Al Gore has a new book The Assault on Reason out on Tuesday (May 22nd, 2007). Time Magazine ran an excerpt. In it, Gore points to the rise of the television media as an assault on the first amendment. Not that television is necessarily censored but it has become such a visual stimulus of divertissement (take the rise of reality TV and pop celebrities in the last 15 years) as opposed to a source of knowledge and education in the affairs and direction of our state.
The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.
But a new media might just bring a new day in the political process and the direction of society as a whole. Today, the Internet is making its mark. Anyone can be a publisher with public forums and open affordable lines of communication. We can see how social media sites (digg, reddit) are playing a part in the prominence of certain presential candidates who are not backed by big money (Ron Paul and Mike Gravel).
Not to mention civil liberties. Four people were arrested after the mob stoning death of a 17 year-old girl last month in Iraq. It was filmed on cell phones, broadcast online through blogs and made the front page of digg. Without online attention, one has to wonder if the murder of this teenager—who fell in love with someone of another religion—would have gone unnoticed, paving the way to more stonings. Now, reported by mainstream outlet CNN, along with the arrests, the top official in the Iraqi town is being removed from his position.
Getting back to the point of the Internet and democracy, Gore warns that we must protect the Internet at all cost:
We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.
The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered.
One could argue that censorship is occuring right now, as the US governement is restricting use of the Internet to troops in Iraq.
