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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 18:39:31 GMT
From: Rich Winkel <rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
Subject: DRIVE-THROUGH DEMOCRACY

/** media.issues: 81.0 **/
** Topic: Article on Info Superhighway **
** Written  9:06 am  Jun  7, 1994 by web:robrien in cdp:media.issues **

This article appeared in the June 1994 edition of _This Magazine_.
Permission to redistribute electronically has been given by the author.

**************************************

DRIVE THROUGH DEMOCRACY
The Info Superhighway could be a virtual democracy, or a
shopping mall in box. Vote now.

by Mark Surman

I was sitting on the edge of my seat. Right there in front of our
televisions, we were about to vote on NAFTA. With my trusty
remote-control voting device in hand, I watched the experts
wrap up their arguments. Then the Democracy Channel's
smiling host came on the screen: "The NAFTA debate has been
brought to you with the generous support of General Motors,
General Electric and General Dynamics. We'll be back with the
vote after these brief commercial messages."

Though it wasn't up and running in time for the North American
free-trade agreement, there really is a Democracy Channel in
the works, and it will have commercials. Dreamed up by former
Viacom executive Jeffrey Reiss, the Channel will allow couch
potatoes to participate in "electronic town meetings," express
opinions on issues, and talk back to the pundits. And citizens
need not worry that democracy will take a big bite out of their
pocket books - financial backing is coming from
Telecommunications, Inc. (TCI), the world's largest cable
operator.

Interested in this unlikely marriage of commerce and
democracy, I phoned Reiss at TCI headquarters in Englewood,
Colorado. There, Reiss' sidekick and Democracy Channel co-
architect Michael Lennon politely informed me that he and
Jeffrey were not talking to the press until the details of the
channel were firm (they still didn't know how much money TCI
would give them). "Until all the ducks are lined up," Lennon
said, "we don't want the spin doctors to get hold of this thing."

But based on the Info Superhighway plans that have
flooded Report on Business and The Financial Post over the
past few months, I suspect that we are the ducks and TCI
already owns all the spin doctors. Because the plans for the
Superhighway look more like a shopping centre than a town
hall.

The vaunted information highway promises to deliver
interactive communication to every home, office and public
park on the planet. It will be built on the foundations of our
current cable and telephone systems, with the addition of miles
of fibre-optic cable. The surrounding hype seems to have
sparked a cyber-democracy gold rush. Politicians like U.S.
Vice-President Al Gore and New Brunswick Premier Frank
McKenna, have opined that the Superhighway will mean the
rebirth of democracy and citizen empowerment.

There may be some truth to these claims. Replacing our
one-way media with two-way systems could create a more
democratic communications culture, permitting ordinary people
to produce and widely distribute media from their basements.
Unfortunately, the people who are building the Superhighway
don't seem to have this kind of democracy in mind.

The architects of the Superhighway are the same people
who have spent the past 20 years buying up media production
and distribution systems all over the world. In Canada, this
includes high-minded corporate leaders like Ted Rogers of
Rogers Communications, who recently announced that his
contribution to paving Canada's information landscape would be
to take over rival media giant Maclean Hunter. Pending CRTC
approval, this $3.5-billion deal would make Rogers one of two
head traffic cops on the Trans-Canada Infobahn, controling the
market for of a third of Canada's cable subscribers, and large
chunks of the Canadian publishing, paging, cellular and long-
distance industries.

The other big player is Stentor, a cartel of Canada's
regional Bell companies. On April 5, Stentor announced that it
would plug $8.5-billion into a fibre-optic network that would be
able to handle video-on-demand, two-way video conferencing,
and so on, in order to compete with the big cable companies
like Rogers. Such competition may sound positive, but as the
newspaper, movie and network TV industries have
demonstrated in the past, rivalry between a few massive media
corporations hardly guarantees information democracy. In fact,
these electronic fantasies are directly inspired by media-merger
mania south of the border: Rogers himself has proclaimed that
Canada needs to build a "Time-Warner of the North."

