Ver. 2. July 18, 2005
DRAFT
– Comments would be welcomed
Comparative
Advantage
Some
Considerations Regarding the Future of Public Media[1]
By
David.Steinberg@houseofdavid.ca
1.
Democracy is Dependant on Information
An informed citizenry is essential in a democracy.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The
information of the people at large can alone make them safe."’[2]
In our 100+ channel TV world
it is hard to remember, that in the 1950s-1970s the everyone watched the same
few channels because that was all there was.
This had an advantage in that TV news etc created a common basis of
knowledge and experience which probably did build social cohesion and
consensus. It also had negative consequences –
“In a modern, technologically complex society, access to
the mass media is a necessary condition for a voice to contribute to the
national political debate. …”
“The political effects of mass communication are closely
linked with the tendencies toward conformity, apathy and political “silence”
which stem not so much from what is said as what is unsaid, from what communication
filters tacitly exclude from the daily order of public attention. Silence is …
the most effective agent for subliminal persuasion in mass communication, and
the most suitable instrument for a kind of negative homologisation of an
information-based public. The political
integration of information-based societies comes about far more through tacit
reduction in the complexity of the topics of political communication than
through any positive selection or discussion of them.”
Promise and
Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement - OECD - January 2004
Good,
investigative journalism is of great importance. Such journalism will include data, including interviews,
synthesis, conclusions, and possibly recommendations. Such journalism is presented on a range of
media including meetings, radio, TV, BLOGs[3], newspapers,
magazines and books. It is not unusual
for these to be used in combination eg. a website may contain the video or
audio file of an earlier broadcast wit an invitation to participated in a
threaded on-line discussion or, as is done by PBS, additional background
material related to a broadcast is provided on a website.
See
Models
of Democracy and Concepts of Communications by Jan van Dijk; Digital Democracy and Political
Systems by Martin Hagen; and, especially, Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere by John Keane all in Digital Democracy : Issues
of Theory and Practice -- by Kenneth L Hacker (Editor), Jan A G M van Dijk
(Editor)
NBC
could create Internet blogs
2. Impact of Life
Style
“Don't
think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many
of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information
should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf
Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources.
They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with
their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a
single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from
newsprint.
“The Post experience merely mirrors the
results of a September study (.pdf) by the
Online Publishers Association, which found that 18- to 34-year-olds are far
more apt to log on to the internet (46 percent) than watch TV (35 percent),
read a book (7 percent), turn on a radio (3 percent), read a newspaper (also 3
percent) or flip through a magazine (less than 1 percent).
“And when young people go online, they tend to browse for news in
much the same way they window-shop for jeans or sneakers: sampling a headline
here, a blog entry there, a snippet of a story there, until their news cravings
are satisfied.”
3. Impact of the
Internet
The
hypertext approach of the Web is similar to the way people laterally associate
ideas and is ideal for providing many links to context. It is
true that, as in books, the linkages chosen by the author limit the nature of
information linked to but the reader has instant access to Google which will
usually turn up masses of information that the author might not have chosen to
guide the reader to.
The
Internet has drastically changed the information and social context[4]
of society[5]
and production within which politics[6]
and information/news television must work[7] in the same
way as:
Using
the Internet, anyone can now get, from home access to a vast range of
information and views with little effort and anyone can put material on public
view expressing their own views[8].
“Feedback is the core of the democratic
potential of the Internet. No
information source before the Internet provided such scope for direct
responsiveness. Digital communications technologies break down the traditional
barrier between producer and consumer; broadcaster and audience. Citizens use
the Internet to become informed, but also to inform others. All information becomes susceptible to
contestation. Internet users share knowledge about issues that matter to them,
ranging from health to travel to recipes to household tips. Participants in these sites tend to be both
knowledge seekers and knowledge providers....”
Promise and
Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement - OECD - January
2004
The
main impacts of the Internet on the democratic process concern[9] –
“AN INFORMED PUBLIC[10]
Empirical
research on mass political knowledge in industrial democracies … has drawn heavily
on the ‘information cost’ perspective … to explain why the public is so poorly
informed. Because it takes time and energy to seek out, interpret, and remember
political information, it may be rational to free-ride on the civic
attentiveness of others. The political promise of the Internet is that it
significantly lowers the behavioral costs of finding, storing, and
communicating specific and personally relevant political information at
convenient, timely intervals.
The
literature reveals, however, that after controlling for education and political
interest, there is little evidence of an effect of Internet use on political
knowledge. Those who seek political information online are generally well
informed to begin with, politically oriented, and heavy users of other media…. At
present, the Internet supplements and complements rather than replaces
traditional sources of political information….
AN ENGAGED PUBLIC
The
economic and psychological dynamics of Web-based human communication, however,
are potentially distinct enough from those of traditional print and broadcast
news media that in time we may see evidence of an Internet effect. For example,
news sites often provide interactive links that encourage users to “send a copy
of this article to a friend or colleague.” The capacity for horizontal
interpersonal communication, to rebroadcast a news article with personal
commentary, enhances the capacity for discussion, engagement, and the two-step
flow that serves as the critical antidote to anomic mass communication
(Kornhauser 1968). Evolving third-voice technologies would permit users to
unilaterally convert every mass-medium Web site into an open public discussion
(Dibbell 1999). Discussion groups on the Web at present lack the selective,
highly edited character of letters to the editor and citizen op-eds. But though
they may not achieve the ideal of deliberative discourse envisioned by Habermas
(1981, Elster 1998), they would appear to be a step in that direction....
POLITICAL POLARIZATION
Perhaps
the most central question for sociological analysis of changing technical
structures of interpersonal and mass communication is the tension between
forces of social integration and polarization (Neuman 2000). Many fear that
the Internet will weaken the cultural center and “political commons” that
network television and metropolitan newspapers provided (Neuman 1991,
Hirsch 1978). Negroponte, for example, predicts that an artificially
intelligent Web-based DailyMe will select news and information based on the
predilections and prejudices of the individual cybercitizen and further
displace the cultural commons (Negroponte 1995).
