Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: [...]
Well, even though I just recently put to bed my annual list of the “Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010,” I’ve already started investigating what new titles we’ll need to pay attention to in 2011. Accordingly, I’ve started this list and hope that others can suggest other books I may have missed. Here’s what [...]
As I’ve noted here before, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has an ongoing proceeding asking “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” The agency has hosted two workshops on the issue and a third is scheduled for June 15th at the National Press Club. Recently, the FTC released a 47-page staff discussion draft entitled “Potential [...]
Can we steer people toward hard news — and get them to financially support it — through the use of “news vouchers” or “public interest vouchers”? That’s the subject of this latest installment in my ongoing series on proposals to have the government play a greater role in the media sector in the name of [...]
[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I [...]
Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.” Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies: newspaper people will use their last drops of ink [...]
This catfight between Ron Rosenbaum of Slate and Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine about the future of journalism in the Internet Age is quite a heated affair. But what I found most interesting about it is that it reflects one element of the Net “optimist — pessimist” divide that I have been writing about here [...]