global civic-related communications

Fun with pounding out vitriolic posts only to get up on my high horse. I admit, it has a marked disadvantage of preventing me from seeing eye to eye with anyone around me. I mean, I could understand the concept of your fanaticism, but I am utterly unable to relate. Don’t get me wrong, I understand frustration and feeling insulted by people who don’t share my point of view, but I have no compassion for violence. Zero tolerance.

It seems like all the serious questions have been asked, so I’m going to take this opportunity to be a little light-hearted… It makes me wonder how long it will be before commercial interests will make the internet as irrelevant as TV has become to me.

Already the nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and non-discriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits to a person’s number of downloads. For your set example, to your appealing yet astronomical amount of amateur pornographic media streams or even online-dating e-mail messages that you could send or receive.

While it comes as little shock that the telephone and cable companies want to make more money, it gets even most surprising to me… considering how important free access is to the internet, why haven’t I heard that both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future.
Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

To me, the major appeal of the web is the free access to information that I would otherwise never have access to, in particular, freedom of expression in/and access to weblogs (blogs for short). Material written by people much like myself with diverse views and opinions.

It seems everyone is wanting to be pro-active. I also live in that category and let me tell you... We’re living in surreal, bizarre, and dangerous times so you might as well sit back and watch the show. Reasonable people try to deal with stuff reasonably, but are there reasonable people? All I have observed in the past few years are narrow minded people sucking at the media tit for what to be upset with next. How about understanding? How about the justification for understanding?

While I do access much of my news on the web, with a few notable exceptions there’s little that I couldn’t already get from my local newspaper. However, I agree whole heartedly if we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" we will permeate not only our information infrastructure but global society and culture as well.

For this administration “public good” seems to be synonymous with making money. They seem unable to see the fallacy in arguments like “What’s good for GM is good for America.” One almost wonders if this administration isn’t consciously trying to implement the philosophy made so famous in ‘Brave New World.’
Are you old enough to remember when you bought cable TV to avoid the constant commercials, or when you went to the movies to see the movies and not an endless string of commercials, previews, and more commercials as you wait for the show you came to see actually begin? It would seem that we’ve been dealt unreasonable times in which to live.