roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV - PUBLIC

roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Henrymp@aol.com
Sat, 7 Jan 1995 12:35:54 -0500 

Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 12:35:54 -0500
From: Henrymp@aol.com
Message-Id: <950107123554_1608066@aol.com>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC


Vigdor Schreibman wrote:
>>
>>  2.  Build an infrastructure (information, telecommunications,
>>education, sustainable development) that is not based on self-interest,
>>or the profit motive, but is instead designed to serve the paramount
>>public goods that Americans find most important (such as those included
>>in the parenthetical preceding phrase).

Brad Cox responded:
>
>Public good? Supplied no doubt by such pinnacles of fair-minded 
>success as the US Postal Service, Universities, Hospitals, and 
>Soviet bureaucracy?
>I suspect Newt has rather different ideas. As do the U.S people, 
>thank god.


I haven't heard anyone promote a bureaucracy.  Quite the contrary.  
I have heard many in this discussion promote open, free, diverse, 
community oriented communication.  This communication requires a 
conduit... _channel space_... spectrum...accessible to all for the 
transmission of ideas.  I have heard support for funding for 
communication _equipment_, to remove barriors of economics: (otherwise, 
it's just us rich white guys talking to each other! ...not very 
constructive).  And finally, I have heard many state that _training_ 
is required to get our communities "on-line".

This is not a bureaucracy.  It is called infrastructure.  It's roads.  
It's free, unbiased passage.  It's roadside assistance.  It seems to me 
that those who are afraid of open discussion for and by citizens, 
equally, are the ones advacating a bureaucracy to control the content.  
Sure we will need rules of the road.  We, the people, set those rules.  
But we will go no where without infrastructure.

Our new speaker of the House of Representatives has supported and 
utilized this type of infrastructure.  I think you'll have to find 
another ally.

In Alliance for Community Media...

Mike Henry
<henrymp@aol.com>

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