Research
on earlier media, however, indicates that individuals tend to be aware of the
most popular cultural artifacts and to monitor the latest hot programs and
motion pictures (Neuman 1991). Ideologically inclined individuals do choose to
attend to media that reinforce their prejudices (e.g., conservatives listen to
conservatively oriented radio talk shows), but expose themselves as well to
opposing views (Freedman & Sears 1965, Frey 1986). The Net’s capacity for
anonymous communication may heighten the level of extremist and hate speech in
the early stages of diffusion. But institutions of self-regulation may emerge
to constrain such expression in cyberspace, as they have in non-electronic
public forums (Lessig 1999).
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
Web
proponents …. insist that the Internet will enhance the quality of political
discussion and the viability, meaningfulness, and diversity of the public
sphere by lowering the access barrier to meaningful public speech. No longer
is it necessary to own a newspaper or television station to participate: The
Web is a two-way medium, and every Internet receiver can be a publisher as
well.... It is clear that the Internet significantly lowers entry barriers
and other Downsian cost factors for participation in the electronic public
sphere. Bimber finds that many of the distortions of group discussion resulting
from dominant personalities and group dynamics are reproduced in cyberspace,
but he concludes that virtual political space (notably Usenet-style threaded
discussion groups) has its place as a significant supplement to, if not
replacement for, the face-to-face discussions of Habermas’ idealized nineteenth
century salon (Bimber 2000, Hill & Hughes 1998, Schneider 1996). Lowering
the economic costs to initiate and sustain an accessible political
voice—compare a teenager’s bedroom-based Web site to the cost of sustaining a
printed magazine or broadcasting facility—can lower access barriers for
minority voices, as well.
Skeptics
argue that the commercial incentives of advertising-based media may lead
ultimately to an Internet culturally indistinguishable from modern commercial
television (Davis 1998, Margolis & Resnick 1999, Rheingold 1993). This
debate is particularly interesting in the case of Web-based political
campaigning in the United States, where by 2000, most candidates had their own
Web sites, many with detailed issue and policy information unavailable through
traditional media (Schneider 2000b).Will such diverse sites attract sufficient
traffic to sustain themselves? Or will dominant commercial portals like AOL or
specialized startups like voter.com dominate attention, paying for
access to the public sphere through political advertising? As of this writing
the jury is out, but researchers are actively studying elite and mass behavior
(Schneider 2000a).”
An interesting
paper is E-Government and Democracy:Representation and Citizen
Engagement in the Information Age by Steven J. Clift.
This paper covers:
In his summary, Clift writes:
Leading governments, with democratic intent, are
incorporating information and communication technologies into their
e-government activities. This trend necessitates the establishment of outcomes
and goals to guide such efforts. By utilizing the best practices, technologies,
and strategies we will deepen democracy and ensure representation and citizen
engagement in the information age. It is upon this foundation that
opportunities for greater online engagement and deliberation among citizens and
their governments will demonstrate the value of information and communication
technologies in effective and responsive participatory democracy.
3. Role of Public
Media
How the public become informed,
and the role of public media, will vary with political structure, social
structure, technology etc..
The traditional argument
for public broadcasting, and more broadly public media, has been mainly based
of the concept of “market failure.[11]” This has been recently restated at length in Building public value:
Renewing the BBC for a
digital world and been attacked by David Elstein in Building
Public Value: a new definition of public service broadcasting?
Some public media is easily
justified and measured for impact. Thus,
if a public health department puts out a pamphlet on, say, colon cancer it is
relatively easy to:
The situation with publicly
supported broadcasting, web sites, discussion fora, film making etc. is much
more difficult. They must:
§
be
discussed within the new information context after establishing that, within
that context, there is still an important market failure;
§
determine
options on how the market failure should be addressed – the medium;
whether through regulation, subsidy or through one or more public funded media;
§
be
based on models of public funding and control that have been shown to work in
the real world[12].
Comparative
Advantage of the Various Media
(This is my first run at the subject)
|
Values |
Issue |
Live
Meetings |
Printed
Media |
Theatre |
Movie
Theatres |
Electronic
Media |
|||||||
|
|
|
|
Books |
Newspapers/magazines |
Major |
Minor and Amateur |
|
Radio[13] (digital
succeeding analogue) |
Television (digital
succeeding analogue) |
Electronic
paper-ink |
DVDs
and CDs (often
available free from libraries) |
e-mail,
Instant Messenger, Discussion Groups, BLOGS |
Internet
Video-Servers Using High Compression (e.g. MPEG[14])[15] |
|
Cultural[16] |
Classical
Performing Culture e.g. dance, theatre and opera |
Lectures
and discussion groups largely marginalized by electronic media. |
Specialized
books and magazines widely read |
Small
audience partly due to cost |
Small
audience |
little role |
Narrowcasting[17] enables a wide
range of programming[18]. Main strength
would be to introduce new talent and art works to public. Effective regulation will be important. |
Will start to take over book and magazine market |
Has take over market for pre-recorded films,
documentaries, operas etc. |
Discussion and reviews |
Possibly eventually take over role of DVD |
||
|
Innovative
Performing Culture – bringing
talent and audiences together to break new ground |
? |
no |
yes |
no |
yes |
Could enable new performers to offer their works to
wide audience as the Web now does for painters |
|||||||
|
Social
and community |
By enabling |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
yes |
Modest role |
Modest role |
yes |
yes |
yes |
||
|
Educational |
By offering
audiences of every age a world of formal and informal educational opportunity
in every medium |
NA |
yes |
Modest role |
no |
Modest role |
little role |
Narrowcasting enables a wide range of educational
programming. Effective regulation will
be important. |
yes |
yes |
Yes – likely to be of great importance |
||
|
Democratic |
Information
required for informed democratic discussion and decision - trusted and impartial news and information that helps
citizens make sense of the world and encourages them to engage with it. |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
Modest role |
discussion |
yes |
|
|
Open discussion of important issues |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
Modest role |
yes |
yes |
||
|
Consultation |
yes |
no |
no |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
Modest role |
yes |
Modest role |
||
|
Consensus forming |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
yes |
Modest role |
yes |
Modest role |
||
|
National Unity |
formation of Canadian Consciousness |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
Modest role |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Documentary Films* |
Can be used to stimulate discussion fora |
NA |
NA |
NA |
NA |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
Yes-likely to become main avenue of distribution
world-wide |
|
* Note on documentary films. It is hard to know
where to put documentary films within the above grid. Undoubtedly documentary films are an
important cultural product which, ideally, should have an educative impact which
should support the democratic process. In television and film documentaries, in contrast to
books and printed thought pieces, the medium itself tends to play on the
emotions while repressing critical thinking and limiting the “audience’s”
access to key contextual information as well as to competing views.
