wrythings

Today (September 22) is One Web Day! Last year I had my act together, and wasn’t dealing with a series of family health matters and together with Dave Chakrabarti conducted a series of interviews leading up to One Web Day. The videos are worth watching… most of the interviews followed a simple convention, and were intended to explore how we use the Internet in our daily life… and my personal favorite part of the questions was when we ask people to describe the Internet.

Listening to people describe the Internet in their own terms and what they actually do with it opens an important space: there is such variety in the Internet, the really interesting things are not the new web 2.0 techniques or the hype surrounding them… it’s the actual interests that people bring to the ‘Net from their own life. When people speak about what they do others are prone to say “wow, I didn’t think about how that might be shared online, but now that I think bout it it makes sense!”

Which is to say there are tons of things online that we probably don’t think about but which pertain to the interests of others and it has become a tool in so many subcultures and obscure pursuits, allowing tremendous variety of community interests (and forms).

With the importance of the Web to our modern life, its use and potential in the full range of human experience and endeavor, it is fitting that we reflect on it’s governance and the basic communication freedoms which we should not take for granted.

This week Chicago played host to the fifth of six public hearings on media ownership convened by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Chicago Organizers did an excellent job in spreading the word and offering testimony.  The phrase “media ownership rules” here reflects an older way of thinking…  the various media - Cable, Broadcast TV and Radio and Print media need to be understood in the context of the Internet and the communications policy and infrastructure that supports it.   We live in a blended world…. the lines are blurred.

I didnt get to offer testimony, but it was quite clear that the people don’t buy the arguments favoring further relaxation of the ownership rules.  The people want the FCC to enforce the rules of the commission.    I’ll try to write more about the hearing later, but concentration of media ownership, and ownership of our communications backbone and last/first mile are clearly related issues, and we need to move towards more local ownership, production and control.  The FCC, and for that matter ICANN need to hear that message.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under FCC, ICANN, Internet, commons, education, ethos, excellence, one web day, thoughts, wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.