Not only are we are keeping up with the Americans, we
should feel proud that a Canadian company will be the first to
build a fully functional Superhighway. On January 24, Canada's
third-largest cable company, Groupe Videotron, announced that
a $750-million system called UBI (you-bee) would be up and
running in the Saguenay region of Quebec by spring, 1995.
Videotron's partners in UBI (Universal, Bi-directional and
Interactive) include Hearst Corporation, Hydro-Quebec, Loto-
Quebec, the National Bank of Canada, and Canada Post
Corporation. According to Videotron's glossy press kit, UBI
will provide its users with pay-per-view movies (all programing
may eventually be pay-per-view, or pay-per-minute, on the
Infobahn), interactive sports coverage (you choose the camera
angles), lotteries, home automation, home shopping and home
banking.

There wasn't any mention of democracy in the brochure,
so I asked Jean-Paul Galarneau, Videotron's director of
communications, whether he saw any connection between his
company and the hype about virtual democracy. He sees the
link: "Every year there is a world-wide competition of the best
French language advertising. Last year it was held in Montreal.
We thought that the public should decide which commercial
would get the Grand Prize. So we showed all of the
commercials on TV, and each commercial had a phone number
attached to it so the public could phone in to an electronic
system and vote. Within only a few hours of the voting, we
were able to present the Grand Prize."

Aside from this empowering tale, Galarneau didn't want
to spend too much time chatting about virtual democracy. He
seemed more comfortable talking about exciting and liberating
initiatives like this: "Canada Post has... lists that can pinpoint
certain types of consumers. With this marketing division in
place, Canada Post will be the first one on the bandwagon with
direct-mail flyers on The Highway."

This indicates the kind of democracy that really excites
Superhighway visionaries - the right to choose between a large
selection of products. This consumerist bias is evident even in
the technology that you will "interact" with at home, like the
UBI interface: It includes a remote control, a credit card slot, a
credit card PIN keypad and a printer to spit out receipts. It
looks like a mix between a cable converter and a twenty-first
century cash register.

As with most new technologies, the consumer info
highway is being designed and built with almost no public
consultation. In early February, the Information Technology
Association of Canada - which includes Stentor, Rogers, IBM,
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and others - held a conference in
Toronto called, "Powering Up North America: Realizing The
Information Infrastructure For A Knowledge-Based Continent."
Though the public was welcome to participate in the brainstorm,
they had to pay $900-a-head if they wanted to get past the front
door.

ITAC didn't really think that average folks would be
interested in the conference anyway. In a January 26 Globe and
Mail advertising supplement promoting their conference, ITAC
took the time to list "the diversity of interests who will be
affected by the Information Highway... enterprise leaders;
corporate alliance and change planners; competition catalyzers;
information managers; policy makers; senior managers;
telecommunications executives; and marketers." It seems ITAC
believes this is the public that ought to design the virtual terrain
across which all information will flow.

And it looks like the Canadian government agrees. On
March 17, Industry Minister John Manley announced the
creation of a federal Information Highway Advisory Council.
Telephone and cable companies like the Stentor group, Rogers
and Videotron make up the bulk of participants. Until public
pressure forced a change of mind, government officials even
proposed that most of the council's meetings be held in private -
- even though the stated purpose of the council is to provide
"advice on creating an open, accessible information highway."

Luckily, there are a few people who disagree with the
position taken by ITAC and the feds. They include millions of
computer network users and thousands of computer network
organizers. These people argue that there is more to virtual
democracy than living-room cash registers - and they have
proof, because they are already using an information system that
allows people to create their own communications and send it
out to the world. This system is the Internet.

The Consumer Superhighway and the Internet represent
two opposing models of interactive communication. The
Superhighway most likely will be organized on what Electronic
Frontier Foundation chair Mitchell Kapor calls "the broadcast
model." In this paradigm, a small group of people own the
system and decide what gets air time. According to Kapor, this
model "breeds consumerism, passivity, crassness and
mediocrity." In contrast, the Internet is a network of computers
and data lines that are owned by thousands of different
companies and public institutions. If one of these lines or
computers disappears, information can simply be rerouted.
Also, the content of the Internet is programed by the people who
use it, rather than the people who own it. Kapor argues that a
system like this "breeds critical thinking, activism, democracy
and quality."

