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| Category: Politics | |
| About the Book | |
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Free Excerpt From The Book (requires Adobe Reader) A handful of multinational, multimedia conglomerates dominate the broadcast, cable, movie, publishing, and Internet industries in the U.S. today. The resulting media environment makes the job of every school teacher, every social worker, every church pastor, indeed, every parent, more difficult than it needs to be.It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s nothing in the physics of the broadcast tower, the electronics of your TV set, or the economics of the newsstand that requires powerful media conglomerates to be such a toxic threat to our families or our democracy. There are alternatives. But those alternatives will never even be mentioned, let alone considered unless we step back from the fire hose of today’s information overload to examine the underlying framework of 21st Century communication and how that framework came to be. This book, written in an informal, conversational style, explains the political, economic, and technology decisions that created today’s mainstream media. The author describes how “communication policy,” from the birth of the United States and the Postal Act of 1792 to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, shaped the media we have today, dominated by people and institutions whose primary agenda is preserving and maximizing their own power. Today, the digital revolution rippling through all media industries is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild, reshape, and rewire those powerful media influences. The key to this opportunity is recognizing that current communication policies are deeply wrong. Religious people, spiritual people, secular people of all beliefs—progressives, conservatives, and libertarians alike—should be able to agree that a communication system that concentrates the power to communicate in the hands of a privileged few is no more ethical or just than an electoral system that limits the right to vote to white men who own property. If we really believe that every individual has the right to vote, the right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, then we need to start asking a few simple questions: What kind of communication system would we build if we started with the value of our individual voices? How could communication power and resources better reflect the needs of our neighborhoods and communities? What communication policies would best promote the practice of democratic self-government? How we answer those questions may decide the future of our democracy in our country, perhaps even the future of life on earth.
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| About the Author | |
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Bart Preecs has been a newspaper reporter, technical editor, technology writer, community technology advisor, and a broadband and media policy activist. He lives in Seattle and writes and blogs about media and technology when he’s not working as a technology marketing writer. |
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