Documentaries shown in the cinema or on TV do not allow the necessarily passive
viewer to stop, review and rethink. However, documentaries
accessible via the Web, can be interrupted, repeated and linked to critical
reviews etc.
Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting
[1] Plural of
medium, a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment
[2] Quoted from THE
DECLINE AND FALL OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING
by David Barsamian, SOUTH END PRESS,
[3] A BLOG is a regularly
updated online journal of information and opinions. What sets blogs apart from
other online writing, is their dynamic nature (as opposed to static Web pages)
and their voice (style).
newspapers worldwide
have been—and seem destined to keep on—losing readers, and with them
advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Newspapers,
circulation fell by 5% in
Blogs, moreover, are but
one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes
available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and
contribute…. Photoblogs are becoming
common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting … lets both professionals and
amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to. …
The most popular
bloggers now get as much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most
newspapers…. True, many thrive on
debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media.
In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But
there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting.
Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day,
often includes eyewitness accounts from people in
“The basic notion is
that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that,
and that this will result in an emerging global conversation”….
The tone in these new
media is radically different…. For
today's digital natives… it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, they expect
to be informed as part of an online dialogue….
… it remains uncertain
what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news
providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What
is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it
and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news
provider to the audience itself. …
Quoted from The
future of journalism-Yesterday's papers, the Economist , April 21, 2005
[4] From New Currents in Politics and Policy in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY:
POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and
Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998
Rapid technological innovation in the field of
informatics has contributed to tile seismic shifts altering our intellectual
foundations, political institutions and processes, and local, national, and
international economies…. The process of technological innovation can be
characterized by conflict, agenda-setting, and consensus-building. At every
level of politics, at stake is the allocation of a new power resource with the
potential to redefine the winners and the losers in the wired world….
Harnessing our technological capabilities to advance human progress depends on
political leadership and policy acumen; the willingness to rethink our
institutions and processes with more than narrowly defined notions of
efficiency in mind; the character and pervasiveness of our collective values
and aspirations vis-a-vis those assumptions, values, and priorities….
However sophisticated a system may be,
technological change offers no easy 'solution' to alleviate complex social and
political problems or ameliorate sociopolitical and economic cleavages….
While the potential of new telecommunities has
often been extolled, less consideration is given to the negative temporal
implications of borderless communication. For example, the new instantaneous
communicative environment may imperil democratic deliberation. Taylor and
Saarinen caution: 'if politics is the art of negotiation, speed is the death of
the political. Negotiation takes time. . . negotiation and deliberate decision
become impossible. Speed privileges certainty and assertion. . . . It is not
possible to slow down long enough to allow time for uncertainty and questions.'
There is potential for the technology to facilitate communication between
individuals dispersed across geographical and temporal boundaries; however, the
quality of the dialogue within and between these discussion groups merits
serious examination before we can state that the technology exposes individuals
to a broad diversity of perspectives, fosters rational, constructive discourse,
generates an exchange that stimulates greater understanding, and cultivates
consensus between diverse and/or opposing interests. In the 'global village' we
may be less-not more-communicatively competent. In the Information Era, we may
possess a more impoverished, not a more enhanced, understanding of world
issues, events, and ideas….
The
new technologies are creating new opportunities and social forces that are
shifting the centre of political gravity away from states towards corporations,
non-governmental organizations, and activists. States remain an important
organizing framework for contemporary politics, but the new technologies are
decentralizing power to a variety of non-territorial domains. He explores this
argument through an analysis of four areas: transnational production, global
finance, civil society networks, and state-security practices.
[5] From Altered Worlds: Social Forces in the Hypermedia Environment
by Ronald J. Deibert in DIGITAL
DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J.
Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998
The result of this convergence between the
hypermedia environment and the transnationalization of production is the rapid
emergence of a much more complex and cross-cutting non-territorial organization
of production. Not only are new corporate structures emerging that are less
hierarchical and more 'weblike', but firms all over the planet are now embedded
in a global 'networked' environment composed of overlapping and complex
transnational production arrangements ranging from formal equity-sharing or
co-production arrangements to informal alliances and joint ventures. Although
we are still far from a completely 'borderless' economy, the changes that have
already occurred are significant and growing, suggesting important consequences
for the architecture of political authority….
The changes to global production and finance …
above have undermined the effective power of state regulatory systems within
territorial-political jurisdictions…. Governments at all levels-provincial,
state, and regional-now engage in competitive deregulatory and re-regulatory
'locational tournaments' designed to attract global investment.
The second consequence has been the creation and
emergence of multiple and overlapping layers of authority designed to respond
to and govern globalizing economic forces. Most states now find themselves
enmeshed in an ever-widening network of informal and formal international
institutions, regimes, organizations, and regional trading blocs that have
arisen in reaction to the transnationalization of production and finance.…
A third set of social forces thriving in the
hypermedia environment is transnational social movements with multiple,
overlapping, and often competing interests. These new movements represent the
emergence of … a 'global civil society': that is, transnationally organized
political networks and interest groups largely autonomous from anyone state's
control. In ways that are similar to the
transnationalization of production and finance … the rise of a global civil
society presents fundamental challenges to the modern world order paradigm by
diffusing a dense network of social and interest group activities across
territorial-political boundaries. Although hypermedia do not generate these new
social movements, they do create a communications environment in which such
activities flourish dramatically. As computer networks have grown,
transnational social movements have exploded, forming complex
non-territorial-based links that defy the organization of political authority
in the modern world order.