In fact, the Internet and the many networks attached to it
have often been used to by-pass corporate and government
information gatekeepers. During the Gulf War, the computer
networks became a "people's news wire," providing a global
source for information that was not "Cleared By The U.S.
Military." According to Rory O'Brien of Web, Canada's social-
change computer network, that included information about
Patriot missiles causing damage to civilian areas and peace
demonstrations that never made it on the six o'clock news.

The multitude of discussions that take place on-line are
further proof that democracy is alive and well and living in
cyberspace. Perhaps most exciting is that individuals talk on the
Internet who are otherwise kept apart by social and physical
barriers. On the Victoria FreeNet, for example, discussions
about Clayoqout Sound resulted in a pro-logging SHARE
group member coming over to the side of the environmentalists.

Incendiary talk like this, however, may not make it onto
the Superhighway. With all of the lucrative home shopping and
movie channels planned, who will make space for money-losers
like a social change channel? Of course the Internet could co-
exist with the Consumer Superhighway, but it would quickly be
out-glitzed by its younger cousin. Democratic two-way
communication would best be served by lanes on the
Superhighway based on the Internet model of public control.
These would provide free public access, two-way video
programmed by the public, and global connectivity.

But this will only happen if the public stands up for its
interests. The regulations and decisions that define Canada's
electronic landscape will be made over the next few years,
almost irreversibly. As Victoria information activist Clyde Bion
Forrest says, "Right now we are at a really critical time in terms
of what we do with this thing. It could become just like
television." In fact, Canada experienced a similar "critical time"
in the early 1970s, when the cable regulations were being
written by the CRTC. Members of the public then made sure
that they were included, demanding and winning space for
community television on cable systems from Labrador to
Vancouver Island.

Two efforts to secure some kind of public
Superhighway access are already underway in Canada. One of
them is the FreeNet movement, which is building free, Internet-
connected computer networks on the public library model in 23
towns and cities across the country. FreeNets can familiarize the
public with interactive technologies and provide a lobbying base
for public access to future systems. The second group is the
Coalition For Public Information (CPI), one of the few non-
corporate voices on the federal advisory committee. The CPI
has had some success in keeping the process open and getting
public issues on the agenda.

In addition, it's important to keep global inequities and
the Internet's own democratic shortcomings in mind. Forty
per cent of the world's population are without access to
electricity and 65 per cent have never used a telephone. Since
the Superhighway corporations plan to install their systems
solely in locales that can afford them, global information
inequity is likely to increase rather than decrease. And the
Internet, despite its openness, is rife with sexism and
technocentrism.

The Web, along with its sister networks in the
Association for Progressive Communication (APC), is taking
steps toward addressing these concerns. For example, all of the
staff at Nicaragua's APC network, Nicario, are women. APC
networks in the U.K., Sweden and Ecuador have been headed
by women. And APC members are working with people in the
South to develop systems and software that will allow them to
run autonomous networks in their own regions.

All these groups can provide a solid foundation, but as
New York's public access collective, Paper Tiger Television,
points out, there need to be more grassroots efforts at "staking a
claim in cyberspace." If such a claim is not made, we'll be stuck
with shopping malls in a box. Or, in the words of
communications scholar Herb Schiller, "a corporate pipeline
into our heads."

SIDEBAR
Canadian Cyberspace Heroes

Several Canadian groups are working to ensure that democracy in
cyberspace is more than virtual. Here's how to contact them:

The Coalition for Public Information, c/o Ontario Library
Association, 100 Lombard St., Suite 303, Toronto, Ont., M5C
1M3; phone - 416-363-3366; e-mail - moorel@gov.on.ca

Freenet, c/o Telecommunities Canada/Victorial Free-Net
Association, Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Centre,
#203-1110 Government St., Victoria, B.C., V8W 1Y2; phone -
604-727-7057; e-mail - shearman@freenet.victoria.bc.ca

Web, c/o NirvCentre/Web, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 104,
Toronto, Ont., M5V 3A8; phone - 416-596-0212; e-mail -
support@web.apc.org

** End of text from cdp:media.issues **

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This material came from PeaceNet, a non-profit progressive networking
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Art McGee [amcgee@netcom.com]
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