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Aspen Ideas Festival: Peter Hirshberg Interviews Jim Steyer About How Children Must Learn Responsible Digital Citizenship on the Web

Technorati's Chairman,Peter Hirshberg, is on the move at the Aspen Ideas Festival-- his video blog provides an excellent forum for impromptu commentary from influential thought leaders in various fields who are attending the conference (link below). Globally, children are developing differently as a result of the pervasive influence of the Internet in their social relations. Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, explains why it is imperative to define 'rules of the road' for every kid on the Internet and the role that his organization plays as a thought leader in this area. According to Steyer, "this is a huge issue of ethics and responsibility . ... kids get this, parents are clueless but know they should." Despite many challenges when it comes to media content regulation, Steyer is optimistic about the future. This important discussion that ties directly into the that we discussed at our Socrates Society seminar last week on issues of the Media and our Conflicting Values. to watch the video: click on the following link:

http://fora.tv/myfora/PeterHirshberg/clip/127/Aspen_Ideas_Festival_Interview_Jim_Steyer

Re-Defining the Public Interest in the Media Torrent of the Internet

Media and Our Conflicting Values: Day 3

On our last day of this Socrates Seminar, we jumped squarely into the discussion of the Internet that we all wanted to have since Day 1.

First, we acknowledged the disruptive transformation of the media away from its historical one-to-many controlled distribution model, which was largely restricted to professionally produced print, radio, and linear video broadcasting content. We discussed how the Internet’s broadband infrastructure has supported the development of a global multi-media content stream now defined by many content creators, both professionals and amateurs. Today we are inundated by countless streams of data broadcast in a free flow of information that is truly a torrent of bits.

Research has shown convincingly that the attention span of Americans has shortened substantially over the past several decades and that the rate of change in this direction continues to accelerate.
Are we doomed to being Information Snackers, a nation of dilettantes distinguished only in being a mile wide and an inch deep in our thinking? Does this trend raise troubling questions and pose risks to the integrity of our democratic society?

I think so. Why?

First, because we are drowning in choice. While America’s obsession with Freedom is empowering, too much choice is debilitating. We have too many choices in the Internet Age of mass customization in digital media. While people like to speak of their love of choices, in fact, people hate choices. Notice the incredible power of global brands today after the initial view that the dawn of the Internet rendered traditional brands worthless.

What are some of the nasty implications for democracies overwhelmed by media choices? In my view, the hyper abundance of choice makes individuals increasingly susceptible to manipulation by groups that have an agenda—especially an agenda associated with power and manipulation of masses of people (does anyone doubt that Al Qaeda has developed a sophisticated web presence, for example?)

The web has massively reduced the costs of coordination among large groups and truly revolutionized social collaboration on a large scale—for a positive example, consider the fundraising powerhouse of the Obama campaign and the massive empowerment and inclusion in the democratic political process of otherwise alienated and disenfranchised groups of American society.

There are many good things associated with these paradigmatic changes in the American political process enabled by the Internet borne media revolution.

But we should also consider the corner cases, the potential for abuse, for manipulation, for the propagation of lies through the digital media. We need to remember the potential for Tyranny of the Majority in a digital media search construct that determines what rises to the top by its popularity.

As Newton Minow, Chairman of the FCC said in his historic address to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, “some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree. … broadcasting, to serve the public interest, must have a soul and a conscience, a burning desire to excel, as well as to sell; the urge to build the character, citizenship and intellectual stature of people, as well as to expand the gross national product.” Promoting citizenship! A novel concept, and one that I have written about extensively in this blog in the context of the Democracy in America Revisited Series and Professor Michael Sandel.

In my view, being right and doing the right thing should have nothing to do with what is popular and everything to do with the responsible exercise of leadership (something that is in very short supply in America today). Having technology drive people to the most popular result only accelerates the mediocrity that Alexis de Toqueville foresaw for American democracy.

We should not let our passion to uphold the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech trump the obligation that we have as a democratic society to keep our citizens informed of objective facts so that they can responsibly exercise their civic responsibilities. To be clear, I do not see this statement as being unsupportive of the First Amendment in any way.

Unfortunately, our discussion on Day 3 did not address a redefinition of the Public Interest.

Domain expertise, an objective mastery of the facts and the nuances associated with a specific body of knowledge, requires more than a passing acquaintance with that domain (would you go to a doctor for surgery who is not truly an expert in his/her field?). In my view, the knowledge crisis facing our next generation will be rooted in the misconception that surface knowledge is sufficient to impart expertise.
We are certainly still in our infancy in this new realm of digital media, but it is abundantly clear that technology has left our regulatory institutions in the dust. While I am a strong believer in the positive power of the market, I fear for those members of our society who will be left behind, for the voices that will not be heard.

The Government is a steward of the Public Interest, and that Public Interest will, of necessity, be redefined when we face a crisis. There needs to be a cool hand, a slow, deliberative process, that gets us to the right answer. Unfortunately, the history of regulation in America shows us that it is most often reactive and likely to generate severe, negative unintended consequences (Sarbanes Oxley, for example).

While I greatly enjoyed our Socratic discussion, I left the seminar continuing to ask myself, what will force this question, and how great a cost will our society bear along the way?

Of Free Markets, Regulation, and Tipping Points

A very interesting Day 2! Some highlights:

First Amendment issues and the specific domain of government regulation over free speech are narrowly confined to content creators over the licensed spectrum. For example, had the famous Janet Jackson Super Bowl breast exposure incident occurred on cable TV as opposed to broadcast TV, there would have been no regulatory issue over indecent exposure and hence no grounds for the FCC to get involved.

