
“step up” to the digital age. They need to attain the skills necessary to
support first-class citizenship, to demonstrate an active willingness to
acquire and share knowledge both within and across social networks, and to
support democratic values in the way every person interacts with the
information ecology that serves his or her community.
It is critical that Americans take the time to embrace the
quality of community information flow as an issue worthy of their concern and
involvement. The Commission has directed many of its recommendations to
government agencies and officials. They are far more likely to respond if their
constituents are campaigning day-in and day-out for a pro-information agenda.
Likewise, media institutions must confront how new
technological capacities and social practices are challenging their core
values. The evolving relationships among journalists, media firms, and the
public should engender a deep discussion about how these changes affect the
proper scope of intellectual property and such values as objectivity, privacy,
and accountability. An increasingly uninhibited information culture creates
opportunities not only for social benefit, but also for slander, harassment,
fraud, pornography, spam, theft, intrusiveness, invasions of privacy, and all
kinds of falsehoods, from innocent mistakes to intentional mischief.
It is unlikely that the formal instruments of law or the
private initiatives of single individuals can fully address these challenges.
Institutions that stand as critical nodes in America’s
information networks need to examine their own practices. They should consider
how changes in institutional practice can protect core values at the same time
that new ways are emerging for creating, organizing, and sharing information.
Society can be lulled into feeling that the very
availability of exciting new tools will bring the solution to all problems.
Alternatively, as long-standing practices are upended, people may imagine a
past somewhat rosier than reality and exaggerate the threat to enduring values
and allegiances. This Commission has tried to resist both impulses. This report
is intended to help America
maintain its commitment to enduring information ideals, even as individuals and
communities create information ecologies more relevant, participatory, and
inclusive than ever. There need be no second-class citizens in the democratic
communities of the digital age. Whether America
fulfills that vision will require individual and collective initiative at every
level of society.
The Knight Commission has attempted to provide through this
report a set of durable principles and broad recommendations that can frame the
pursuit of the informed communities America
needs. The Commission, however, understands “informed communities,” like
democracy itself, as a vision always to be pursued, not as a final state of
perfection ever likely to be achieved. In that spirit, our first call is for an
outpouring of additional ideas, dialogue, and action in communities
throughout the United States.
The “information issue” is everyone’s issue
Endnotes:
1. Loris Ann Taylor, Native Public Media Policy Priorities, Paper
Prepared for the Obama-Biden Presidential FCC Transition Team (2008), available
at http://www.media-democracy.net/files/NativePublicMediaPolicy-1.pdf.
2. Although the Commission has strived to take an
evidence-based approach to its analysis and recommendations, its experience
confirms the conclusion of other researchers that “[e]fforts to understand and
address these issues are limited by a lack of solid empirical evidence, and
must rely instead on incomplete information, anecdotes, and information. We
know far too little about how changes in the delivery and consumption of news
are affecting public awareness, opinion, and public engagement.” Persephone Miel
and Robert Faris, News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age, at 2
(2008), available at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/file/Overview_MR.pdf.
3. Paul Starr, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a
New Era of Corruption),” The New Republic, Mar. 4, 2009, at 28, available at
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a4e2aafccc92-4e79-90d1-db3946a6d119.
4. Project for Excellence in Journalism, Local TV News
Reports a Drop in Revenue, Ratings, Mar.
26, 2009, available at
http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/local_tv_sees_drop_revenue_and_ratings.
5. AJR Staff, “AJR’s 2009 Count of Statehouse Reporters,”
American Journalism Review, Apr./May 2009, available at
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4722.
6. Michael Liedtke, “AP Survey of News Execs: Staff Cuts
Hurting Coverage,” EditorandPublisher.com, May 13, 2009, available at
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_ display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003972765.
7. “You Tell Us: Gigabit Wireless on the Cheap,” IEEE
Spectrum, Jan. 2008, available at
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/you-tell-us-gigabit-wireless-on-the-cheap.
8. John Horrigan, Wireless Internet Use, 4, 33 (2009),
available at http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Wireless-Internet-Use.pdf.
