The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

» via The New York Times

WOULD you pay a full day’s earnings just to receive an e-mail message from me? On those terms, I bet you wouldn’t welcome hearing from me very often.

In England in 1830, postage for letters was calculated not only by the number of sheets of paper but also by the number of miles traversed, and the recipient was the one who had to pay. For a person of ordinary means, a letter of middling length could come to about a day’s wages, a fearsome cost for the unfortunate household that received a letter.

But a decade or so later, when Britain and the United States introduced cheap, flat postal rates, without regard to the number of sheets or distance traveled, correspondents enjoyed something like our unmetered broadband today. Communication became more frequent, and ties were strengthened among families and friends. But cheap rates also led to junk mail and postal scams.

» via The New York Times

For the literate elite—which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates—the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, or the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period (as measured by the NEA in 2007), or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?

The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.

To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.

The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.

» via Encyclopedia Brittanica Blog

greggyour:

Worth a read.

“The more we allow for and understand the importance of all the various levels of communication, the more we can skillfully and effectively use each one.”

Goes back to a basic tenet of communication, use all the tools in your toolbox, not just the shiny one.

The Web and social media is not the answer to your every communication and information/knowledge management problem.

The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It’s easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

Today, there’s another surprise in store for network connoisseurs courtesy of Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and various buddies. One of the important observations from these networks is that certain individuals are much better connected than others. These so-called hubs ought to play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through society.

In fact, no small effort has gone into identifying these individuals and exploiting them to either spread information more effectively or prevent them from spreading disease.

The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.

» via Technology Review

“We are seeing a clear trend of huge increases in text messaging,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “If teens are a leader for America, then we are moving to a text-based communication system. For them, there is less interest in talking.”

Her research found the average teen currently sends more than 2,000 text messages per month. About two-thirds of all teens use text messaging, mostly due to its simplicity as well as the privacy of being able to communicate without being overheard.

Lenhart predicted that texting would continue to grow as parents begin using it as an easy way to reach their kids.

At the same time, the average length of a cell phone call declined last year to 2.3 minutes. That’s the shortest chat time since the 1990s, before mobile devices and cheap calling plans became widely available to everyday consumers. The peak talk time came in 2004, when a caller on average chatted for 3.05 minutes.

» via Yahoo! News

Want to know what prominent Apache Software Foundation and former Google developer Greg Stein thinks about MySQL, the GPL, and the European Commission’s antitrust stance on Oracle/Sun? You’ve got two options.

You can read his original post here, of course. But if you want better commentary, you’ll need to read this same post on Facebook.

Except that you probably can’t, unless you’re Stein’s “friend” on Facebook.

Open Web, meet your closed cousin, Facebook.

» via CNET news