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Sunday, December 8, 2002
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conference
on the next really big thing that could really change everything -
spectrum
Lessig Blog posted on Dec 8,2002 at 11:47 AM
We're holding a conference on March 1 at Stanford about spectrum
policy. If that sounds boring, then you really need to pay a bit more
attention to the next extraordinarily important policy issue affecting
innovation and growth. There is about to be a very significant shift in
how spectrum is managed. One school says it should be propertized;
another says it should be treated as a commons. Read: auctions vs. WiFi;
or more auctions vs. mesh networks. The question for the conference is
which model makes most sense. The day will end with a "moot court" which
will be judged by FCC Chairman Powell, Judge Alex Kozinski, economist
Harold Demsetsz, and possibly Senator Barbara Boxer. Go here to learn more.
7:59:45 AM 
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"After a night's sleep the news is as
indispensable as the breakfast," Thoreau wrote sarcastically in 1854,
about the time people began to use the phrase "the news" to refer to the
bundle of information that's dumped on the public's doorstep on a daily
basis.
That ritual of daily news consumption was a "mass ceremony," as the
political scientist Benedict Anderson describes it, which shaped the
sense of community essential to national consciousness.
But "the news of the day" was never more than a convenient fiction, and
one that the all-news broadcasters and the Internet have made it
increasingly hard to sustain.
So, I wondered, what is "news" if it is not separate from the "now?"
And I realized with a start, it is gone but not gone - merely not
separate any more. The key news
has always been what is in front of us, what our conciousness filters
out of the torrent coming from our senses. We are designed to filter the
noise out of the signal and, once more, we must rely on our own
filtering and focusing of what comes from our now augmented senses. And,
I suspect, we need to find another convenient fiction to shape a
sense of community - physical and digital.
7:15:16 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Russ Savage.
Last update: 5/8/06; 9:03:02 PM.
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