9. For many purposes, communities are properly defined in a
broad sense as “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability,
support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity.” Barry Wellman,
“Physical Place and
CyberPlace: The Rise of Personalized Networking,” 25 Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 227, 228 (2001), available at
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/individualism/N_1_#N_1_. The
quality of democracy, however, depends fundamentally on people’s relationship
to the places in which they live. Geography defines the scope of people’s
common governance over resources for which they share jurisdiction. At the
founding of the republic, there was a significant correspondence between the
geographical boundaries that defined people’s sense of community and most of the
structures that evolved to produce news and information. From the age of the
telegraph to the digital age, the evolution of technology has steadily worked to
erode, if not eliminate, that correspondence. This is one key reason why
focusing on the needs of geographically defined local communities is now so
crucial.
10. These include INSEAD’s Global Networked Readiness Index,
available at http://www.insead.edu/v1/gitr/wef/main/analysis/showcountrydetails.cfm;
the Media Sustainability Index created by the International Research and
Exchanges Board (IREX), see http://www.irex.org/msi/, and the Access to
Knowledge Index being created by Yale Law School’s Information Society
Project, see Lea Bishop Shaver, Defining and Measuring A2K:
A Blueprint for an Index of Access to Knowledge, 4 I/S: A Journal of Law and
Policy for the Information Society 235 (2008). UNESCO’s Press Freedom and
Development survey of 194 countries is beginning to find suggestive links
between a free press and other measurable aspects of social welfare. Marina Guseva,
et al., Press freedom and development: An analysis of correlations between
freedom of the press and the different dimensions of development, poverty,
governance and peace (UNESCO 2008), available at
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001618/161825e.pdf.
11. Researchers Mark Lloyd and Phil Napoli, for example,
have proposed a local media diversity index that could be used to correlate
elements of media diversity with local levels of both civic participation and
civic knowledge. Mark Lloyd and Phil Napoli, Local Media Diversity Matters:
Measure Media Diversity According to Democratic Values, Not Market Values,
Center for American Progress (2007), available at
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/01/
pdf/media_diversity.pdf. At USC Annenberg, Professor Sandra
Ball-Rokeach has developed the thesis that local communication infrastructure
plays a critical role in three components of civic engagement: neighborhood
belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation. She has even developed
a measure that she calls Integrated Connectedness to a Storytelling Network (ICSN),
which she has determined—at least for the local communities she has studied—to
be an effective summation of the relationship between what she calls local
media connectedness, their scope of connections to community organizations, and
the intensity of interpersonal neighborhood storytelling. Yong-Chan Kim &
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, “Civic Engagement From a Communication Infrastructure
Perspective,” 16 Communication Theory 173 (2006). These projects, along
with such community assessment efforts as the Sense of Community Index, D. W.
McMillan & D. M. Chavis, “Sense of Community: A definition and theory,” 14 American
Journal of Community Psychology 6–23 (1986), the National Civic Health Index
created by the National Council on Citizenship, available at
http://www.ncoc.net/index.php?tray=series&tid
=top5&cid=97, and Patchwork Nation, http://www.csmonitor.com/patchworknation/,
point the way to the possibility of a deeper understanding over time between
the precise elements of local information ecologies and other positive social
outcomes.
12. Sheila Grissett, “Shifting Federal Budget Erodes
Protection from Levees; Because of Cuts, Hurricane Risk Grows,” The Times
Picayune, June 4, 2004, at
1.
13. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and
Responsible Press – A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio,
Motion Pictures, Magazines and Books, 20 (1947).
14. Starr, supra note 3, at 29.
15. James M. Snyder, Jr, and David Strömberg, Press Coverage
and Political Accountability, March, 2008, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w13878.pdf.
A new Princeton study even suggests that when news
outlets close, people disengage more broadly from community affairs. The
year after the Cincinnati Post closed “fewer candidates ran for municipal
office in the suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely
to win re-election, and voter turnout fell.” Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel
Garrido, Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post
(Woodrow Wilson School Discussion Papers in Economics, Mar. 2009), available at
http://wws-roxen.princeton.edu/wwseconpapers/papers/dp236.pdf.