To some extent, there have always been social
movements throughout modernity whose interests transcend political boundaries.
A good example … is the nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaign.... These
movements continued to grow such that by the 1980s they were becoming a common
feature of the world political landscape. …
The movements that together comprise this emerging
global civil society are not homogeneous in their orientation or organization,
but rather consist of scores of 'heteronomous' networks of political
associations. The causes around which these movements are formed are equally
varied….
The majority of these transnational social
movements do not operate through the traditional lobbying procedures and
political channels of participation as defined by state structures. Most of them cannot be characterized as
political parties campaigning for government office. Indeed, their very
importance as a challenge to the modern world order paradigm lies in their
willingness to sidestep traditional political structures and sovereign
boundaries 'to address international problems, and to reflect a global
sensitivity…. The rise in the visibility and density of these transnational
social movements cannot be divorced from the communications technologies that
have empowered them. As Spiro notes, 'this explosion in nongovernmental
activity reflects the dramatically heightened permeability of national borders
and improvements in communications that have allowed territorially dispersed
individuals to develop common agendas and objectives at the international
level.'[5]
Although telephones and faxes have long been staples for international
co-ordination, computer networks-in particular, the Internet-have vastly
transformed the scope and potential of these transnational movements.…
Of course, not all of these transnational social
forces are working with the same goals in mind, and not all can be said to be
working to the betterment of the human condition: such technologies have also
facilitated the rise of transborder criminal activities, including pornographic
distribution systems, terrorist activities, and the money-laundering schemes of
organized crime. One of the more effective transnational social movements in
exploiting hypermedia has been the neo-Nazi movement....
Less important (for the purposes of this chapter)
than the values of these social movements, however, is the extent to which
their interests are defined and their actions organized largely without respect
to sovereign-territorial boundaries. By moving around and through political boundaries
to influence populations, they undermine states' monopoly of legitimate
authority over a territorially defined populace, which is one of the central
ideas of sovereignty.[5]….'
The monopoly claims of territorial states over legitimate authority, in other
words, are increasingly challenged by global civil society networks that
buttress their actions on wider, universalist aspirations.[5]…
What do these changes mean for the character of an emerging
post-modem world order? Probably the most significant is the way considerable
social, political, and economic practices are increasingly decoupling or
'unbundling' from sovereign-territorial spaces. In many respects, a 'space of
flows' is coming to dominate and transcend a 'space of places' as the defining
characteristic of postmodern world order. Certainly this describes the
organization of the global economy, not only with respect to the
transnationalization of production but particularly with respect to global
financial trading activities. It also accurately portrays the interactions of
the many heteronomous transnational social movements now operating through the
global non-territorial spaces of computer networks.
In fact, these movements may be but one
manifestation of a larger 'demassification' of group identities fuelled by the
hypermedia environment. The two-way, interactive nature of computer networks
that has favoured transnational social movements is also contributing to a
flourishing of multiple and overlapping transnational 'niche' or 'virtual'
communities-what Howard Rheingold has aptly called an 'ecosystem of
subcultures'. The values of these niche communities are multiple and
contradictory and reflect widely varying aspirations, from religious
fundamentalist groups to ethnic diasporas, and from functionally defined
interest groups to terrorist organizations. What is perhaps the most
significant aspect of these communities, however, is the extent to which they
are not bound by traditional notions of territory or place as prerequisites for
membership-an orientation that in many respects mirrors the decoupling or
unbundling of economic and interest group practices described above.
Amid
these wider changes, the purpose and forms of states themselves are being
transformed…. this transformation is
that states are evolving from 'container' to 'transmission-belt' organizations
designed to facilitate flows of information and capital and to provide an
interface between multiple and overlapping layers of authority. While there is
enough cultural and historical diversity among states to ensure a variety of
separate trajectories within this process, nearly all states have taken similar
liberalizing measures primarily in response to the structural pressures of
global market forces. With the flourishing of both transnational corporate
interests and transnational social movements, the locus of authority, once
monopolized by sovereign states, has been disaggregated and diffused to a much
wider domain-to what Rosenau calls 'diverse subnational and supranational
sovereignty-free actors'. A quasi-feudal, multicentric system is emerging as
the architecture of the post-modern world order
[6] From Digital Democracy or
Politics on a Microchip by Edwin R. Black in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: POLICY
AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie
A. Pal, OUP 1998
Information and communication technologies are changing more
than just national governments. City councils, legislative assemblies,
provincial governments, and public regulatory authorities are all acting
differently because of changes in the business of public collection,
manipulation, and computerized manufacturing of 'facts' about our affairs. What
is involved goes far beyond fancy record-keeping and data bank matching. It
means a rapid evolution in some of the most important aspects of the state: the
political legitimacy of representative government versus 'direct democracy';
§
the ways in which the opinions of interest groupings and
various sectors of the voting public are determined and assessed;
§
the operation of new biases or sets of values in what
appears to be the mechanics of information handling;
§
the importance assigned in budgetary battles to quantified
approaches to developing and delivering 'soft services';
§
changing bureaucratic subcultures that deal with the
framing, phrasing, and weighting of policy choices.
In short, the ever-spreading use of digital information technologies
is transforming both how we are governed and the institutions of that
governance. Whether these developments are for the better remains to be
demonstrated….
