5 pages, due 22 October 2002

These topics invite you to "intervene" in one of three recent discussions related to our recent readings in McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Each suggests that you do some further reading and/or draw on your own experience of the uses of new information technologies. Each tries to point you to a way of focusing a 5-page essay in argument and analysis, but it is up to you to give your essay both its particular focus and its "substance," drawn from reading and browsing the web. Write for an audience that needs to understand, in detail the issues you are addressing: your empirical audience (at a minimum, this instructor) is far from knowing everything about either your topic or your sources. You are encouraged to print out key sources other than those referred to in the topics and attach them to your essay; this system worked well with Paper #4 on the propaganda model. But you should ALSO write as though those sources were NOT available to your reader; your own text and quotations and your "Works Cited" list should convey all that he or she needs to know about the scope and substance of your argument.

Cass Sunstein's article "The Daily We" (which you should read together with the discussion it engendered in the Boston Review online at http://bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.nclk) espouses a plausible but untested thesis: that increasingly sophisticated "filtering" of news and other Internet content is likely to deprive users of the exposure to the robust variety of viewpoints and information to which they normally have access. His "thought experiment" (in the section "Individual Design") is worth paying attention to in detail; he imagines a none-too-far-off world where vegetarians would read nothing but vegetarians and Nazis would encounter only the views of Nazis through their personally customized menus of Web fare.

Read the short articles in the Boston Review responding to him (especially those by Rosen, Garfinkel, Jenkins, and McChesney). Then devise a suitably ingenious test of his thesis that you can carry out on the Internet. Garfinkel may give you some ideas here, but then his own test is based on the fact that he's a published author mentioned frequently on the Web; your own name, alas, may not (yet) give you as much leverage over Web contents. One good way to proceed is to look for Websites devoted to an issue on which you have strong views -- gun control, perhaps, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or globalization, or the preservation of the snail darter or the spotted owl -- and do a first-order web search with a major search engine. (Okay, everyone will use Google, but some other engines are nearly as "smart" and voluminous: for recommendations, see the UC Berkeley site at http://www .lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/SearchEngines.html.) Starting with sites congenial to your viewpoint, start making "paths" through the Web and find out easy or how difficult it is to encounter genuinely new information that makes you think or views that are significantly different from yours. Is Sunstein right in suggesting that you minimize your chances of encountering alternative views and information through "general interest intermediaries? Do your researches convince you that the Internet has lead or will lead to the abolition of public forums or "speakers' corners" such as those Sunstein speaks of? If you encounter actual discussion -- through blogs or bulletin boards -- does that discussion seem to narrow debate or perhaps to enhance its quality by giving it focus and shared premises?

Don't hesitate to come up with a cleverer way of testing the views of Sunstein and his commentators than that suggested here.

McChesney gives First Amendment "absolutists" a very hard time in Chapter 6 of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: he virtually accuses the "ACLU liberals" of being dupes of or shills for the corporate interests sponsoring a "commercialized First Amendment" that is bound to favor the First Amendment rights of those who have the means to promote their views over those who don't and who would extend to commercial speech all the protections that traditionally accrue to political or content-neutral speech. He makes reference to a 17 July 1997 Nation symposium entitled "Speech and Power: Is First Amendment Absolutism Obsolete?" which you can recover through C.U.L.'s electronic resources by looking for the "Networked Resource" code for the Nation and searching ProQuest on "First Amendment Absolutism." (The address generated when I tried this was http://proquest. umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000012924288&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1& Idx=2&Sid=1&RQT=309, if it's any help.)

Consider McChesney's position with reference to views expressed in this symposium. In this chapter and in the "Conclusion" to RM, PD he is quite clear about the kinds of media reform he favors, and most of them would affront a strict First Amendment absolutist like Floyd Abrams, the ACLU counsel he quotes from the Nation symposium. But: are strong (let's not say "absolutist") First Amendment views as antithetical to media regulation and reform as he suggests they are? Could one make a reasonable adjustment between kinds of regulation he proposes and robust First Amendment views that privilege the kinds of speech McChesney would favor -- without, indeed, throwing important the First Amendment babies out with the bathwater of "oligopolistic" control?

You might find it useful to focus on one issue: campaign contribution reform. McChesney clearly favors it; the ACLU has historically supported the First Amendment rights of those who want to express their political views through campaign contributions. (See pp. 259 ff of RM, PD. ) Interestingly, the ACLU has modified its position since 1976, the year of Buckley v. Valeo, a case in which it supported candidates' and contributors' rights to let their money do the talking; you can learn more about this by going to the ACLU website via Google or doing a Web search on "ACLU" and "Buckley" or "Campaign Finance." The focusing question here, in any case, is: just how hard are the hard choices that have to be made about free expression when corporate and media money enter the political process? Is there a First-Amendment-friendly way of addressing one (at least) of the problems McChesney finds in the system?

The third "discussion" is a not-altogether-imaginary one between current Internet utopians like John Perry Barlow and current copyright law as embodied in the 1976 Act and enhanced and extended through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Barlow is cited with some contempt by McChesney at RM,PD 120 for his famous dismissal of the big media's invasion of the Internet as "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" when the oceanic Internet with its "five hundred milliion channels" would devour monopoly power and set consumers free.

Barlow is also the author of a famous manifesto "The Economy of Ideas" published in an early edition of Wired magaine (issue 2.03, March 1994; online at http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html": it makes extravagant predictions about the future of information and of intellectual property law that have not so far come true in the increasingly corporatized world of the media. Here, a good focusing question is whether the Internet does indeed have the promise to liberate information and ideas from the proprietary boundaries in which U.S. and world law have not ceased to try to confine it -- whether, to quote Barlow, "information wants to be free" and whether we should respect that desire at the expense of those with proprietary stake in it. Your own views on the ethics and legalities of widespread Internet-based copying of intellectual property like music and films should lead you to try to clarify -- not, indeed, solve -- the "discussion" between the visionaries and the lawyers on this question. You can learn something about copyright law at http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/ copyright.html and something about the DMCA at .http://www.educause. edu/issues/dmca.html?.