16. Ira Machefsky, Newspaper Advertising Revenue Trends,
TheNumbersGuru.com, Aug. 1, 2008,
available at http://thenumbersguru.blogspot.com/2008/07/newspapers-advertising
revenuetrends. html (based on data from the Newspaper Association of America,
available at
http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx).
17. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal
System from Franklin to Morse (1998).
18. Adrienne Chute and P. Elaine Kroe, Public Libraries in
the United States:
Fiscal Year 2005, at 3, (NationalCenter
for Education Statistics, 2007), available at
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008301.pdf.
19. American Library Association, The State of America’s
Libraries 20, (April, 2009), available at http://www.ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/mediapresscenter/presskits/2009stateofamericaslibraries/State%20draft_04.10.09.pdf.
20. Leigh Estabrook and Lee Rainie, Information Searches
that Solve Problems: How People Use the Internet, Libraries, and Government
Agencies When They Need Help, at 10, 22 (Pew Internet & American Life
Project, 2007), available at
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Information-Searches-That-Solve-Problems.aspx.
21. Denise M. Davis, Funding Issues in U.S. Public
Libraries, Fiscal Years 2003-2006, at 1 (Mar. 10, 2006), available at
http://docs.google.co/gview?a=v&q=cache:yor2N5NrL6EJ:www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/ors/reports/fundingissuesinuspls.pdf+denise+m.+davis,+Funding+Issues+i
22. This is how the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009,
H.R. 985, 111th Cong., 1st Sess. (2009), the federal journalist shield law
recently approved by the House of Representatives, defines journalism.
23. Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of
the News Media 2009: News Investment, available at
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_newspapers_newsinvestment. php?cat=4&media=4.
24. Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of
the News Media 2009: Audio – News Investment, available at
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_audio_newsinvestment.php?media=10&cat=4#1newsroomsize.
25. Television News Jobs and Salaries Decline As Amount of
News Increases, RTNDA/Hofstra University Survey Shows, RTNDA.org, Apr. 19,
2009, available at
http://www.rtnda.org/pages/posts/television-news-jobs-and-salaries-decline-as-amount-of-news-increases-rtndahofstrauniversity-
survey-shows481.php.
26. U.S. Census Bureau, Geographic Areas Reference Manual,
Chap. 2 at 2-3 (2005), available at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/GARM/Ch2GARM.pdf.
27. Circulation of U.S. Community Weekly Newspapers by
Circulation Groups, EditorandPublisher.com, available at
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/images/pdf/US%20Weekly%20Circ.%20by%20Circ.pdf.
28. See generally Charlie Beckett, SuperMedia: Saving
Journalism So It Can Save the World (2008).
29. Jay Rosen, the founder and director of
NewAssignment.net, writes, “At New Assignment, pros and amateurs cooperate to
produce work that neither could manage alone. The site uses open source methods
to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion. It pays professional
journalists to carry the project home and set high standards; they work closely
with users who have something to contribute. The betting is that (some) people
will donate to stories they can see are going to be great because the open
methods allow for that glimpse ahead.” Jay Rosen, Welcome to NewAssignment.Net,
NewAssignment.net (Aug. 19, 2006),
available at
http://www.newassignment.net/blog/jay_rosen/welcome_to_newassignment_net.
30. Charles M. Firestone, “The New Intermediaries,” in David
Bollier, The Future of Community and Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic
Culture, Aspen Institute (1995).
31. See Association for Computing Machinery, ACM U.S. Public
Policy Committee (USACM) Universal Internet Accessibility Policy
Recommendations, available at http://www.acm.org/publicpolicy/accessibility.
32. Sunshine Week 2009 Survey of State Government
Information Online, SunshineWeek.org, Mar.14, 2009, available at
http://www.sunshineweek.org/index.cfm?id=7284.