Those with interests in government and politics should keep
an eye on at least two sets of phenomena. The first is the most likely to be
neglected: the rapid changes in our political institutions, processes, and
subcultures set in motion by the exploitation of information technologies in
all phases of political life. No communication system can exist shorn of power,
purpose, or organization. Although seldom recognized because of their spurious
claim to scientific neutrality, information and communication technologies
(ICT) are as subject to social values and partisan biases as the 'worst' state
or provincial highway proposal. More likely to attract a student's attention-as
demonstrated by the work in this book-are the second sorts of phenomena: the
public policy issues. These relate to automation and employment, public access
to public information, law and public morality, the health or survival of a
host of trades and industries, the financial and educational spheres, and,
ultimately, to questions of national security
Particular, and often new, sets of social biases operate at
all these levels. Information specialists and senior government officials will
protest in vain; it is difficult for any student of society to agree that
processing systems in use on today's scale could be neutral in their effects on
either policy or administration. Not only would that be difficult to believe,
it would be impossible in practice….
Part of the problem in analysing and adjusting to enormous
technological changes in the creation, manipulation, and transmission of data
is that we scarcely understand the nature of information and its social role.
This causes major problems for policy-makers because information is not easily
quantified and assigned numerical weights. More difficult to grasp are the
distinctions to be drawn among data, information, meaning, and knowledge. The
old catchphrase tells us 'knowledge is power'. The possessor of knowledge,
however, unlike the owners of many commodities, does not necessarily lose value
by sharing the information or giving it away. Today the question is not so much
who possesses particular information as it is a question of who has access to
certain stores of data and who has the skills to turn it into exploitable
knowledge. For all of the egalitarian impulses allegedly inherent in some
conceptions of digital democracy, nobody has yet shown how these qualities will
do anything other than to make the badly-off even worse off in comparison to
the better-educated….
Bureaucratic and ministerial power resources continue to
expand, thanks largely to lCT. Does that leave much room for the people's
elected representatives to improve significant public control over our
government in between elections? The answer is no, not if past Canadian and
American experience is 'any guide at all. If present trends go very far-and
they will if there is not more examination of the issues presented here in Digital
Democracy-the computerization of government could mean the end of
meaningful public interest in representative government and its replacement by
a plebiscitarian dictatorship under the guise of direct democracy. The triumph
of converging information technologies married to digitized entertainment
systems is busy stripping representative resentative legislatures of their last
shreds of dignity and threatening all governments in their attempts to shape
popular culture.
[7] From Technologies of Abstraction Cyberdemocracy and the Changing
Communications Landscape by Michael R. Ogden in DIGITAL
DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J.
Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998
If we are to believe the government hype, then life
'in cyberspace. . . will shape up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have
wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and the commitment to
pluralism, diversity, and community' In
this vision of cyberspace, people can live (physically) almost anywhere they
want without forgoing opportunities of association or useful and fulfilling
employment by 'telecommuting' …. The best 'schools' (such as they would exist
in cyberspace), teachers, courses, and vast storehouses of information would be
available to all students without regard to geography, distance, resources, or
disability This promotes a vision of education as a mechanism of encouraging
individual student exploration, interaction, discovery, and growth with the
instructor acting as mentor and guide.
Furthermore, in the new global economy, where
knowledge is the key resource-and thus, the key to prosperity-the principle of
lifelong learning becomes essential for ensuring competitiveness. Workers will
begin to demand access to the widest possible variety of learning opportunities
and tools, pushing the integration of computer-based technology and learning
and creating business opportunities in course-ware development, course
delivery, and software applications. Likewise, services that would improve
health care and respond to other important social needs would all be available
'on-line' without having to wait 'in-line' whenever and wherever one needs
them. Because of the free flow of information across local, state, regional,
and national boundaries, access to government information at all levels becomes
a 'right' of all citizens in the facilitation of their informed participation
in the democratic process at whichever level they so choose. As well,
businesses would use the network to develop new ideas and new modes of
interactive use, or use the network as a way to restructure themselves, improve
communications, share ideas more effectively, and get closer to their
customers. Small manufacturers could get orders from all over the world
electronically, and with detailed specifications in a form that the machines
could use to produce the items.
Individuals would also have access to movies-on-demand and all the hottest
video games, and could do their banking and shopping from the comfort of their
own homes whenever they chose….
Thus, individuals of all age groups, income levels,
ethnic backgrounds, and educational attainment are able to use this equipment,
if given proper training and support, in the context of activities that serve
their needs and capture their interest. One of the compelling aspects of this
vision is 'interactivity', If we see the (Internet) … as a meeting place, then
we will recognize that the purpose of the information superhighway is to bring
people together, to foster community Access would therefore be open to everyone
and interaction would be encouraged. This type of connectivity will further
allow users to participate actively in communities of interest, not in
'virtual' isolation from each other, but as an overlay to real-life
communities.
The important issues will be social, not technical:
How do people interact? What kind of facilities are needed to support
co-operation and group work? How can people with similar interests find one
another? How are the benefits and costs of the system shared equitably? The
communication landscape of this scenario is seen as always growing, adapting,
and changing in response to new ideas and initiatives. Governance is not so
much about imposing rigid control as building an environment that fosters
co-operation and trust….
Will the information superhighway be decentralized,
inexpensive, and open? Will it facilitate grassroots production and
distribution? Or will it permit the media giants to establish a one-way flow of
home shopping and movies-on-demand?
… The same technology that is able to identify and
link citizens and political institutions to facilitate the conduct of direct
democracy-as well as other forms of legitimate constituent participation in the
democratic process-could also, if not formulated correctly, facilitate
nationwide identification systems and increased governmental surveillance..
In the end, however, 'The’ question is not whether
the transformation to instant public feedback through electronics is good or
bad, or politically desirable or undesirable. Like a force of nature, it is
simply the way our political system is heading. The people are [already] being
asked to give their own judgment before major governmental decisions are made;
political parties and special interest groups employ a multitude of pollsters
for just this purpose....
