The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action.

People could live almost anywhere they wanted, without foregoing opportunities for useful and fulfilling employment, by ÔtelecommutingÕ to their offices through an electronic highway. The best schools, teachers, and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability. Services that improve AmericaÕs health care system and respond to other important social needs could be available on-line, without waiting in line, when and where you need them.

Preface

While the highway metaphor illuminates the strengths of an interconnected society, it also suggests possible problems. Writing in the computer journal Communications of the ACM, Peter G. Neumann notes some of them: traffic jams, road kill, drunken drivers, and car jackers, as well as drag races, joy riders, toll bridges and crashes.

Chapter 10: Nongovernmental and Other Reforms

With a system of personal codes and the right telecommunications technology in the hands of all citizens, no longer would there be a practical reason why voting should necessarily by limited to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The people could be asked to vote electronically on any specific measure any time a public response is required. That it is technically feasible, however, does not mean it is politically possible or even desirable. Should we make provision for popular electronic balloting in out representative system? And if so, on what basis and how often? Should a limit be imposed on how many popular votes can be held in a year? … Issues are inevitably going to be raised in the electronic republic and need to be thoroughly explored.

Chapter 10: Nongovernmental and Other Reforms

The president should appoint, and the Congress confirm, a highly visible Federal Commission on Citizenship to prepare the people of the United States to exercise their civic responsibilities for the 21st century. The commission, with members from every state, should be charged with a broad mandate to recommend basic reforms in our political processes and institutions and to stimulate widespread public participation in the nation’s civic affairs. Its focus should be local as well as national … Its recommendations for involvement and reform should be designed specifically to be suitable for the telecommunications age.

Chapter 10: Nongovernmental and Other Reforms

The question is whether, in this age of interactive telecommunications, we can take advantage of the new technologies to help make modern deliberative democracy work better than it does today. Nobody yet knows for sure. Too few people are yet interconnected by means of computers; interactive technologies and skills are still only in the infancy. But much can be done even with today’s relatively primitive interactive technology (primitive compared only to what we can expect in the decade ahead) … Yet the United States is doing precious little in a serious and systematic way to explore how these new interactive communication systems can be designed to enhance the local and national democratic process. The information superhighway is being shaped by random forces for other purposes in a fluid marketplace. In the electronic republic, the cultivation of effective citizenship must be made a clear national priority and a vital and continuing element of public policy.

Chapter 9: Media Reform – Back to the Future

The First Amendment should apply to all media equally. The content of all media should be equally free from government intrusion. No prior restraint should be place on any medium, no matter what its format. No restrictions should be imposed on who may publish or transmit information. The maximum possible diversity of media ownership and control should be sought. There must be universal access to the emerging transmission networks; a public sphere should be reserved for all citizens for civic information, discussion, debate, and decision making. There must be a free, independent, and properly financed system of public telecommunications: That system, I believe, should be supported at least in part by fees from commercial telecommunications service providers and spectrum auctions.

Chapter 9: Media Reform – Back to the Future

The more complicated and diverse communications technology becomes, the simpler and more unambiguous our First Amendment protections should be. The electronic republic will be best served in the 21st century by returning to the late 18th century approach to the press that was specified in the Bill of Rights. Its content should be entirely free from ‘abridgment’ by the government. In that respect, tomorrow’s telecommunications media should enjoy the same freedom as yesterday’s print press. That freedom should hold no matter what form its content may take … The First Amendment’s centuries-old language, taken literally, should be the beacon for the future.

Chapter 8: The Perils and Promise of the Electronic Republic

Instead of ascending to a higher, more responsible level of information, the still critically important mainstream media are ratcheting down their standards to the lowest, most instantly accessible level of sensationalism and scandal. For an electronic republic, in which citizens have the capability to participate directly in making the day-to-day decisions of government, this is an especially precarious and menacing problem … If our thesis is correct, that an electronic republic opens the way for the public at large to become the actual fourth branch of government, then it is essential that urgent steps be taken to improve the quality of citizen deliberation in the public sphere.

Chapter 8: The Perils and Promise of the Electronic Republic

The multi-billion-dollar investments in the developing new telecommunications landscape are driven by a simple, irresistibly tempting vision – the prospect of converting every home and workplace in the nation into a computerized electronic movie theater; shopping mall; video game arcade; business, information and financial center; and perhaps even gambling casino, run by remote control and open all day long, every day of the week. The information highway will not be a freeway but an automated private toll road, traveled mostly by those who can afford the pay the price for the wealth of popular entertainment, information, data, communications, and transaction services it will carry.

Chapter 8: The Perils and Promise of the Electronic Republic

Optimists cheer the potential of the new electronic media … Individual citizens will be empowered to communicate directly with their leaders, express their own opinions, ask their own questions, and ultimately make their own judgments about laws, policies, and affairs of the the state … Pessimists see the dire consequences for the future of democracy in an electronic republic. They distrust the judgment of the people at large who, as James Madison suggests, are too easily “misled by the artful representations of interested men” and “overcome by irregular passion.” These pessimists conjure up images of rule by an ignorant, ill-informed majority, poorly served by “the degrading effects of the triviality, banality and vulgarity” of television … Another group of critics fears that the inordinate power of a rich and privileged few … In place of democratic pluralism, they argue, we have a dominant telecommunications industry, owned and controlled by a shrinking oligopoly of powerful corporate interests, gatekeepers to the flow of ideas and information.