33. Stephanie R. Hoffer, Taxes, Local Journalism, and
Transition to the Public Sector (Paper for the Knight Commission on the
Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, November, 2008), at 1.
34. Id., at 1.
35. PBS Research, Roper Public Opinion Poll on PBS: 2007 vs.
Past Years, available at http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/pbsfoundatio/news/pastroperpolls.pdf.
36. National Public Radio, Final Report to the John S. and
James L. Knight Foundation re: Local News Initiative: Research and Planning
Phase (June 2006).
37. Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide, Public Media
2.0: Dynamic Engaged Publics, at 21 Center for Social Media (2009) (hereafter,
Public Media 2.0).
38. Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron, “New Ideas
for Challenging Times,” in Free Press, Changing Media: Public Interest Policies
for the Digital Age, at 221 (2009) (hereafter,“Changing Media”).
39. Public Media 2.0, supra note 37, at 6-7.
40. Id. at 7.
41. John Horrigan, Home Broadband 2008: Adoption stalls for
low-income Americans even as many broadband users opt for premium services that
give them more speed, at ii (Pew Internet and American Life Project, July 2,
2008), available at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/257/report_display.asp.
42. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Home Broadband
Adoption 2009, at 9 (2009), available at http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Home-Broadband-Adoption-2009.pdf.
43. Jon M. Peha, Bringing Broadband to Unserved Communities,
Brooking Institution, (July2008), available at http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2008/07_broadband_peha.aspx.
One recent report suggests a rural “broadband penetration rate” of 75 percent,
but appears to define “penetration rate” as the percentage of all homes with an
Internet connection that have broadband—not the percentage of all homes that
have broadband. Broadband Plays Catch-Up in Rural Areas, Outpaces Growth in Big
Cities: Broadband Penetration Rate Grows 16 Percentage Points in Rural Areas
Over Past Two Years, Significantly Outpacing that of Metropolitan Areas,ComScore.com
(Aug. 19, 2009), available at
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/8/Broadband_Plays_Catch-Up_in_Rural_Areas_Outpaces_Growth_in_Big_
Cities.
44. Akamai Report: The State of the Internet, 1st Quarter
2009, at 26 (2009), available at http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/.
45. S. Derek Turner, “The Internet,” in Changing Media, supra
note 38, at 16, 37–39.
46. NationalCenter
for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL): A First
Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century, at 3 (2005),
available at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF (hereafter, “NAAL”).
47. Christopher B. Swanson, Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing
the Graduation Gap, Editorial Projects in Education (2009), available at
http://www.edweek.org/rc/articles/2009/04/22/cities_in_crisis.html.
48. NAAL, supra note 46, at 5.
49. Henry Jenkins, MySpace and the Participation Gap,
Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of HenryJenkins (July, 2006), available at
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/06/myspace_and_the_participation.html.
50. Id.
51. Robert W. Fairlie, et al., Crossing the Divide:
Immigrant Youth and Digital Disparity in California,
at 5, Canter for Justice, Tolerance, and Community, (2006).
52. Linda A. Jackson, et al., Does Home Internet Use
Influence the Academic Performance of Low-Income Children? 42 DEVELOPMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY 429, 434 (2006).
53. Renee Hobbs, Reading the Media in High School: Media
Literacy in High School English, at 7(2007).
54. John Carlo Berthot and Charles R. McClure, Public
Libraries and the Internet 2008: Study Results and Findings, FloridaStateUniversityCollege of Information (2008).
55. The Commission notes that the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation hascalled for a “revitalized Technology Opportunities
Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable
Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law
enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.”
Robert D. Atkinson, Daniel K. Correa and Julie A. Hedlund, Explaining
International Broadband Leadership, at 3 (2008), available at
http://www.itif.org/file/ExplainingBBLeadership.pdf. It likewise encourages
governments to “[s]upport new applications, including putting more public
content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine,
and online learning programs.” Id.,
at 44.
56. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of
American Community (2000).
