#connectall

On Wednesday January 31 2024 the ISOC-NY TV show features excerpts from the Silicon Harlem Inspo Meetup on Jan 18 2024. After CEO Clayton Banks gives his Top Ten Predictions for the year, he sits down with Joshua Breitbart and Jodia Vanel, State and Federal officers responsible for distributing the more than $664 million in funding that New York has been awarded under Broadband Equity Access and…

Yochai Benkler certainly presents some interesting ideas, but he largely overstates how much of a revolution the networked information economy/commons-based peer production has created. I want to challenge some of his underlying premises. First of all, Benkler assumes that everyone has universal access to this information and that there are lowered costs of entry. But this simply isn’t the case. In fact, this year, the Obama administration announced its ConnectALL Initiative. Yes, in 2016, we have just now made it a priority to ensure that all Americans, including low-income individuals, have access to broadband internet. Many households do not own computers or have access to the internet. Some school districts even took the novel approach of turning school buses into Wi-Fi receptacles so that low-income and rural students can have access to the internet in order to complete their homework. Just because users now have the capability to generate content, it does not mean that they actually have the ability to do so. Not everyone in the population is computer-literate after all. These seem like pretty significant barriers to me.

Secondly, there are limitations to user-generated content. There is certainly tremendous upside to innovations such as Wikipedia. But just because more individuals can generate content, it does not mean that the content will be higher quality. Anyone can create a blog, but there are limitations to this level of user-generated content. Journalists and authors have access to greater resources, have higher ethical standards and quality controls, and are more credible. Most blogs do not have the same level of quality assurance in the sense that the repercussions for presenting false or misleading information, and plagiarizing content is not as great. In the journalism world, such transgressions are career-enders. I’m not convinced that the democratization of news is necessarily a good thing. Even though the costs of entry have been lowered according to Benkler, user-generated content cannot compete with publications in the traditional industrialized information network. Though there are some popular blogs, most do not have the resources to compete with major news sites and print publications. Few user-generated platforms have created a big enough community to aggregate resources and provide a check on peers. Large scale user-generated sites, such as Wikipedia, are useful to many people, but they have not replaced other sites. Using Wikipedia is a convenient way to learn basic information and research, but it has not replaced other research sites and encyclopedias. A lot of user-generated content already exists, but much of it is largely ignored or unlikely to have a lasting influence.