I've noted here before that Gordon Crovitz is my favorite technology policy columnist and that everything he pens for his "Information Age" column for The Wall Street Journal is well worth reading. His latest might be his best ever. It touches upon the great debate between Internet optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of digital technology on our culture and economy. His title is just perfect: "Is Technology Good or Bad? Yes." His point is that you can find evidence that technological change has both beneficial and detrimental impacts, and plenty of people on both sides of the debate to cite it for you.

He specifically references the leading pessimist, Nicholas Carr, and optimist, Clay Shirky, of our time. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Carr paints a dismal portrait of what the Internet is doing us and the world around us. Clay Shirky responds in books like Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, arguing that we are much better off because of the rise of the Net and digital technology.

This is a subject I've spent a lot of time noodling over here through the years and, most recently, I compiled all my random thoughts into a mega-post asking, "Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?" That post tracks all the leading texts on both sides of this debate. I was tickled, therefore, when Gordon contacted me and asked for comment for his story after seeing my piece. [See, people really do still read blogs!]

Over at MediaFreedom.org, a new site devoted to fighting the fanaticism of radical anti-media freedom groups like Free Press and other "media reformistas," I've started rolling out a 5-part series of essays about "The Battle for Media Freedom." In Part 1 of the series, I defined what real media freedom is all about, and in Part 2 I discussed the rising "cyber-collectivist" threat to media freedom. In my latest installment, I offer an analytical framework that better explains the major differences between the antagonists in the battle over media freedom.

Understanding the Origins of Political Struggles

In his many enlightening books, Thomas Sowell, a great economist and an even better political scientist, often warns of the triumph of good intentions over good economics. It's a theme that F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman both developed extensively before him. But Sowell has taken this analysis to an entirely differently level in books like A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Sowell teaches us that no matter how noble one's intentions might be, it does not mean that those ideas will translate into sound public policy. Nonetheless, since "the anointed" believe their own intentions are pure and their methods are sound, they see nothing wrong with substituting their will for the will of millions of individuals interacting spontaneously and voluntarily in the marketplace. The result is an expansion of the scope of public decision-making and a contraction of the scope of private, voluntary action. As a result, mandates replace markets, and freedom gives way central planning.

Sowell developed two useful paradigms to help us better understand "the origins of political struggles." He refers to the "constrained" versus "unconstrained" vision and separates these two camps according to how they view the nature of man, society, economy, and politics:

"Constrained Vision"	"Unconstrained Vision"
Man is inherently constrained; highly fallible and imperfect	Man is inherently unconstrained; just a matter of trying hard enough; man & society are perfectible
Social and economic order develops in bottom-up, spontaneous fashion. Top down planning is hard because planners aren't omnipotent.	Order derives from smart planning, often from top-down. Elites can be trusted to make smart social & economic interventions.
Trade-offs & incentives matter most; wary of unintended consequences	Solutions & intentions matter most; less concern about costs or consequences of action
Opportunities count more than end results; procedural fairness is key; Liberty trumps	Outcomes matter most; distributive or "patterned" justice is key; Equality trumps liberty
Prudence and patience are virtues. There are limits to human reason.	Passion for, and pursuit of, high ideals trumps all. Human reason has boundless potential.
Law evolves and is based on the experience of ages.	Law is made by trusted elites.
Markets offer benefit of experience & experimentation and help develop knowledge over time.	Markets cannot ensure desired results; must be superseded by planning & patterned justice
Exponents: Aristotle, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Lord Acton, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Robert Nozick	Exponents: Plato, Rousseau, William Godwin, Voltaire, Robert Owen, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Dewey, Earl Warren, Bertrand Russell, John Rawls

Earlier this year, while I was preparing this mega-filing to the Federal Communications Commission in its "Future of Media" proceeding, I read Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-open: A Free Press for a New Century, by Lee C. Bollinger, who is the president of Columbia University. I had planned on reviewing it since I try to review almost every book I read, but it was hard for me to believe that anyone would take this book too seriously, so I just moved along.

I hate to be that dismissive of any text but this is a book, after all, that proposes the creation of a massive U.S. propaganda machine. Bollinger doesn't just want our government to help out a bit at the margins like it currently does; he wants the State to get under the covers, cuddle tight and become intimate lovers with the Press. And then he wants the Big Press to project itself more, especially overseas, to compete with other State-owned or subsidized media enterprises. Again, it's a propaganda machine, pure and simple. In a new Wall Street Journal editorial today entitled, "Journalism Needs Government Help," he argues:

To me a key priority is to strengthen our public broadcasting role in the global arena. In today's rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China's CCTV and Xinhua news, as well as Qatar's Al Jazeera. The U.S. government's international broadcasters, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, were developed during the Cold War as tools of our anticommunist foreign policy. In a sign of how anachronistic our system is in a digital age, these broadcasters are legally forbidden from airing within the U.S. This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.

