7 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. Newspaper and magazine publishers could curate their content, as could the limited number of television and radio broadcasters. As cable television advanced, there were many more channels available to specialize and reach smaller audiences. The Internet and WWW exploded the information source space by orders of magnitude. For example, platforms such as YouTube receive hundreds of hours of video per minute. Tweets and Facebook updates must number in the hundreds of millions if not billions per day. Traditional media runs out of time (radio and television) or space (print media), but the Internet and WWW run out of neither. I hope that a thirst for verifiable or trustable facts will become a fashionable norm and part of the soluti

      Broadcast/Print are limited by time and space; is digital infinite?

  2. Jun 2023
  3. Dec 2022
    1. Okay, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate, basically when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves needs to serve the public interest. So what do they mean by the public interest? Yeah, right? It's like super vague, right? But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War Two, They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want us radio stations to become propaganda outlets. And so in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events and you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine.

      Origin of the FCC Fairness Doctrine

  4. Aug 2022
    1. With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis (rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.

      Martin Gurri argues that had the financial crisis of 2008 happened in the 20th century, the elites, through their control of the flow of information, might have portrayed it as a natural disaster we should rally around our leadership to overcome. But with the advent of the internet, we got the "networked public", and the elites and government lost their monopoly on information.

  5. Jan 2022
  6. Oct 2021
  7. Sep 2020