[9685] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A different perspective regarding priorities
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Drake)
Sun Jan 16 15:58:04 1994
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 1994 12:56:01 -0800
From: William Drake <wdrake@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: dave@oldcolo.com, postman@lists.psi.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, jrugo@nic.near.net
The Michael Schrage piece on "Let them read books" has been
Status: R
getting a lot of play on several lists. I agree with Sean
McLinden's comments, and would add the following two cents:
1. Schrage says that the notion that net access is important to
wealth and poverty is misguided, and reflects solely the
"paternalistic pretensions of a public policy elite." He provides
no argument about why the ability to access and use info capabilities
is NOT important to generating wealth, zillions of obvious examples
to the contrary. Nor is it obvious why the focus on universal service
in the NII debate is simply a matter of paternalism, or what explains
the bredth of that apparent paternalism, which goes pretty far beyond
the administration, which he clearly doesn't care for.
2. Schrage argues that promoting US is stupid because half of
the population is close to functionally illiterate. That's certainly
true, but hardly voids the goal of promoting net literacy as well
as the more generic type.
3. Schrage admits that US in telephony worked and was a good thing,
but says there's no reason to give priority to extending it to this
particular medium. Instead, he suggests, "it would be far more
logical and cost effective to give people subsidies for newspapers
and magazines," which are presumably more appropriate for those
teeming illiterate masses (they have pictures, after all). To make
the position even more strawmanish, he goes on to add that we might
as well subsidize US to TV, VCRs and phone answering machines while
we're at it. I'm not aware of anyone arguing that these media have
the same capacity to generate new wealth as info services, or are
preferable from an education/training standpoint to, say, net access
to libraries, etc etc. There *might* be an interesting argument
here---what are the properties of different media which provide
rationales for differential treatment in terms of economic and
social policy---but he certainly doesn't make it. It's just an
off the cuffer to dismiss US to nets.
4. His big conclusion is that it's misguided to invest in
technology rather than people. Talk about a false choice. The
administration can hardly be accused of inattention to the
importance of education and retraining generally; they're preparing
lots of proposals along those lines (of course, there's no money
to fund any of it, given that our entire tax structure is designed
to redistribute wealth upward) anyway.
The whole thrust of the piece is, the masses are too stupid to worry
about promoting US, and can't use the capabilities. Obviously,
there are enormous class and educational divisions in the US, and
not everyone will have much use for the internet and such. Which
services involve which requirements is hence a real issue. I can't see
how this piece makes a constructive contribution to that debate,
though.
"digital do-gooder" and "computationally compassionate" [whow, what
clever terms!] Bill