57. “Sustainable development and sustainable communities
typically measure indicators that show the overall health of the community:
i.e., looking at measures of the economy, health, crime, in addition to human
and social capital levels. We completely agree that a community’s stock of
social capital is not the sole measure of a community’s health. Nevertheless,
we believe that social capital is important in that it is a key driver for
these other indicators (economy, health, crime, etc.) rather than merely a goal
in and of itself.” The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America,
available at http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/faqs.htm#2.
See Susan Saegert, Gary Winkel, and Charles Swartz, Social Capital and Crime in
New York City’s Low-Income
Housing, 13 Housing Policy Debate 189 (2002), available at
http://www.fanniemaefoundation.
org/programs/hpd/pdf/hpd_1301_saegert.pdf (describing how
social capital helps lower crime).
58. Ming Wen, Christopher R. Browning, and Kathleen A.
Cagney, Neighbourhood Deprivation, Social Capital and Regular Exercise during
Adulthood: A Multilevel Study in Chicago,
at 44, Urban Studies 2651 (2007).
59. S. Derek Turner, Off the Dial: Female and Minority Radio
Station Ownership in the United States, Free Press (June 2007), available at http://www.freepress.net/docs/off_the_dial.pdf;
S. Derek Turner and Mark Cooper, Out of The Picture: Minority & Female TV
Station Ownership in the United States, Free Press (Oct. 2006), available at
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/files/out_of_the_picture.pdf.
60. Changing Media, note 38, at 191–192.
61. U.S. Census Bureau News, An Older and More Diverse
Nation by Midcentury, Census.gov (Aug.
14, 2008), available at http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/012496.html.
62. The Commission was assisted in the organization of this
forum by Dave Mills, Program Officer (San Jose),
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
63. The Commission was assisted in the organization of this
forum by Professor Monroe Price of the University
of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School
of Communication, along with Annenberg staff members Sylvia Beauvais and Libby
Morgan, research fellow Kate Coyer, and graduate student Lee Shaker. The
planning team also included Matt Bergheiser, Program Officer
(Philadelphia),John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Todd Wolfson, Media
Mobilizing Project.
64. The Commission was assisted in the organization of this
forum by Dean Peggy Kuhr and Professors Dennis Swibold and Denise Dowling of
the University of Montana School of Journalism.
Every time Governments legislate against or big business
prosecutes against file sharing, internet users find a new way to circumvent
and continue their activities.
As there are more Internet Geeks than enforcement officials,
this is hardly surprising.
Sometime ago I predicted to Chris that if the “powers that
be” continued raining down hellfire and brimstone on all the file sharers then
the file sharers would take the whole operation totally underground.
Chris asked me if that meant encrypted private networks and
I replied, no, it means community WiFi.
802.11a/b/g grade WiFi connections are not known as the best
methodology for connecting high speed networks suitable for viewing videos,
however the new “n” and the new wimax 802.16e will change the viability of local
community networks.
But even those using b/g can with the right antennas still
obtain reception upto
88.7km (55.1 miles) making WiFi (set-up by geeks) in the community an
obvious next step in the propagation of sharing person to person.
At the very least home users who want to extend their b/g
802.11 range might consider this
or this
(good for about 600-900 metres) or to connect to other WiFi networks, this
(upto about 4 km but directional)
Consumer pushback against the copyright enforcers is
starting to become organized in a way similar to resistance units in the second
world war.
Small cells totally independent of each other and not
reliant on a central network that can be filtered, intercepted or interdicted.
It would seem that the next foray against the media corporate
world is the P2P Kiosk.
Located in Weimar, Germany,
The Pirate Kiosk announced the other day that they were open
for business.
A real kiosk designed to act as an index site and to
facilitate OFFNET file sharing (that’s file sharing with NO INTERNET”).
Yes it’s a real Kiosk. To see it in action, view movie at
bottom of this article.
And here’s the announcements…..
Dear users and abusers, dear Elders of the Internet,
the Kiosk of Piracy is proud to announce the launch of
“The Pirate Kiosk”! From last night own, a copy of the infamous Pirate
Bay is available to the public, but – here comes the catch – offline-only.
