Media-Space-Place-Network

World Press Freedom Day 2008: Freedom of Expression, Access to Information and Empowerment of People

May 3 was UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day. Checkout the UNESCO Communication and Information site. It is rich with information on the media and development.

Community media is recognized by UNESCO and the UN as a key element in reaching their Millennium Development Goals. At this link there are a few spare paragraphs on community media that express their value and importance. The ease, clarity and thoughtfulness with which the UNESCO writer makes the critical distinctions between mainstream media and community media and notes the obvious logic of new media and community media integration is like a clear, cool drink of water. Particularly when compared to the contorted language and obfuscations, and barely concealed aggression and turfiness, associated with the US discussion on community media, participatory media and the social web. Rather than seeing community access and community radio portrayed as failures that have fallen under an “old media malaise,” here we find a clear understanding of the role of community media in empowerment and democracy. Rather than finding community media framed as receding into the past along with the old pre-network society media organizations — as has been the tendency of many new media types in the US — we find in much of the rest of the world an understanding of community media as a pioneer in media participation and open platform media development that rests on a logical continuum with the social web. And we find an understanding that community media organizations are extremely well positioned to become the local cultural institutions needed to realize the democratic potential of the network society.

So then, if you have a moment click your way through the UNESCO site and enjoy being in an information space that sees the value of community media as a prerequisite for development, not as an old media barrier to development.

As I said cool water.

“The role of community media”
“Even though many media outlets have made provisions for audience participation and have therein become more accessible to the people they serve, nowhere is accessibility and specificity of purpose so well defined as with community media. Currently radio is the most widespread form of community media in the developing world because it is cheap to produce and to access, can cover large areas, and overcomes illiteracy.”

NYC, Greenwich and James in the West Village at the Soy Luck Club coffee house, which, luckily, has a free, fast wireless network — the 5th anniversary of the US’ Iraq “caper”. I am surrounded by all these incredibly healthy people dressed in NYC sleek, dark and hip, drinking espresso with soy milk and wondering what a credit crisis is. The economy is in some kind of new post 20th Century networked recession: obscure financial arcana, talk of “CODs” and “liquidity puts”, Woody Guthrie is coming off the network and into the room — “that old dust storm killed my baby….kain’t kill me, lord, kain’t kill me, lord, kain’t kill me…..we don’t stand no chance” — a research group just published a report explaining that the Federal Communication Commission’s public participation efforts are a sham, Verizon and Comcast and AT&T are privatizing the network society right before my eyes, there is a Verizon truck across the street. A charming young British woman has just convinced me to plug her nano iPod into my laptop for a charge. Can you do that? Is that OK? Well who can resist a Brit in pink Converse lowtops with an iPod and a laptop, biting her fingers and jamming away at some blog and current affairs info, dirty hair piled on her head in a hasty topknot? The nano seems to be charging, so at least that works, but the economists are arguing over whether the war has cost $2trillion or $4trillion……do you think that might have as much to do with the financial crisis as sub primes? Woody still squawking, ”we don’t stand no chance lord, we don’t stand no chance”, god someone switch tracks. Perhaps a Machiatto with low fat Liquidity Put?

Harvard Law School was “Markey Country” today as Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey defended net neutrality in his opening remarks before the FCC’s Public En Banc Hearing on broadband network management practices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Markey declared the US “no country for old bandwidth” and hung around to observe, with the rest of us, the FCC, “en banc” and securely enclosed in Harvard space droning through a tedious day of testimony and q&a, comfortably surrounded by an audience packed with polite but bored Comcast employees trained to provide applause on cue.

Unfortunately no one followed up on Markey’s cinematic word play from last night’s academy awards winning film, “No Country for Old Men”, by pointing out that we own the Internet, we own the last mile, we put the money up for the whole thing; or as Javier Bardem’s character, Anton Chigurh, put it in the film, “you have been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it.” Instead we got market solutions, tired old neoliberalism, simplistic framing of our choices as a dichotomy of “free market” duopoly or government micromanagement. We also got the beginning of what Yochai Benkler called a never ending flow of micro managing regulatory debates from the FCC if it tries to make the cable and telephony duopoly be nice and adhere to net neutrality. Sorry Cormac, but regulating Comcast and Verizon is going to be like stopping Chigurh/Bardem as he undertakes a bloody, money driven rampage through West Texas. Nice is just not their nature, they are unrelenting profit machines and no matter how hard messieurs Markey, Copps and Adelstein try, the duopoly are going to throttle your networks, and they are going to build them so that you have to ask the duopoly for permission, and cut them in on every new innovative content or software application; or your work just won’t technically run on their networks. They can’t help themselves; they will do it.