In short, you can be the willing consumer (or the inadvertent and unwilling spectator) of the most indecent behavior embedded in content on cable TV anytime and cannot object to it on grounds of Public Standards of decency because you have paid for the basic cable TV transport infrastructure. If the content is broadcast over the government licensed spectrum, then it's a totally different story, as you have entered the domain of the Public Trust.

Today, 95% of US homes are passed by cable and increasingly ubiquitous access to the Internet brings streaming media of just about anything you can think of all the time. Most people get their content from new forms of media that are unsupervised and unaccountable to anyone other than The Market. Many people may feel this is not a problem at all-- on the contrary, they may see it as a blessing.

Licensed spectrum broadcast content is now dwarfed by other media transports. In short, the domain of the Public Trust, and thus standards of socially and morally acceptable program, are hurtling toward irrelevancy in our new digital world.

My problem with this is that a few clicks away for ANYONE, especially children, you will find abominable violence, graphic examples of human enslavement for sexual exploitation, and hard core porn. The evidentiary record is increasingly showing that exposure to these types of negative human behaviors has a bad influence on children and absolutely impacts their social development.

The consequences of these trends are not well understood, but, in my view, these tectonic shifts in the landscape of content distribution will reach a tipping point that will trigger new regulation. Can the market self-regulate? Perhaps, but at what cost in the process? While America was built on freedom of speech, the proliferation of freedoms in the Digital Age may substantially fray the fabric of our society before we reach a new equilibrium.

Whether or not we think this is a good thing, we are already in the soup.

Sarah Lacy, Silicon Valley Host of Yahoo! Finance Tech|Ticker, Interviews Pascal, Sharon Wienbar (Scale Venture Partners), and Jessica Canning (Dow Jones/VentureSource) on Current VC Industry Trends

Last Thursday I joined Sharon Wienbar, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, and Jessica Canning, Director of Global Research for Dow Jones/ VentureSource, on Yahoo! Finance's Tech|Ticker program, hosted by Business Week's Sarah Lacy. We discussed issues ranging from opportunities in Clean Tech investing and the current state of tech IPO's to the implications of recent VC industry funding statistics and how entrepreneurs should manage their companies through an economic downturn. Two of the segments were posted this morning and can be accessed at http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker

Animal Copyright, "Ashes and Snow"

Gregory Colbert delivered an outstanding presentation and excerpts from his incredible nature film "Ashes and Snow"at TED.  I just watched it on YouTube, and this is a must see-- watch it here. 

The idea that he introduces of an animal copyright makes eminent sense-- corporate advertisers who use nature and animals to promote their produts should pay 1% of their media buy into an “Animal Copyright Foundation”  and dedicate these funds to animal and nature conservation projects around the world.  Based on the annual dollars spent on such advertising, funding from the Animal Copyright could become the largest environmental fund in the world in just three years. Colbert's suggestion should not be controversial-- his simple logic, we pay for the use of musical scores and for the human talent in commercials, why shouldn't we have an obligation to pay to protect the animals and the natural vistas that aren't able to be represented by talent agents?  This makes a lot of sense to me.

I hope that others will support this idea.  It's time for a lot more people to think creatively about immediate solutions to the environmental crisis we are facing.

Borat: Comedy, Investigative Reporting, or Both?

I don't think I've ever posted three times in one day, but I just saw "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan", and had to blog about it.

First, run, do not walk, to see it.  It is a terrific film.  Second, consider its implications. Film critic Emanuel Levy has written a review of the film and a comment on "The Making of a Mockumentary" that are both worth reading.

Borat is Reality TV on steroids-- while some scenes were staged, at least half were not.  From Levy's commentary  you can get a sense of the "guerrilla" filmmaking tactics that the crew of 8 used.  Apparently they experienced several narrow escapes from angry mobs plus questioning by the Secret Service, FBI, State Troopers and other law enforcement officials who chased after, and at times incarcerated, members of the production team during the making of the film.

It is easy to dismiss the film as a self-deprecating comedy that targets every ethnic group and gets away with being anti-Semitic because it was conceived and executed by Jews.  In my view, Sacha Baron Cohen is a brilliant comedian and social satirist, and the film "Borat", beneath its gross vulgarity, delivers a very depressing message about the intolerance and bigotry that runs deep through American culture toward Jews, gays, racial minorities, and women.

When you are done laughing, Borat's disturbing message about how some Americans really feel toward "the other" remains with you-- and that message is not funny. 

Media Spin Impacts Viewer Perceptions of "Facts"

My friend and long-time co-seminarian at the Aspen Institute, James Beldock, recently posted an interesting piece on his blog about television news viewers' factual misperceptions of stories by the major networks, ranking FOX News, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, and CNN and comparing them all to the print media.  He wrote this following his participation in the Socrates Society July seminar on "Media and Our Values", led by former FCC chairman Michael Powell.

Three interesting takeaways for me from the post--

(1) FOX appears to make it most easy for viewers to draw incorrect conclusions about the facts;

(2) PBS appears to be the most factually correct in conveying reality to its viewers, even more correct than the print media;

(3) Let's remember that FOX has many more viewers than PBS.  What's wrong with this picture? 

I am sorry to have missed this year's Socrates gathering due to my trip to the Middle East-- I hear that the seminars were superb, as we expect them to be!