Yes, offline, the Kiosk is not connected to the Internet in any way, but the
interested public is invited to use the service in a wifi-radius around
it.
With our newest project, we are joining the work of the
dear people and groups which managed to duplicate the contents of The PirateBay on other places
in the Net. We want to show in a very physical way that the Internet is neither
a machine nor controllable in any way – it is just a system of agreements which
work in any circumstances. We don’t need the Internet – the magic can happen
anywhere.
The Pirate Kiosk features a webinterface similar to it’s
online brother (reachable under http://kioskofpiracy.org – IF you are in wifi
range), a tracker
service (under http://tracker.kioskofpiracy.org:6969), a growing backup of most
of the Bay’s .torrent
files and the ability to upload files which will be added to the
integrated Seedbox.
The
Pirate Kiosk at the Kiosk of Piracy based at the Sophienstiftsplatz
serves .torrents with the following Tracker-URLs:
http://192.168.42.1:6969/announce &
http://tracker.kioskofpiracy.org:6969/annouce - offline tracker url in the
local WLAN “kioskofpiracy.org”
What does it mean? After downloading a .torrent from The
Pirate Kiosk, you are able to share your pirated content on a local space in Weimar
with your friends or share over teh internetz with your 10 million best-buddy
friends
And of course… the Youtube test of the service.
For those wishing to duplicate this community service in
their own local wireless, the TPK enthusiasts have supplied a DIY instruction
set – here.
Conclusion:
The RIAA and their lobbyists created a new game. It was
called “Us versus the Internet”.
Well, the game results are in...
RIAA Guys? You lost.
Government guys? It’s all over.
Non RIAA Content guys? It’s all over.
Whilst “it” (file-sharing) was on the internet – you had a
chance to make money out of P2P – had you hired someone that knew what they
were doing – however, if it’s not going to be on the internet, well then I
guess the game is over……….
You can all pack up your lawyers and investigators and go
home, because as a geek, I don’t know of any way of interdicting or
infiltrating an encrypted 192.168.0.0 network over limited range wireless.
Advice:
Right now the online kiosk population appears to be one. RIAA, and all content industries and Government lobbyists. If you don't back off, I don't think the population will stay at one.
DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT - NOT FOR DISTRUBTION OR USEDRAFT DRAFT DRAFT - NOT FOR DISTRUBTION OR USE
When I first signed up for a Facebook page – about 2005, I
did not quite “Grok” Facebook.
Why would a user want to say what they were eating for
breakfast? Better yet, who the hell would be interested?
I didn’t understand the sheep meme. Look at me – I can do
this, you can too.
Which of course is the secret of the success of the various
applications.
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We published the top 60
applications the other day. (But don't bother taking any notes - Facebook moves
at a quantum as yet unrealised by normal media analysts. It doesnt move in
years, months, weeks or days. It moves in minutes, seconds and occassionally it
might take a whole hour......).
Notwithstanding it's speed, there is more movement in the
Facebook top 1500 applications than in the Music industries top 40.
And certainly more movement than the Mojo’s Movie
Blockbuster results.
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Here’s Box office Mojo’s estimates of opening weekend last
week.
Rank
Title
Avg. Pred.
$Millions
1
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
$27.60
2
The Informant!
$14.40
3
Jennifer's Body
$14.10
4
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
$10.40
5
Love Happens
$8.50
6
9
$6.20
7
Inglourious Basterds
$4.10
8
All About Steve
$3.20
9
The Final Destination
$2.60
10
Sorority Row
$2.10
So that equals nine point two million cinema goers.
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Let’s compare that to that to the top ten Facebook
applications……
Or
five times more attention than the movies. In fact just the BlackBerry and
iPhone Facebook users exceed the Hollywood
movie attendance numbers.
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In
America,
a recording artist is required to sell 500,000 albums or copies of a track for
that music track or album to go “gold”. A million for platinum.
On
Facebook, an application needs to have an audience of 15,000,000 BEFORE it gets
into the top ten; nine million for the top 20 and 6 million for the top thirty.