There were however some glittering insights and clarity today from Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School and Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. Wu explained the connection between the kind of network hardware and software needed to discriminate against specific applications and surveillance and political oppression. Noting such technologies are keenly in demand among repressive regimes and organizations around the world, Wu urged the Commission to understand that the outcome of the net neutrality debate in the US is a foreign policy issue not simply national communications policy.

Benkler framed the whole discussion as the distinction between using the last mile to allow users to connect to each other versus network owners connecting to audiences. Benkler has network economics cold; check out his book Wealth of Networks - you can download it free. He explains the dirty little secret of all US networks that meld network infrastructure and content, so that the definition of an information service [content] is legally and physically confused with a telecommunications service [infrastructure]: It creates a negative incentive for the network owner to grow their networks, it’s easier to sell their own content if they throttle their networks and choke out the content of their competitors, rather than build big pipes. That is why most developed countries in the world are growing networks that are faster, cheaper and bigger than the ones we have in the US.

Another thing was clear at the FCC hearings today. We are now deeply into the 5 year battle for the last mile. I am not sure when exactly it started, maybe COPE, maybe state-wide franchise legislation that is destroying local cable regulatory frameworks for more simplistic, unrelenting neoliberal economic hack thinking. Whenever it started it is well underway. The interactive nature of the Internet has demonstrated that it is possible to organize communication in a much more democratic fashion. This is the time. There won’t be better time in a long time.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is indulging in one of the FCC’s oldest, time honored traditions: making a lot of noise about “localism” and local programming, while creating policies that are destined to have the opposite effect.

As part of his efforts to have the FCC adopt rules that would relax the 32-year-old ban on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership, Martin proposes that, “Licensees should establish permanent advisory boards in each community (including representatives of underserved community segments) with which to consult periodically on community needs and issues,” and, that “The commission should adopt processing guidelines that will ensure that all broadcasters provide a significant amount of locally oriented programming.”

There is something very curious about a proposal to have our local broadcast license holders create local advisory boards, just now — particularly since it is coming from the FCC, an agency that has for the last 20 years charted new terrain in the land of regulatory capture. So what’s the problem, surely we are all for more local programming? And surely requiring broadcasters to take advice from local communities is desirable, what could be the downside? Well perhaps a great deal. Martin’s proposal comes at a moment of heightened media activism and citizen discontent with the US media system and media culture. A time that is abuzz with proposals for a more participatory and diverse media. The current broadcast media system and the local arrangements for delivering television, Internet services and wireless communications are roiling with change and economic restructuring. Communities are waking up to the fact that restructuring in the communication industries has resulted in unprecedented levels of ownership concentration and control of their media environments by private industry; and that withdrawal of traditional forms of government media oversight over the last 20 years have left communities with fewer and fewer local regulatory options.

So just now, not some other time, but now, when the whole media culture is turning over with change and activism, Martin proposes some tired old worn out concept like toothless community advisory boards of the ‘Good and the Great’! If you are having trouble imagining what that might look like then take a look at the boards that run the your local public television stations – you do know there are such boards don’t you? Well, the kind of advisory boards Martin is proposing would be even more conservative and enamored with the status quo and elitism, and they would be powerful allies of the entrenched incumbents holding media power in our communities.

Rather than thinking of Martin’s proposal in terms of incremental regulatory change, we should see this as a panicky move to stave off the coming wave of media change, particularly at the community level. Now, we have an opportunity to move toward a more participatory, democratic media environment or local public spheres, one where we can use media and our communications infrastructure to create social relationships that bind us together as communities, and enrich our lives in countless noncommercial and commercial ways. Windows of change like this do not open up that often and they do not remain open long. Let’s not lose sight of what is at stake and what is possible, just now.

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In the spring and summer of 2006, the cable and telephone duopoloy tried to buy national legislation to shape the US communications infrastructure to their advantage. This Short documentary was created to help stop that legislation; hopefully it played a small role in defeating the legislation. The Barton/Cope Act, as it was called, was bad public policy, based on”stink tank” research, or no research at all. Now the same politics, hyperinfused with money, are now underway at the state and administrative levels, alas with more success.

See http://saveaccess.org/node/1618
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

So even though the commentators in this video are talking about national rather than state legislation, the politics and issues are extremely similar. Basically it all comes down to two things for both the Telcos and Cable: They want huge government subsidies of various kinds to build the next network, and, they want to make the content on their networks proprietary, so they control content. Content is thus technically melded with the network infrastructure, so that the definition of an information service [content] is legally and physically confused with a telecommunications service [infrastructure]. This contradicts 70 years of common carrier communication policy in the US.