I watched earlier this week as the blogosphere, including many observers I respect and admire, castigated Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) for his limited knowledge of technology. The 80-year old Senator betrayed his lack of understanding of high-tech matters over and over again during the Commerce Committee’s mark-up of his controversial telecom bill.
Senator Stevens made such laughable faux pas as describing the Internet as a “series of tubes,” which prompted critics of his legislation to brand him as a luddite and out-of-touch and worse. The real concern expressed by bloggers: how can someone who is rewriting the nation’s telecom laws be so ignorant of the technology?
I felt very uncomfortable reading all these attacks because in truth I thought they were completely unfair — the man is a legislator, a politician, a leader in the Senate and can’t be expected to be an expert on every subject matter we ask our lawmakers to handle. Moreover, it’s almost assured that Senator Stevens himself drafted not one word in his own bill; that’s what specialists, committee counsel, do.
I thought that the attacks on the Senator’s lack of a techno-vocubulary were cheap shots that could easily be aimed at so many otherwise valuable public servants.
But someone at the 463 blog (please guys, give us your names when you write posts) has picked up on my discomfort and improved on it. Instead of snickering at the statesman, why not take that ridicule and come up with a plan to educate members of Congress, Senators and other public officials on the new technological realities?
Still, the industry works in the real world. And, we collectively need to take the opportunity to step-back and do a much better job in clearly explaining why our industry is making the lives of average Americans better and better. Once that is done, than it’s a heck of a lot easier to drill down into specific issues.
We need to target up-and-coming state and federal policymakers and multiply efforts to educate the staff members of the already powerful (and extremely busy).
There’s no way, of course, to make public officials and lawmakers as conversant in technology as the industry is. But that’s not the point. The point is to enlighten them on the bigger picture issues and why they matter.
The goal is to get policymakers to understand why technology matters — not necessarily how it works. How many congress folks can explain clearly how oil is refined, what makes a spark plug spark, or what the perfect soil conditions are for corn?Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:58 AM | Print | Comments (3)
Courtesy of Grant Gross at Network World, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales has started a wiki on political campaigns called the Campaigns Wikia. The mission for Wikia in brief is
It’s time for politics to become more intelligent, and for democracy to really involve the people. Broadcast media tells you what to think and doesn’t let you get involved. It’s time to focus on what you need, what you care about, and the messages you want to get out.
In a more lengthy mission statement, Wales says he has started Wikia to get campaigns to take notice of bloggers, wikis and the new era of participatory politics.
One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.
The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens.
Right now Wikia is organized according to seven topics: International Affairs, education, civil rights, public benefit, social welfare, economy and upcoming elections. It looks a lot like Wikipedia, with entries for each category that summarize the topic and include user submissions.
This section, for example, on the Democratic Party provides a brief description of what the party is, the hot topics facing Democrats, key mid-term election challenges (although this section definitely needs beefing up), and the current slate of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:06 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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