In
fact, if one only had 500,000 eyes on Facebook – you wouldn’t be number one on
the charts….. you would be number 220.
AND what’s most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from
being the 11,235th most popular movie, to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks
(we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction film
on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites
So the billion dollar question that should be on everyone’s
lips is – but isn’t…..
“Koltai – What can we do to jump back onto the gravy train
of attention?”
When companies finally realise that P2P in all it’s forms,
Torrent, Emule, Facebook is the future, then they might start altering their
value propositions and benefiting from “what is” and not what “We bloody well
think it should be this – because we say so.”
Those that keep saying: “If only”:
If only - We had shutdown that horrible Internet before it
started.
If only - The Geeks would show us how to filter
everything…..
If only - We had bought all the ISP’s before they got too
big.
If only - We could could convince all the TRIPS
signatories that ACTA
is a good thing.
If only - Everyone in the world sent 25% of every dollar
they earned to the USA.
Will wind up as useless as a meaningless turd in the desert
of “what could have been, if only:”
The Desert (old media) where even the dung beetles have
moved on to greener more lucrative pastures.
Which by the way – are all on the Internet.
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Rupert, here’s a freebie – Cause it’s Monday. Buy Channel
Seven.
Kerry,
Don’t buy Foxtel. TiVo is not a cure all for what ails that lumbering coffin
looking for a burial plot. DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT - NOT FOR DISTRUBTION OR USE
Earlier this year we blogged
about the fact that Pornography appeared to be decreasing on the internet due
to the wide variety of other content available via the P2P networks.
The other day we blogged
about Facebook games as being an escape from the doom and gloom of the Global
economy.
Historically, there are four recession proof industries
during any financial crisis.
Beer, cosmetics, hosiery and perfume.
Now, it would appear that there is a fifth. Facebook.
Throughout the ages, each succeeding new publishing
technology has been given an injection of wow factor (not the dying world of
Warcraft); I’m talking "Wow, 'lookit' the girl on page 3, she’s cute".
Books, periodicals/journals, newspapers, radio, films,
television, VCR’s, DVD’s, the Internet have all allowed adults to enjoy the
“forbidden” fruits in the privacy of their homes.
Radio? Well you would have to be about 70 to remember the
risqué radio plays that were the staple of the male imagination diet of the
fifties, but yes, double entendre radio plays qualified as aural pornography
and had exactly the same complaints (“devil inspired”) as does the Internet
today. Even the iPhone now has “adult” apps available in the iStore.
Only Facebook has kept the halter on the descent into moral
turpitude; and; it seems to be paying off.
By creating a porn free environment Facebook have developed
a “trusted” new playing field just begging for new product commercialization.
And it’s paying off handsomely – the demographics would
suggest that the average game player is a 27 year old female.
Who do all the advertisers want to reach?The decision making 25-34 year old females.
OK back to the Porn.
Pornography is traditionally a word that describes material,
that has no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire.
So then how has Facebookmanaged to grow so large without it?
I leave the reader with a question.
If the girl/guy of your dreams is on Facebook, and you are
playing Farmville with her/him. Who needs Pornography?
Facebook is about connections and trust between persons on
planet earth.
Person to person, without an intermediary, globally.
P2P – a ubiquitous publishing platform that has no need of
artificial imaginary stimulants.
References:
“Hey, let’s get an App Store”
“Though, with the iPhone OS 3.0 release, Apple has lifted
their limitations a bit and allowed adult content in the App Store;”
The Internet is lauded by many, hated by a few, but without
doubt has changed the lives of everyone connected to it.
It is therefore reasonable that the internet and it’s
underlying technologies occasionally become the target of geek humour.
The internet is abuzz today about the pigeon that could.
South African Internet users throttled by the limited pipe
supplied by SA Monopoly “Telkom SA” decided to look for alternatives in moving
their data around.
“The Unlimited faces great challenges in getting data
from its locations across KZN back to its central location for storage. These
are large files, and it was postulated that a pigeon could do this faster than
a normal landline could.