China's CCTV and Xinhua news? Qatar's Al Jazeera? Really?! As Jeff Jarvis rightly asks in his terrific response essay, "No American BBC,": "In what sane world is the Chinese government's relationship with news a model?" Indeed, this is frightening stuff. Has Bollinger not studied the Chinese system of state media meddling? Needless to say, it's not pretty. And while I would agree that the BBC model shows that some State-funded media can be quite impressive and free of most meddling, that's not been the case across the board.

If you are an avid reader of everything Clay Skirky pens -- and I'm going to assume most readers of this blog are -- then the chapters you'll find in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, will seem quite familiar. In fact, as I was working my way through the book, I was reminded of a piece of advice my old boss David Boaz gave me once (but that I foolishly ignored several times over): Sometimes there's no need to write a book when a good article with suffice.

We've seen or heard most of the material in Cognitive Surplus many times before and I think we got the point: The Internet and digital technology has freed up an enormous amount of time for more productive / worthwhile endeavors that was previously squandered -- most by too much coach potato television consumption. He spells out his thesis a bit more eloquently on pg. 63:

The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. [...] Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offers us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn't do. In the world of "the media," we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form. (p. 63)

Shirky spends 200+ pages here trying to bolster that claim in various ways. But, again, I'm not sure he needed to. I think he had most of us at "hello." The notion that the Net has made us and our culture better off seems fairly uncontroversial to most of us. Of course, one could argue, as Jonah Lehrer or Wired Magazine has, that "the consumption of culture is not always worthless," and that just because the Internet and digital technologies have empowered the audience to talk back doesn't mean they'll have anything all that much more interesting to say. Lehrer's critique of Shirky continues:

Those of you interested in transparency and "Government 2.0" issues will absolutely want to pick up Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice, a terrific collection of 34 essays edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Much like Access Controlled, the collection of essays on global Internet filtering and censorship that I praised here last month, Open Government is a resource like no other in its field. It offers an amazing diversity of viewpoints covering virtual every aspect of the debate over transparency and open government.

The collection was published by O'Reilly Media and Tim O'Reilly himself has one of the best chapters in the book on "Government as a Platform." "The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways." (p. 25) This explains why in their chapter on "Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement," David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Edward W. Felten, of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, speak of "a new baseline assumption about the public response to government data: when government puts data online, someone, somewhere will do something valuable and innovative with it." (p.84) "By publishing its data in a form that is free, open, and reusable," they continue, "government will empower citizens to dream up and implement their own innovative ideas of how to best connect with their governments." (p. 89)

Indeed, just think about some of the many exciting sites and projects (both public and private) that have been developed thanks to government data becoming more accessible in recent years. Here's a short list of some of the best:

I've been so busy trying to cover breaking developments related to Washington's new efforts to "save journalism" (FTC) and steer the "future of media" (FCC) -- see all my recent essays & papers here -- that I forgot to do a formal book review of the book that is partially responsible for whipping policymakers into a lather about this issue: The Death and Life of American Journalism, the media-takeover manifesto by the neo-Marxist media scholar Robert W. McChesney and Nation editor John Nichols. Their book is horrifying in its imperial ambitions since it invites the government become the High Lord and Protector of the Fourth Estate. [For an in-depth look at all of McChesney's disturbing views on these issues, see: "Free Press, Robert McChesney & the "Struggle" for Media."] Anyway, I put together a formal review of the book for City Journal. It's online here and I've also pasted it down below.

_____________________

A Media Welfare State?

by Adam Thierer

Imagine a world of "post-corporate" newsrooms, where the state serves as the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate. Billions flow from bureaucracies to media entities and individual journalists in the name of sustaining a "free press." And this new media welfare state is funded by steep taxes on our mobile phones, broadband connections, and digital gadgets.

Sound Orwellian? Well, it's the blueprint for a press takeover drawn up by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism. McChesney, the prolific neo-Marxist media scholar who teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Nichols, a journalist with The Nation, aren't shy about their intentions. Along with Free Press, the absurdly misnamed regulatory activist group they co-founded, McChesney and Nichols outline a self-described "radical" agenda for what they hope will become a media "revolution." And, shockingly, some folks in the Obama administration are listening.

Last Friday afternoon, as I was leaving my house to en route to the airport with the family for a short vacation, Nicholas Carr's latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, arrived in my mailbox. I grabbed it, jumped in the car, flipped it open during the drive to Dulles Airport (don't worry, the wife was driving), and began devouring it. I say "devour" because once I started reading it, I didn't stop. I was wholeheartedly absorbed in the text from start to finish.

