Digital Future of Public Media

Kentaro Toyama’s insightful essay punctures the cyber-utopian hype surrounding ICT4D initiatives and resists the allure of quick technological fixes for political and social problems.

But Toyama says relatively little about how to design ICT4D projects that apply the same good sense. In the absence of a clear-cut prescription, policymakers may believe that simply by acknowledging the failures of previous technologies, they ensure that their new initiatives avoid the same fate.

New America Foundation President Steve Coll was a guest on NPR’s On the Media two Fridays ago, commenting on his open letter to the FCC in the The Columbia Journalism Review and the accompanying op-ed in The Washington Post. In these publications and on NPR, Coll made the point that it is in the best interest of Americans for commercial media to give up the existing public interest obligations, and instead pay spectrum usage fees that could go towards strengthening the public media to provide the information the commercial media hasn’t been providing.

In 1930, a man named Daniel Lord wrote a Production Code for American motion pictures. He included specific prohibitions: "Dances suggesting indecent passions," he wrote, "are forbidden." But Lord's general point was to ensure that American films didn't glorify that which was morally wrong and that they always had a happy ending. Movies would be a source of uplift. "No picture shall be produced," he wrote, "that will lower the moral standards of those who see it."

How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google? It wouldn't be impossible, but for even a moderate Internet user, it would be a real pain. Forgoing Google and Amazon is just inconvenient; forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet's dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.

Theodore Vail is not a familiar figure to most Americans, but his life's work is. Vail built the AT&T monopoly, the greatest and longest-lasting communications monopoly in American history. AT&T ruled the American telephone for nearly seven decades in a close partnership with the federal government. For long periods, it was the largest corporation in the world.

Especially in recent weeks—when the purpose and tone of the media has been a topic of heated discussion (and rallying)—there has been chatter about the need to reevaluate public media in the U.S. In this vein, there has been a fair amount of reaction in the blogosphere to New America Foundation President Steve Coll’s piece in the The Columbia Journalism Review, which MPI discussed in the last Week in Review. Here are some comments on two responses from MPI collaborators:

Though we focus on media policy here at the New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative (MPI), such policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It must address the needs of the day. As the FCC explores policies in its “Future of Media” inquiry, understanding the changes in technology and designing the policies to address these changes is crucial to successful media policy.

Steven Waldman
Future of Media Project
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554

Dear Steve,

For Immediate Release
October 25, 2010

Washington, D.C. -- Today, New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative launched Japanese and Chinese language versions of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) website to encourage Internet users based in both countries to test the speed and other performance measures of their broadband connections.

New America Foundation, Free Press, and Media Access Project et al. respectfully submit
these comments in the FTC’s inquiry into the Future of Journalism. This proceeding represents a
critical undertaking to examine the news and information needs of communities in light of
economic and technological shifts in the media industry. Many of the joint filers here submitted
comments earlier this year in the FCC’s similarly oriented “Future of Media” proceeding. The
comments that follow are substantially the same as those we filed in that FCC proceeding. We