Herein lies the dark lining to the silver cloud of
cyberdemocracy; direct democracy via sophisticated information technology could
also bring with it the inevitable tendency to pressure political leaders to
respond quickly-perhaps too quickly-to every impulsive ripple of public opinion
and hold the nation hostage to the tyranny of the majority Such a tendency
could fundamentally alter the conduct of government and perhaps even threaten
some of our most cherished constitutional protections…. So far, the information revolution has been
largely waged by highly educated and informed advocates, people who often have
tremendous resources at their disposal. These advocates have spoken quite well
on behalf of their own needs; some have even attempted to speak to the needs of
the 'information-poor'. But the 'information-rich', however well-meaning, have
largely determined and prioritized the issues of the information revolution and
the emerging cyberdemocracy according to their own visions and realities….
Within the US, the problem of melding old but still
valid concepts of constitutional rights with new and rapidly evolving
technologies is, perhaps, one of the most profound challenges to the 'common
good' yet faced by our society. The meaning of freedom, structures of
self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for
co-operation, sense of community, and nature of progress will each need to be
redefined….
Information technology provides us with the key to
restructuring our governing system, simultaneously permitting more distribution
and new concentration of power. The result may be more equality and more
inequality, more cohesion and more splintering, more cooperation and more
competition, more democracy and less.
[9] See also E-Government
and Democracy http://publicus.net/e-government/
; Trust, Civic
Engagement, and the Internet
by Eric M. Uslaner http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/vf_pew_internet_trust_paper.pdf
[10] See also
TABLOIDS, TALK
RADIO, and the FUTURE OF NEWS: Technology's
Impact on Journalism by Annenberg
Senior Fellow Ellen Hume http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/tabloids/default.htm
http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/tabloids/tabloids09.htm
Radio
and Television News Directors Foundation – Future of News http://www.rtnda.org/resources/future.shtml
Abandoning the News: What's the future of the news business? This report to Carnegie Corporation of
“The dramatic shift in how young people access the news
raises a question about how democracy and the flow of information will interact
in the years ahead. Not only is a large segment of the population moving away
from traditional news institutions, but there has also been an explosion of
alternative news sources. Some have been assembled by traditional news
organizations delivering information in print, on television and on the radio
as well as via the Internet and mobile devices. Others include the thousands of
blogs created by journalists, activists and citizens at large.”
Use
Of Sources For News (PowerPoint) http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/AbandoningTheNews.ppt
[11] As
stated in MADE POSSIBLE BY: The
Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States by JAMES LEDBETTER, VERSO, 1997
Excepting the broadsides launched by a few
professional ideologues, American public television is rarely considered part
of a political philosophy; most fans of Barney or This Old House would
be hard pressed to discern an ideology behind their favorite shows. Still, an
archaeological dig to PBS's roots unearths the 1967 report of the Carnegie
Commission, Public
Television: A Program For Action. This blueprint for American's public
broadcasting networks is a classic document of the Great Society. The report
was not officially issued by the Johnson administration, and was not
specifically designed to improve the lives of the poor or elderly. But barely
hidden in its bureaucratic plan is the seemingly indestructible optimism that
marked the American public sector of the 1960s. It is a quiet manifesto,
expressing the belief that government action and technology can and should be
catalysts for perfecting the human spirit.
"Public Television," the Commission report
declared simply in its introduction, "includes all that is of human
interest and importance which is not at the moment appropriate or available for
support by advertising."! In a more expansive section entitled
"Fulfilling the Promise," the Commission laid bare its grand belief
that public television could transform the airwaves from what FCC commissioner
Newton Minow had, just a few years earlier, dubbed "a vast wasteland"
into a tool for enlightenment. "Public Television programming can deepen a
sense of community in local life. . . . It should bring into the home meetings,
now generally untelevised, where major public decisions are hammered out, and
occasions where people of the community express their hopes, their protests,
their enthusiasms, their will. It should provide a voice for groups in the
community that may otherwise be unheard."
As if the community mission were not broad enough,
the Commission believed, along with Marshall McLuhan and the trendier
communications theorists of the 1960s, that the technology of television could
transform the planet into a global village (provided that the technology was
guided by the proper, government-funded hands). The Commission's international
rhetoric was sweeping: "Through Public Television programs, and through
advances in the technology of communication, Americans should have rapidly
increasing opportunities for greater insight into the nature of other nations
and cultures, for a clearer understanding of struggles and settlements between
nations, for a view far beyond our own borders into the ways of the rest of the
world."
… The existence of a government regulatory agency is
an acknowledgment sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit-that the free market
alone is incapable of achieving certain social goods (such as a clean
environment or safety in the workplace). The Carnegie Commission report, and
the initial federal funding for public broadcasting, constituted a much rarer American
observation; namely, that the media market alone is incapable of achieving
certain cultural goods.
The Carnegie commissioners were candid on this point.
Dr. Hyman Goldin, a 20 year FCC veteran and the Commission's executive
secretary, concluded that commercial broadcasting's cutthroat competition for
viewers was the culprit that limited what could be put on the air. "A
public affairs program or a news analysis sometimes will deteriorate as it
passes through the various stages of production," wrote Goldin,
"because the producer is seeking desperately for some device to increase
its rating. . . . In the end, commercial television remains true to its own
purposes. It permits itself to be distracted as little as possible from its
prime goal of maximizing audience."
The Commission was echoing a sentiment widely held
among the country's opinion-makers: Americans were poorly informed, in
measurable part because commercial television made them that way. In an
influential March 1967 New York Times Magazine article, "A Program
for Public Television," veteran Times editor Lester Markel-who
himself hosted a weekly educational television program complained that
"the state of the
Here again, ratings-driven decisions were to
blame.... Thus, one tenet of the Carnegie report was that public broadcasting
had to be insulated from commercial forces in order to achieve its ideals. This
implied at least some government funding-an unsurprising conclusion, since most
industrialized nations already had taxpayer-funded broadcasting agencies. …
The leading communications authorities of the day
told Congress they were standing on the edge of a historical era….
Taxpayer-funded public broadcasting represented a
pinnacle of what historian Godfrey Hodgson has called the reigning
"liberal consensus" of postwar
The position conservatives developed in later
years-namely, that regardless of public broadcasting's content, government has
no business subsidizing an industry best developed by the private sector-was
little in evidence, even among conservatives….
