The Prince George’s<\/p>\nInformation Commons<\/a>. <\/p>\n
I see our local work on this experimental "information<\/p>\n
commons" as an effort to fill an important gap. The national public interest<\/p>\n
groups that work on media issues use a model pioneered around 1970 by Ralph Nader<\/p>\n
and John Gardner (founders of Public Citizen and Common Cause). Today, these groups<\/p>\n
perform extremely important functions in tracking complex federal policies and<\/p>\n
lobbying and litigating on behalf of values that would otherwise be unrepresented<\/p>\n
in Washington. However (with the exception of the ALA and a few other groups),<\/p>\n
they lack a grassroots base. In part, this is because their issues are so complex<\/p>\n
that most people cannot, and will not, keep up. In part, it is because the original<\/p>\n
Nader\/Gardner model depended on a large population of active citizens who were<\/p>\n
prone to join groups, to follow and discuss issues, and to make contributions.<\/p>\n
Public Citizen and Common Cause were born at the demographic peak of what Robert<\/p>\n
Putnam calls "the long civic generation." Now that people are generally<\/p>\n
less likely to follow the news and to join groups, the "public-interest community"<\/p>\n
in Washington lacks a base. So our strategy is to start building independent (that<\/p>\n
is, non-partisan, non-profit, and non-governmental) groups at the community level—as<\/p>\n
places where people can develop social ties and learn to use the complex new media<\/p>\n
for public purposes. I believe that we should never try to push these groups to<\/p>\n
take any particular political positions. Even after people start using the Internet<\/p>\n
for public purposes, they may still not be upset (as I am) about corporate monopolies<\/p>\n
or a lack of diversity in the mass media. They may have other concerns. But they<\/p>\n
will be active, participatory, experienced, experimental, and independent; and<\/p>\n
so they will provide the missing voice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The American Library Association’s commons-blog has a nice mention of The Prince George’s Information Commons. I see our local work on this experimental "information commons" as an effort to fill an important gap. The national public interest groups that work on media issues use a model pioneered around 1970 by Ralph Nader and John Gardner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}