--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jst...@... wrote:
This sentence, written by a NY Times reporter, appeared
yesterday in a news story:
To help me understand how the proposed cuts would affect
riders, the staff reached deep into Hopstop's big, googly
brain and felt around.
To see the context:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10citycritic.html
Colorful sentence. Love it. But for people without computers, usually the
elderly and poor, it is not just an inconvenience but another assault on their
access to information. The war on free access to information continues unabated
as we continue to sacrifice free public airwaves for radio, antenna TV, local
programming and eventually the internet to paid services such as very expensive
satellite TV. For quite awhile Amy Goodman has been talking about the growing
disparity between free access and privileged access to privatized information.
This summer my household ditched Dish Net TV and Iowatelecom for phone and
computer connections and we ran Lisco's fiberoptic cable directly into our
house for all three services. When you add it all up with the premium package
that includes HBO, SHOWTIME and others we're paying an arm and a leg. Plus, ya
gotta have a cell phone, doncha? The days of 3 or 4 free TV channels and a ten
cent newspaper are long gone. I'm fortunate to be able to afford high tech
access to information. But for those less fortunate, and for those who lose
their job and can no longer afford to pay for information, I worry about the
cost of a poorly informed public. Lord knows we are already poorly informed
quite enough.
FDR
Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to
choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
Amy Goodman:
I think there is a greater diversity of voices, but people have to fight very
hard to protect the national airways. They are a public treasure, and this land
is your land, this land is our land. The public airwaves are a national
treasure. They're not anyone's private property and that's where the debates
have to happen.
Also, network neutrality - the issue of the Internet remaining open and free,
not allowing the cable companies, the phone companies, to write the legislation
that would privatize the Internet. This kind of - it's a back-and-forth battle.
More and more people need to learn about how to protect the airwaves, how to
break the sound barrier.
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200912/20091202_goodman.html
