Do we want all roads across cyberspace to be private toll roads?
June 12th, 2005Its funny when you are reading an article here, a book there, a post over there when suddenly an idea seems to shape in your head and then you feel you have to pursue that thought in ernest to understand what it means.
It started with reading about the conflict between Dinah Neff – Chief Information Officer at Philedelphia’s city government and local businesses that are strongly opposing her initiative to build a 135 mile square wireless broadband network.
As the Financial Times reported on June 3 2005
If she is successful, the city… will become North America’s first municipality to offer broadband internet access as a public service to all residents
No wonder those big-business hyper-commercial big-dollar boys are having convulsions and attacking ms Neff in her quest to do the right thing. Her desire is to make sure that as we move inexorably towards a digital world – certain groups of people are not left in the prehistoric analogue one.
America would end up dividing itself again, between rich and poor, and those living in the digital world and those that do not. They would become analogue refugees.
And this gets us into the the heart of what this is all about. CONTROL of the media.
Robery McChesney, who wrote The problem of the media says in his preface
The first myth is that media do not matter that much – that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it. In fact, media are a social force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces. These are complex relationships, often difficult to disintangle, because media are so interwoven into the fabric of our lives
Chesney goes onto say that big business is standing firmly in the path of the ordinary joe to make a difference
The point of this claim is patently ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations
And those big media corporations are currently bending out of shape, as media fragments, as trust in big media has eroded and the rise of the blogosphere as revolutionised the notion of the collective power of the people, and the authentic voice of the individual.
For example, on May 31 in the Financial Times ran an article about CNN and the future of news broadcasting, it painted a bleak picture for some of CNN’s terrestrial rivals, ABC and CBS. Declining audiences may soon drive the networks ABC and CBS to consider consolidating their news gathering activities with CNN. It is a real world example which supports a recent Deloitte report on the future of the TV industry
Jeff Jarvis in a wonderfully researched post had a little stat attack on the problems big media is having.
* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole
And CNN, once lead by the charasmatic Ted Turner is now owned by corporate behomoth – Time Warner. Who certainly are not interested in the will of the people – only shareholder return. Its not their fault – its the system.
So back to ms Neff – unkowingly perhaps, challanging who has the keys to access and distribution of content and information, and therefore, who has the opportunity to control and influence even in an altrusistic way, that content and information.
America is fierecly commercial, and the more you understand it, the more you can see a real conflict between commercial interests and the democratic interests of the many people.
The FT reports that
Many other cities and towns are setting up municipal broadband networks – either by wireless or by laying cable, and many more are thinking about doing so.
But driven by commercial interests have dragged in politicians and driven through legislation in Philedelphia to prevent by law the creation and deployment of highspeed broadband networks.
See the chain – commercial – big business – media – politics
These bills have outraged municipal broadband proponents, who argue that cities that retain the right to enter the market are far more likely to get cheap access to broadband – and more – quickly – than those prevented from setting up their own network
The other thought here is the Morgan Stanley report The age of engagement and the movement from mass media to social media, and I also think about Bob Garfield in his piece the Chaos scenario, which describes a world where
Fragmentation, the bane of network TV and mass marketers everywhere, will become the Holy Grail, the opportunity to reach — and have a conversation with — small clusters of consumers who are consuming not what is force-fed them, but exactly what they want. Producers and broadcasters capitalized with billions of dollars will be on approximately equal footing with podcasters and video bloggers capitalized with $399.99 12-months same-as-cash from Best Buy. And just as DailyKos, Instapundit, Wonkette and Wil Wheaton have coalesced large followings in the cacophony of the blogosphere, some of the citizen-video programmers will find not just a voice but an audience.
Now if cities, and towns start to build and control their own broadband network, they will be contributing to the will of the people, not to the will of big media and big business. Ms Neff seems to have started something very big indeed.
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