The
same amount of data will be sent on the landline and via the pigeon, on a
SD card ( 4 gigabytes)
The
race is from Howick to Hillcrest
The
Pigeon flys from Howick to Gillits, and then will be transported via car
to the finish site ( where the landline data will arrive)
The
day will be announced closer to the time
Birdseed
must not have any performance enhancing seeds within.
Data
is not to be compressed.”
The Pigeon's mission? Carry 4 GB of data between Howick and Hillcrest and get there ahead of the ADSL Data stream.
And here's the obligatory Google Youtube......
The Result?The
Pigeon (Winston) delivered the 4 GB in 2 hours, 6 minutes and 57 seconds.
Telkom SA ? Well (transfer speed wise) they were still going
49 hours later…….
Interestingly, this technology breakthrough was foreseen in
1990 with the introduction of RFC 1149. Which is replicated here for our
readers edification.
RFC1149
- Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia
Network Working GroupD.
Waitzman
Request for Comments: 1149BBN STC
1 April 1990
A Standard for
the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
Status of this Memo
This memo
describes an experimental method for the encapsulation of
IP datagrams in
avian carriers.This specification is
primarily
useful in
Metropolitan Area Networks.This is an
experimental, not
recommended
standard.Distribution of this memo is
unlimited.
Overview and Rational
Avian carriers
can provide high delay, low throughput, and low
altitude
service.The connection topology is
limited to a single
point-to-point
path for each carrier, used with standard carriers,
but many
carriers can be used without significant interference with
each other,
outside of early spring.This is because
of the 3D ether
space available
to the carriers, in contrast to the 1D ether used by
IEEE802.3.The carriers have an intrinsic collision
avoidance
system, which
increases availability.Unlike some
network
technologies,
such as packet radio, communication is not limited to
line-of-sight
distance.Connection oriented service is
available in
some cities,
usually based upon a central hub topology.
Frame Format
The IP datagram
is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in
hexadecimal,
with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff.
The scroll of
paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier.
A band of duct
tape is used to secure the datagram's edges.The
bandwidth is
limited to the leg length.The MTU is
variable, and
paradoxically,
generally increases with increased carrier age.A
typical MTU is
256 milligrams.Some datagram padding
may be needed.
Upon receipt,
the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the
datagram is
optically scanned into a electronically transmittable
form.
Discussion
Multiple types
of service can be provided with a prioritized pecking
order.An additional property is built-in worm
detection and
eradication.Because IP only
guarantees best effort delivery, loss
of a carrier can
be tolerated.With time, the carriers
are self-
regenerating.While broadcasting
is not specified, storms can cause
data loss.There is persistent delivery retry, until the
carrier
drops.Audit trails are automatically generated, and
can often be
found on logs
and cable trays.
Security Considerations
Security is not
generally a problem in normal operation, but special
measures must be
taken (such as data encryption) when avian carriers
are used in a
tactical environment.
Author's Address
David Waitzman
BBN Systems and
Technologies Corporation
Which of course HAD to be tested ……
Real-life implementation
On 28
April 2001 IPoAC was actually implemented by the Bergen
Linux user group. They sent nine packets over a distance of approximately five
kilometers (three miles), each carried by an individual pigeon and containing
one ping (ICMP Echo Request), and received four responses.
According to Wikipedia a perceptron is a type of artificial neural network.
“Perceptric” is made-up word to describe a person who creates or uses a neural network.
The Perceptric Blog is where business partners and associates in Perceptric Pty Limited post thoughts, ideas, and links to stimulate thought and accelerate the transfer of ideas.
Perceptric offers consulting services on matters relating to the commercialization of Intellectual Property and the impact of disruptive technologies on business. Our group of consulting professionals includes leading people in the legal, technology, HR and business fields.
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The Perceptric mission is to help companies and people exceed their expectations.
If you want to contact Perceptric to brief us on a problem or to find out which of our people would most suit your needs, please send an email to: chris at perceptric dot com
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