Talk:Main Page

Doug Forbes Assignment Zero 1 29 13

From the 50’s thought the 60’s there was a communications theorist named Marshal McLuhan. He devoted a lot of thought and writing around the invention of Television, noting that the existence of the medium itself had impact beyond any specific content coming across it. He coined a phrase, “The medium is the massage.” He felt that the ability to bring images of experiences in real time across vast distances would bring an awareness of each others circumstance in an unprecedented way and that cold lead to deeper understanding of one another as people and as countries. He referred to this as a “Global Village” and wrote a book in 1968 that included that phrase in the title. However, by 1964, he had already written in his book “Understanding Media” that the networks of the day were “timid giants,” there position was so important and so visible that they had become very weary of promoting non-mainstream positions because they could so readily create chaotic responses.

Looking at the class readings so far, I’d say that the advent of the Internet made for very similar expectations in, promoting unrestricted speech, moving it across borders and across economic boundaries as well. Barlow’s Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace makes it clear that people felt they had an area of total free speech but unlike our founding fathers, he forgot to shoot the opposition. The most notable change that around the Internet in the readings is that those expectations which seemed almost inevitable to begin with have, to a very large extent not come to fruition. So to me the most important challenges that presents are in achieving some kind of balance in the areas of accessibility, governmental censorship as well as economic censorship.

Taking these in order, Hargittai’s writings on the Digital Divide make it pretty clear that Barlow’s “World that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” was wildly optimistic. With third world countries lagging behind, and minorities and the elderly behind as well, those things could be improved on a bit but some of the statistical information has probably been improved on in some areas since his latest stats which are around 2004. In particular India seems to have made very good use of the Internet and related telecommunications technologies to improve their economic status, just call Dell for tech support and you’ll get a good idea. Hargittai also points out that user skill level is crucial to making use of Internet access. Her suggestion that education is around this is perhaps the most important one as we only have so much control over what happens in other countries. The NYC school system has done quite a bit of experimenting with this with very favorable results, as a videographer, I did several video’s that demonstrated very good results when students had access to laptops and also one teacher in particular was big on having younger students use small, relatively affordable tablets, noting that third graders became enthusiastic to do rewrites of papers for the first time. Zickuhr and Smith point out that “Both African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are as likely as whites to own any sort of mobile phone, and are more likely to use their phones for a wider range of activities.” Which may make for an opportunity to flatten the digital divide a bit so that may take care of some of the access point issues in the U.S. but it still remains important to teach our youth to be good searches and Internet savvy, which may not be as easy to accomplish using cell phones.

Regarding Government censorship and control, Goldsmith and Wu point out that while countries such as China may go way to far in their blocking of Internet, countries like Frances’ opposition to a Nazi auction site may be perfectly reasonable given their history and culture and a one size fits all set of laws would not be desirable. The challenge here is very similar to all other media, holding governments to their standards where we can. I must say I thought Google and Yahoo missed on opportunity. Goldsmith and Wu quote Yang of Yahoo as saying, "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law." As proponents of free speech, just deciding that one must operate within the laws of a country like China and at least in Google’s case hoping that they would loosen up a bit by themselves, missed the fact that to be a major world power as the Chinese are clearly achieving, they would have to have a search technology and I think our search engine people could have demanded some reform. Instead they wimped out or got greedy and got hacked in the process. That was part of the challenge the Internet posed and they did not meet that part which is a human as well as political great loss as we might have benefited greatly from some loosening of controls on there part. It’s interesting to note that the ability to censor sites was not even discovered until it was brought into light in the Yahoo/France case. The technology had a built in capability that was discovered by a commercially developed technology.

This leads to the last and greatest challenge of the set, the role commercial censorship of Internet information. This is most challenging in part because our corporations are so pervasive, partly we don’t have a say in their goings on much and partly because as one reading points out, companies are beholden to their share holders and not to the general citizenry and sometimes these appear to conflict, at least in a short term view. MacKinnon has a great example of this in the Julian Assange happenings. Here we have someone very much in the business of providing otherwise hard to obtain information and with no conviction or even start of due process, his provider and I believe also his credit card processors pull out on him. We seem to have the most difficult time coming up with answers to this area of problems, it’s the one way in which the Internet is living up to it’s promise of eluding solutions to control. What would “taking back the Internet” look like? More Government intrusion? That is not always such a good idea and the antithesis of what it’s earlier proponents hoped for. Can you imagine that a company would be required to keep an account with someone who has just published national security secrets? Even if someone discarded the Assange case as an outlier, one is still left with the troubling mechanics of censorship of information by companies and corporations some of whom may be very savvy at Internet manipulation. Hargittai states that censorship or gatekeeping [in this country] is now occurring at the level of information exposure. MacKinnon calls for vigilant activism in keeping the Internet as free as possible, but it is very hard to regulate or in any way control gatekeeping at the level of information exposure. We used to have a fairness in reporting doctrine for the televised press, that was based on running an opposing view to any story, but with billions of pages, this type of legislation provides only a partial solution.

In conclusion, while the Internet may not have lived up to the expectations of proponents such as Barlow, it may still be the closets thing we have to what he envisioned. Of the three challenges discussed, the digital divide may suffer from some Mathew effect, but my sense is that as time goes on, this will lesson, especially here in the U.S. for the reasons discussed above.

Balance in Government regulation will continue to be an issue that we must be aware of and influence where possible as the situation warrants. While we should keep as much freedom as possible, should we really be able to skirt existing laws about background checks and buy six thousand rounds of ammunition in hundred round belts?

Corporate Censorship which mostly takes place at the level of information exposure is very problematic and perhaps can only be combated with counter information exposure. I would say that the Internet does provide a counterbalancing force. Lots of news items and discourse emerge from it, such as those of Matt Drudge, Jullian Assange just to name a couple of the most notable ones. If one really feels strongly about an issue that is buried in reams of digital masking, posting to your social media site, posting to blogs, calling and discussing with friends and colleagues, or, by whatever means is available. As the recent internet and telecommunications involvement in the Arab Spring Uprisings suggest, I believe that the Internet still provides the closest means possible to achieving it’s touted mandate of getting muffled voices heard across as many borders and obstacles as possible and as we think about legislation and control, preservation of that freedom should be paramount. Douglas Forbes 17:03, 29 January 2013 (EST)