In April 1967, the Ford Foundation formally
petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to construct a satellite
system for public television's interconnection. The Foundation's plan may have
been a rather dry one about little-understood science, but it was imbued with
the rhetoric of public service, and-like its Carnegie counterpart-presented
public broadcasting almost as a moral imperative. Noncommercial television,
insisted the Foundation, "has unlimited potential, for human welfare and
for the quality of American life."
Indeed, said Friendly and Bundy and their allies, "nothing is more needed-for television itself as well as for the country-than a first-rate national non-commercial service."
[12] The
American model is particularly problematic. As stated in MADE POSSIBLE BY: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States by JAMES LEDBETTER, VERSO, 1997
Despite 30 years of debate and promises, a variety of
experiments, and more commission reports than any mortal could digest, American
public broadcasting lacks any systematic, long-term way to pay for itself. So
much of public broadcasting's internal bickering and inefficiency grows out of
the endless struggle for money; if funding were adequate and reliable, goes the
argument, many-perhaps most-of the system's problems would evaporate.
To bolster this case, advocates point to the far
greater levels of government support in other industrialized nations. According
to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in 1993 the national government of
Japan spent $32.02 per citizen on public television, Canada spent $31.05 per
citizen, and Great Britain $ 38.99-and the U.S. federal government just $1.09…. The sobering reality, however, is that if the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its nationwide affiliates were funded
at three or four times current levels-a political pipe dream-the system would
still be hobbled by a host of contradictions that public broadcasting's
chieftains have refused for decades to resolve...
Most of the difficulties revolve around the concept
of "public" broadcasting, an adept, stirring term that was never
precisely defined, and therefore attracted factions of supporters with
conflicting interpretations. For example: in order to serve the
population-which has invested trust, airwave resources, and taxpayer dollars-a
public broadcasting system must try to reach as many viewers as it can. It may
not be necessary to maximize audiences for every single program, but clearly
public broadcasting must be viewed by a reasonable portion of the nation's
audience. At the same time, public broadcasting must resist or surmount
commercial and dumbing-down pressures that inevitably accompany efforts to attract
large audiences. Willard Rowland, a onetime PBS researcher who is also one of
the system's most incisive critics, has succinctly labeled this dilemma the
"contradiction of popularity."…
There is ample evidence, however, that in seeking to
serve these millions of viewers and listeners-and secure their donations-PBS
and NPR programming is moving further and further from the goals laid out by
its founders. This is not merely a complaint from outside critics; it is an
idea widely held by people within public broadcasting. Having collected
testimony from dozens of station and program managers before authorizing the
1988 public broadcasting bill, Congress voiced its concern about PBS's
programming drift: "Some public television stations increasingly are turning
away from traditional public, educational or informational programming and
broadcasting....” During the late' 80s and early '90s, the
fastest-growing program on public television was reruns of The
The question of public participation is equally
vexing. Is the "public" in public broadcasting mere rhetoric, meant
simply to mark a distinction from commercial television-or should the public
have an active role in public broadcasting, one that transcends paying taxes
and writing checks? Over the years, this question has been answered in various
ways. Early experiments-such as the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL)
described in chapter 2-interpreted "public" liberally.
For some episodes, for example, PBL brought
members of the public into studios for moderated debates over timely
issues.... today-despite a public deemed
to be far more media-sophisticated-PBS allows the general public no comparable
was to influence content. The system's early effort at institutionalizing
public participation-the Advisory Council of National Organizations (ACNO), an
umbrella group of unions, advocacy, and civic groups-has been disbanded (see
chapter 7)…. The decline of any
mechanism for public involvement means that today "the public" appears
rarely on public television …. the
commercial broadcast 60 Minutes exhibits a greater dedication to
interacting with the public than does The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. …
The Carnegie commissioners were insistent that public
television should "deepen a sense of community in local life," and
should be a forum "where people of the community express their hopes,
their protests, their enthusiasms and their will.,, This role grew naturally
out of public television's educational roots…. In the' 80s and '90s, however, a
number of powerful forces within the public television bureaucracy have leaned
on stations to move toward a more uniform schedule. PBS has recently
implemented a so-called common carriage feed, whereby stations agree to show
the national schedule on the same night-which benefits big underwriters who
crave effective nationwide promotion. Consequently, locally based programming
stands little chance of being picked up for system-wide distribution, an
increasingly important revenue source for many stations.
The unacceptable but inevitable result is that some
of the nation's largest cities have virtually no public television devoted to
what goes on in their own backyards…. Far from supplementing commercial
television's skimpy community news offerings, WNET actually trails far behind….
rather than provide an outlet for New York's four million blacks and Latinos,
WNET lazily rebroadcasts Visiones and Positively Black-programs picked
up from New York City's NBC affiliate. Critic Marvin Kitman, who has tracked
decades of public television on WNET, told an interviewer in 1993: "This
station has totally abdicated its role as a local television
outlet."… Large stations such as
This book focuses on the interplay between American
politics and the public broadcasting world, in the belief that pressure from
Congress, the White House, and a few special interest groups plays a much
greater role in shaping and determining the public broadcasting schedule than
is generally recognized. …. throughout the 30-year history of public
broadcasting, its taxpayer subsidy has repeatedly been used as a club with
which to clobber that very commitment. Like a dog that has learned to flinch at
the mere pantomime of the master's lashing, public broadcasters know to avoid
topics and methods of criticism that might bring down the hand of rebuke. In
those few instances when explicit threats are made to remove funding based on
unpopular content-such as Dole's 1994 Senate attack on NPR for commissioning
commentaries from a journalist convicted of killing a police officer-public
broadcasters generally back down.
Such timidity has not always been the norm: it is
learned behavior, based on survival instincts…. The first great wave of
retrenchment followed Richard Nixon's public and private war on perceived
enemies in PBS; the system responded by dramatically slashing the amount of
airtime devoted to critical assessments of sitting presidents and Congresses.
