Dear Colleagues,

As an addendum to (and agreement with) the positive portrayals of networked
life (see recent posts re Twitter and Networked Life) focused on the power
of the Internet paired with social networking technologies, I think it's
equally important to be keep a focus on debates about the policies that make
this infrastructure available, affordable, accessible, and democratic.
Perhaps not all necessarily "traditional" sociology topics, but important to
keeping another dimension of the conversation ever-present, especially from
a sociological perspective. By this I mean the conversation about policies
governing the Internet and communication infrastructure need not be driven
primarily from political science:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-cooper/the-future-of-journalism_b_186675.
html?view=print
http://gfem.org/node/496
http://opennet.net/
http://www.pff.org/events/upcomingevents/042409-ICANN-internet-governance.as
p
http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/
http://www.neutrality.ca/

--
Becky Lentz, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University
853 Sherbrook Street West, Arts Building, W-265
Montreal, QC Canada H3A 2T6
514.398.4995 (phone) 514.398.7247 (fax)
email: becky.lentz@mcgill.ca
web: http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/ and http://media.mcgill.ca/

Hello Becky, Barry and all my other CITASA buddies.

Some of us are engaged in studying national telecommunication policies
sociologically and critically.

In January of this year a new book came out entitled...

..and Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration
by Amit M. Schejter (Editor)

I have a chapter in the book on developing a US National Broadband Policy
and Municipal Wireless policy.

Here's a little write up on the book as a whole.

In October 2007, a group of 16 scholars from 11 American universities joined
together to draft a communications policy agenda for the next
administration. Last week, the Future of American Communications Working
Group released its recommendations in a book called, ŠAnd Communications for
All.

Amit Schejter, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Penn State
University, edited the book. Schejter believes that academics have an
important role to play in telecommunications policymaking.

Amit Schejter: We are all funded by public money, and we owe allegiance only
to the public. The work of academics ­ when it can ­ should be within the
public domain. And since all of us, in one way or another, are policy
researchers, we want to contribute to the policy debate. Our position as
academics, which are arguments that can be substantiated, are based on many
years of study and research and do not represent the partisan or
stakeholders¹ position.

The book covers issues like media ownership, broadband access, the wireline
and wireless industries, cable, content issues, media representations of
women and people of color , the role of public media, and protecting teenage
privacy.

Schejter says that no one idea in the book is radical. But the sum of its
parts are unique.

Amit Schejter: The radical thing about it is that there is such agreement
among the authors of this book about the principles of the new policy. And I
think that that¹s radical in an academic world.

The authors of ŠAnd Communications for All agree that government needs to
take an active role to ensure that Americans have access to
telecommunications technologies. They also agree that uniform rules covering
cable, telephone, and wireless will be much more efficient in providing
better services to more people. And they all share the belief that the
market is not always the answer to problems concerning crucial public
infrastructure.

Amit Schejter: Telecommunications infrastructure doesn¹t only exist in order
to serve markets. We believe that we need to create more competitive and
fairer markets on the one hand, but we need to focus government policy on
the creation of needed public good and spaces where hyper-commercialism is
not at the center, but actually at the sideline.

You can read more about it on Amazon here
http://www.amazon.com/Communications-All-Policy-Administration/dp/0739129201
/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240234042&sr=8-1