Friday, June 6, 2003
A spectrum of questions
In reference to the Bush Administration's planned year long review of government radio spectrum use, Kevin Werbach asks,
Will this simply transfer spectrum from government agencies and the military to private licensees, or will the administration consider the more revolutionary change of opening up some of that spectrum on an unlicensed basis?
If the democrats are the party of weath redistribution, and the republicans the party of wealth creation (an old and generally sensible republican claim), another question then becomes, Will the republican-led congress vote with The People for more open and free common spectrum to support more invention and entrepreneurship, as we're seeing with wi-fi today, or will it vote with the big boys and auction the spectrum off to the highest big boy bidders?
Bush says,
We must unlock the economic value and entrepreneurial potential of U.S. spectrum assets while ensuring that sufficient spectrum is available to support critical government functions,
"Economic value" translates to "auctions." "Entrepreneurial potential" translates to "open spectrum."
Now the question isn't how to bet on the outcome. It's how to influence the outcome.
Digging Dean
In the Official Howard Dean Weblog, we may have (far as I know, which admittedly is not far enough) a model politcal campaign blog.
What makes a good poliblog? Human beings speaking in human voices (like Matthew Gross, who signed the latest several posts). Making the ends the means. Links galore. Cross-crediting where due. Permalinks. RSS. Involvement. All that stuff is good to see, regardless of the policies involved.
Are any other candidates even close?
By the way, Hugh Hewitt in The Weekly Standard says "The Big Four" pundit bloggers (Reynolds, Sullivan, Kaus and Volokh) are "poised tremake the political landscape." Of course, the Standard is a conservative pub. No mention of Daily Kos, Max Speak, Altercations and The Agonist. This thing will work both ways. And toward the middle too. Thanks to Jim Flowers for the pointer
While we're talking politics, there's this from another Dean. John. Counsel to Nixon. Yes, that Dean.
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked.
Thanks to Sean-Paul at The Agonist for the pointage.
Q.O.D.
Quote of the Day, from Phil Wolff:
RSS newsreaders are TiVo for bloggers.
Normally I'd append a pointer to the end of the post that occasioned it, but I thought this was too good not to give a post of its own.
I responded to Phil's post here.
This also seems like a good time to point back to Which Side is TiVo On?, which I wrote in September 2001.
The biggest Digital ID problem
The challenge is to reconcile two complementary yet superficially opposed points of view.
On the one head, Aberdeen's Identity Theft Problem abstract, dryly pointed to by Eric Norlin. Aberdeen says ID theft is a multi-$trillion problem for business.
On the other head, there are the natual creeps people get around the idea of new they-identify-us systems of any kind, even though our wallets are full of them. For that we have Stand, an organization in the U.K. that has successfully opposed government-enabled snoopage, among other things. Their site is titled A Cynic's Guideto Entitlement (*cough* ID *cough) Cards.
My own libertarian take on the matter is to start by keeping the government out of it.
More blog bashing
Simon Dumenco gives TiVo and blogs a sarcastic treatment in American Idle, in New York Metro (New York Magazine too? Dunno).
For examples he points to a bunch of sites I don't frequent, plus TiVo, which I don't use (but would if the company worked something out with DishTV, which instead prefers to sell captive customers its own DVR). Still, some of what he says rings true, some false.
True:
Sorry. I thought I saw something, but I can't find it now.
False:
But I’d argue that certain information-delivering technologies — like TiVo and blogs — up the ante so dramatically, and so seamlessly, that they create an entirely different sort of interpassive lifestyle, one that’s, well, hyperpassive.
Wtf? Let's get this straight: A TiVo is a machine. A blog is a journal. Like comparing apples and noises.
By the way, if I ever think what I'm doing here is "information delivery," or akin to television, I'll stop it in half a heartbeat.
More:
A home video library, or a physical collection of information of any sort, exists. The pleasure derives from the ownership of objects, but those objects—the piles of unread papers and magazines and books, the stacks of unwatched videotapes—also constantly taunt you, reminding you of their presence.
Readers do that for me. One emailed me three times yesterday. Good stuff too.
He goes on:
A machine removes that punishing presence. A blog, for instance, constantly pushes even slightly stale talking points to the margins (or the bottom of the homepage, or the archive). And while in hope-springs-eternal obliviousness you can always think, in the back of your mind, Oh, I’ll go back and catch up on what I missed or I’ll go back and read the article that was linked to, chances are it’s not going to happen because there won’t be any tangible evidence of your failure to do so.
What’s more, a machine erases not only physical boundaries (the information object vanishes) but psychological boundaries as well. The point where you begin and where the machine-generated awareness ends begins to blur. (I’m starting to feel like I really have watched Tina and Clay.)
The blog reader isn’t thinking, Jim Romenesko is smart about media for me or Elizabeth Spiers is drolly engaged in Manhattanism for me. The reader is thinking, I’m smart about media and I’m drolly engaged in Manhattanism.
And I really hate to do this, but I can’t help but bring up that kid, Jayson what’s-his-name, at the Times , who sat in his apartment with a laptop and a cell phone, collected all manner of information from disparate sources, and said to himself not only I am knowledgeable but I am a reporter.
For him, firsthand experience was secondary: Life was blog, blog was life.
The truth is, I’m getting a little blurry myself on some of the boundaries (maybe this column is a cry for help), including the shape and scope of my own argument. If I’m lucky, a clever blogger will summarize this column and crystallize its meaning not only for other readers but for me. (I can’t tell you how many times Romenesko has blogged me and I’ve thought, Oh, so that was my point.)
Okay, I'll bite.
Simon, you're conflating a whole buncha crap here and not making sense. I won't even bother quoting the earlier references to Lacan, Zizek and "interpassivity." You may be right about TiVo, but you're fulla gas on blogs.
What's going on with blogs is the opposite of interpassivity. It's inteactivity. Literally. There is an immediate, first-hand, involved quality to writing here that doesn't happen elsewhere. I won't idealize it. It has shortcomings. But whatever it is, it's a breed apart from broadcasting and print journalism. Instead, it's a lot like what Benjamin Franklin was up to with Poor Richard's Almanac: personal, engaged, often quotable, sometimes enlightening, still experimental, and — what the hell: fun.
By the way, while you were writing about getting nagged by unread papers and magazines, bloggers were nagging papers and magazines for washing their archives off the Web. And you know what? We got somewhere with it, too. At the New York Fucking Times, no less. Interactivity, dude. Involvement. Making stuff happen. Nothing passive about it.
Finally:
Meanwhile, I have to ask: Did you read this essay or did you read about it?
A friend told me about it. Then I read it. Then I blogged about it. The beat goes on.