Hence, today the best way to get a full-length documentary about a
presidential-related topic on PBS is to produce one on a president who has not
been in office for 20 years….
(Commentators) with more sweeping, damning criticisms-from any political
perspective-will simply not be invited to appear. In this way, public
broadcasting's government subsidy functions like hush money to protect powerful
incumbents.
Another method of political influence-the specialty
of Democrats such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton-is to voice support for
public broadcasting as a way of controlling and defining it for political gain.
…
Another significant area where public broadcasting
looks increasingly like its commercial counterpart is business journalism. At
one time, public television's national business programming-which includes the
half-hour Nightly Business Report, and the weekly Wall Street Week in
Review and Adam Smith's Money World might have been justified by
arguing that televised business news was a rare commodity.
But the 1980s and '90s witnessed an unprecedented
explosion in this category, catapulting televised business and financial news
into what is surely its Golden Age…. By 1996, it was simply preposterous to
argue that there could be a significant number of viewers who wanted stock and
bond updates and reports on mergers and acquisitions who had not figured out a
way to get them before the Nightly Business Report came on public
television. Suggestions from labor and consumer advocates that PBS could
produce distinctive business programming by focusing on the lives of working
people rather than the portfolios of investors have been ignored.
…. With cable due soon to reach nearly every American
household and to expand, as most predict, to either hundreds of channels or an
individually tailored CD-ROM or "push technology" format, it is
nearly impossible to see what makes PBS's programming unique-or even necessary.
The televisionaries who conceived of the need and
role for public broadcasting did not foresee how a multichannel cable
environment would alter television content and the advertising base that
supports it. In the Big Three network environment of the 1960s, it seemed
eminently logical to assume that corporate television sponsors would never be
satisfied by the thin audiences attracted to offbeat or highbrow fare. But by
scattering audiences to dozens of channels, by offering low-cost saturation
advertising-and, most importantly, by charging subscription rates that few in
the' 60s would have dreamed possible-cable television's "narrowcasting"
has succeeded in forging a commercial foundation that supports a great deal of
PBS-type programming, even where the number of viewers is too small for A. C.
Nielsen to care to measure…. cable's growth has robbed public television of one
of its most powerful rationales. It is one thing to argue that PBS programming
provides a unique service to poorer or remote populations unserved by cable; it
is quite another to say that PBS should be satisfied with simply duplicating,
in content and in form, benign programming that most American television
viewers already watch elsewhere.
The melding of commercial and public broadcasting
priorities is not schizophrenia, or some random breakdown of public broadcasting's
identity. It is a logical result of the increasing, now dominant use of public
broadcasting as a marketing and promotional outlet. As public television relies
more and more on corporate underwriting and an array of commercial gimmicks for
its funding, its programming approach-even its on-screen talent-will look more
and more like those of commercial networks. (Public radio, as I argue in
chapter 6, while subject to precisely the same forces, behaves somewhat
differently.) Today, corporate underwriting represents more than 16 percent of
PBS's overall budget-up from 10 percent a decade ago-and 27 percent of its
national programming costs. Though that may appear to be far from a controlling
interest, there are virtually no programs on the PBS dial that are not in some
way beholden to private, commercial firms.
Public broadcasters, quite naturally, perceive
underwriting as an essential form of support. It is also, however, an
inevitable censor. There are perspectives on certain topics-including gays and
lesbians, American foreign policy, abortion, and the environment-that cannot be
aired on national television without provoking a peculiarly American firestorm
of criticism. The commercial networks, whose advertising lifeline almost
automatically seeks in advance to avoid such controversy, learned back in the
1950s that the best way to prevent such flak was to sharply curtail the
programming that makes it to the nation's living room. Networks enforce
genres-soap operas, situation comedies, game shows, half-hour newscasts-because
both advertiser and audience have signed an implied consent decree to not be
offended by … what is broadcast within those boundaries…. Commercial
television's self-imposed straitjacket is the primary reason why public
television was founded. Few would have predicted that public television would,
a quarter-century into its existence, have tailored a distinctive, but equally
bland, straitjacket of its own. Thirty years into the experiment of public
television finds a typical evening that draws from depressingly few genres:
largely duplicative news and business programming, aging imported British drama
or mystery, nature and science programming often indistinguishable from that
shown elsewhere, and arts programming that usually deviates little from the
tastes of the local elite.
There are many observations to be made about such
programs, but they share either the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary
political controversy, the kind that would bring trouble for powerful patrons.
Where, as Raymond Williams asked of American public television back in the
'70s, are the documentaries? With the genre essentially extinct on commercial
television, documentaries are clearly an area where public broadcasting could
distinguish itself. And if the medium is to provide a sustained, intelligent,
critical look at American society-as its founders certainly intended-it must
examine the actions and faults of
[13] Radio
listened to in cars is a particular potent vehicle for community information,
news synthesis and interviews etc.
[14] The latest iteration of the Moving Picture Expert Group's standard,
MPEG-4 reduces the bandwidth requirements to as little as 40 kilobits per
second—some 50 times leaner than MPEG-2—while preserving clarity. At higher bit
rates, MPEG-4 manages near-DVD quality. MPEG-4 incorporates 23 different
mathematical profiles. These enable users to adapt its algorithms to operate on
a variety of devices, including pocket PCs and set-top boxes.
[15] Video
compression technology has now reached a stage where very high quality film can
be streamed to the home from anywhere on the Internet via fast (DSL or cable
modem – now 50% of subscribers in North America) internet connections which are
now possessed by a major and fast growing section of the Canadian and world
public. This enables individuals to set up a video server and give away
or rent movies etc. It is the dream of narrow-casting. Soon you
will be able to view Hebrew, or Malayam movies and news reports in your home
world-wide.
[16] Digital Technology and
Cultural Policy by Kieran Healy,
http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/cul_tech_and_cultural_policy.pdf
[17] CATV term
distinguishing cable from broadcasting, it describes the function of distributing
a range of TV channels or programs designed for minority interests rather than
mass appeal. www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/jton.htm