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April 21, 2007

The Loud Echo and Communications Policy

In the technology industry, much attention is paid to disruptive technologies and other trends that have the potential to force rapid change on a given industry. We all get caught up in "overnight sensations," and this is not surprising. Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a great deal about a more "slow-change" trend; a trend that may be occurring so gradually that its impact is only realized in hindsight.

It's the generational-transition from baby-boomers to the Net Generation, and its potential impact to public policy in the areas of communications and media. My thinking on this has led me to conclude that private-sector communications and media companies; whether incumbent or competitive; broadcast or interactive; offline or online; have a lot to get ready for, as the old methods of influencing policy-making cease to operate. But I'm getting ahead of my own argument, so I'll back up and explain.

What prompted me to think about this at first was the infamous “series of tubes” metaphor used by Senator Ted Stevens to describe the way the Internet works. Despite the generous ammunition the Senator served up for nighttime talk show hosts and many others, it occurred to me that the episode brought into clear focus some very serious issues; the state of U.S. broadband policy and the country’s downhill slide in world standing.

I was inspired to re-read a book called Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott, a brilliant business strategist who has written extensively about digital transformation. Published in 1998, the book is based on Tapscott’s research on the so-called Net Generation and how it may affect society. The following excerpt helps to understand its premise.

Eighty-eight million offspring produced by 85 million baby boomers have eclipsed their parents in size and impact. The youngest of these kids are still in their diapers, and the eldest are just turning twenty. As N-Gen culture is extended into society, every institution will have to change. The N-Gen will transform business. As they stream into the marketplace, power and authority will shift towards the consumer.

Tapscott’s book is one of those that could have been shelved (and it was in my case) due to the fact that it was written roughly within the dot-com era, but I found instead that it was ahead of its time. In my view, it laid the groundwork for many of the trends that are now considered leading-edge; Web 2.0, social networking, long tail theory, peer production, Wikinomics and many others.

As I made my way through the book again, I started to notice its ideas playing out in my own family and household. My children, ages eight and seven, had become engrossed in the hugely-popular online virtual world of Club Penguin. The game basically allows children to create an avatar (a penguin, go figure) and “waddle around” a virtual world, interacting with other penguins, gaining points (a currency of sorts), purchase igloos (homes) and various other virtual-world concepts. Increasingly, I found my daughter playing the game at the same time she was talking to her best friend in the neighborhood by cell-phone. This was a type of interaction and community-building that even I had trouble grasping; a melding of online social networking and old-world communication. As I sat with her and observed, I realized that to my daughter, these two worlds were seamless; natural.

Then I started to realize the rapid rate at which communications and media were becoming platform issues for elected officials and the profound impact that personal technology and peer production (e.g. camera phones, blogs, video) were having on public figures. Examples appeared almost daily. And events that had been happening over the past few years started to have a context:

A website called Techpresident is covering “how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign.” A complete merger of President 2008 and Web 2.0. Very cool I thought.

The firing of Don Imus for his racial remark recently was put in motion by a blogger. Eric Chabrow wrote a fantastic article recently where he referred to Wikinomics forces at play, saying:

What makes Imus' dismissal different from [Dan] Rather's departure from the airwaves is speed. Today, the tumult created by various media working in unintentional harmony can results in quick actions as the community comes to a rapid consensus. About 20 months passed from the ill-fated 60 Minutes report to the time Rather last walked out the doors on West 57th Street. Imus was silenced in eight days.

In 2006, Virginia gubernatorial candidate George Allen used the word macaca to refer to S.R. Sidarth, a young man of Indian ancestry, but who was born and raised in Virginia, while Sidarth was filming Allen’s political event as a "tracker" for the opposing campaign. The rest is history.

Howard Dean’s extensive use of the Internet in his run for the 2004 Presidency is now legendary, and has been mimicked by virtually every serious candidate in 2008. This has evolved to the point where Clinton, Edwards and Obama all have virtual campaign sites set up in Second Life (although they appear unofficial), the popular online virtual world.

In doing a quick review at a local level, I found that the average age of a Mayor in the top 300 U.S. cities is 56. If you reverse this timeline, you find that the average U.S. Mayor graduated college roughly 5-7 years before the introduction of the personal computer.

Now, to be clear, I am not trying to generalize or stereotype here by suggesting that anyone over a certain age is a luddite. That would be unfair, and it is clearly not the case. But the concept of having the loud echo of Tapscott’s Net Generation enter communications policy-making roles over a span of just ten years or so suggests that change will happen; and that change will happen at a very rapid rate. Time is compressed through technology and communications. The pressure that may be placed on existing policy-makers who are not as progressive as this N-Gen crowd could be intense.

All of this convinces me that the phenomenon of community broadband, public broadband, municipal wireless; whatever one chooses to call it, is not a fad, but rather an inevitable continuation of forces that have been underway for quite a while. When looked at from the vantage point of communications policy, the N-Gen will accept nothing other than policies that promote what they have grown up believing to be the norm; low barriers to entry, infinite choices, the ability to peer-produce content. They will value having more options over strong brands. They will have little appreciation for policies that place more power in the hands of fewer companies. They will have little tolerance for well-established protections of any status quo.

Tapscott sums it all up with the following passage:

The technology innovation introduced to the baby boom – TV – had strong values. It assumed that communications should be controlled centrally, by broadcasters. These broadcasters understood your needs and desires for entertainment, news and information. They programmed, creating a schedule which they estimated corresponded to the largest masses.

Such values were enshrined by governments, which regulate TV, and the advertisers who dominate the medium. There is careful licensing of broadcasters to ensure that ideologies which challenge tenets of the social order do not have a loud or sustained voice.

The interactive media cherish a different set of values. These media embrace the two-way interactive model of the telephone and extend it a thousand fold. To Bell’s invention, the new media add information banks that can be created by anyone.

How will communications policy be re-shaped when the N-Gen is no longer simply playing the role of activist and policy advocate; but instead moving into the role of policy maker? Will this new generation be content to force-fit a converged voice-data, wired-wireless world into the ancient framework of "telecommunications vs. information services?" Will this generation prioritize over-arching, mega-telecom-reform-bills that seem obsolete at the time they are passed? Or will they look to the ordered chaos, grass-roots experimentation and other characteristics of unlicensed spectrum, community involvement and private-sector innovation for guidance? Remember, this is a generation that values more options over strong brands.

I believe the writing is already on the wall; from the defeat of state bills to limit community-choice in 2005, to the decreasing effectiveness of “think tanks” that are paid to write biased reports to influence policy-makers. These are ineffective strategies to influence communications policy already, and they will be even more ineffective in the future as the N-Gen becomes the majority.

Posted by Greg at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)