I tell you all this not just because Carr's book is that good, but because according to the thesis he sets forth in The Shallows, fewer and fewer people are likely to be engaged in such contemplative, deep reading activities due to the highly distractive nature of the Internet and digital technologies. "With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use," Carr claims. "At the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book." (p. 116) The Net and multimedia "strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding," he says. (p. 129) And we have no one to blame for this mess but ourselves:

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information... And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider. (p. 133-4)

Although, ultimately, Carr doesn't quite convinced me that "The Web is a technology of forgetfulness" (p. 193), he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed.

So, do I need to remind everyone of my ongoing rants about Jonathan Zittrain's misguided theory about the death of digital generativity because of the supposed rise of "sterile, tethered" devices? I hope not, because even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk about it. But here again anyway is the obligatory listing of all my tirades: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + video and my 2-part debate with Lessig and him last year.

You will recall that the central villain in Zittrain's drama The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is big bad Steve Jobs and his wicked little iPhone. And then, more recently, Jonathan has fretted over those supposed fiends at Facebook. Zittrain's worries that "we can get locked into these platforms" and that "markets [will] coalesce [around] these tamer gated communities," making it easier for both corporations and governments to control us. More generally, Zittrain just doesn't seem to like that some people don't always opt for the same wide open general purpose PC experience that he exalts as the ideal. As I noted in my original review of his book, Jonathan doesn't seem to appreciate that it may be perfectly rational for some people to seek stability and security in digital devices and their networking experiences--even if they find those solutions in the form of "tethered appliances" or "sterile" networks to use his parlance.

Every once and awhile I find a sharp piece by someone out there who is willing to admit that the see nothing wrong with such "closed" platforms or devices, or they even argue that those approaches can be superior to the more "open" devices and platforms out there. That's the case with this Harry McCracken rant over at Technogizer today with the entertaining title, "The Verizon Droid is a Loaf of Day-Old Bread." McCracken goes really hard on the Droid -- which hurts because I own one! -- and I'm not sure I entirely agree with his complaint about it, but what's striking is how it represents the antithesis of Zittrainianism:

During a recent blog post on William Patry's self-parodying, dishonest, and hate-filled book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, ("Copyright Wars"), I argued that disputes between creative industries and technologists who create new means to access creative works tend to be notoriously complex because creators of new content and creators of new content-access technologies are producers of complementary goods.

Producers of complementary goods do not want to destroy each other, but they would love to commoditize each other. In other words, a producer of a complementary good should want to drive the price of any complements produced by others as close as possible to marginal cost in order to maximize the share of mutually-created value that it could potentially capture.

For a concrete example of what I was talking about, review Clash of the Titans, an interesting, opinionated, and perceptive account of the recent clash between Amazon.com and Macmillan over ebook pricing. It represents a thoughtful analysis of the complexities lurking behind these debates. Moreover, the issues outlined are relevant to debates about online pricing of all types of expressive works--music, video, news, periodicals, etc.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution for highlighting this post.

PS: Speaking of Patry's vile book Copyright Wars, I just belatedly perceived another of its many glaring ironies. Around a year ago, the unhinged Patry was putting the finishing touches upon its false and hate-filled claims, (e.g., "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."), in order to depict an ugly alternate reality in which copyrights had so failed to support the production of innovative works that they should be wholly repealed: "In other areas where a government monopoly, created to serve the public interest, is blatantly abused over a long period of time, it is taken away" (p.199).

Meanwhile, back on Earth, funding provided by copyright industries was empowering Director James Cameron to put the finishing touches on the years of work and the millions of dollars in R&D required to create the beautiful alternate reality depicted in his wildly popular film Avatar. A finer testament to the vacuity of Patry's rabid, unreasoned hate is scarcely conceivable....

Recently, some routine events occurred. Stars shone at night. Snow fell in winter. And, in a new blog post, Dan Glickman's Moral Panic, Mr. William Patry warned that another vicious "moral panic" has been launched by another representative of the copyright owners whom Mr. Patry has denounced as Maoist, Stalinist, Fascist, Terrorist, murderous, war-mongering religious-zealot stranglers who will stoop not only to "castration" but even to "name calling."

But Mr. Patry's latest attempt to smear a creative industry backfires as badly the "siege-engine"/"screed"/worthless book that he called Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars"). Consequently, Mr. Patry has again proven only that he is either the most incompetently diabolical "Master of Moral Panics" ever known or that he has become so unhinged by rage that he can no longer rationally comprehend or reply to even simple arguments made by copyright owners.