A friend recently sent me this link, "Who reads blogs, apparently, no one," (link).  The mainstream media is always an easy target (I'm prone as much as anyone here, esp. when writing after mid-night).  However, the most exciting change is happening as the mainstream media innovates and attempts new things.  At the same time, if we're looking at what holds back the blogasphere, we need more subtle, sophisticated analysis that examines a full range of societal issues.

I'm interning at KCET and the LA Times, both places with great people embracing change and trying to transform institutional cultures.  While Bakersfield is amazing in its social networking, let's not give the blogasphere more credit than it's due.  Let's also remember how hard it is to really institute change.

Then let's recognize that the fissures and failures in American society run deep.  Let's look back at the so called "creation" of the "Internet Superhighway."  Let's examine Al Gore the symbol, not the "producer" of Inconvenient Truth, but the Al Gore who as VP coined the "Information Superhighway" and who, in concert with Bruce Lehman, then Assistance Secretary of Commerce, pushed through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (at the behest of the RIAA/MPAA lobbies), the single worst law to hit the blogasphere ever.  So thanks Al. 

What's interesting is just this year, Lehman came out and said the DMCA doesn't work (link - he also said how Hollywood is a cold place that doesn't keeping saying thank u.  Duh, Bruce.  I could have told you that as a recovering indie producer).  The DMCA gives corporate "copyright" holders a bullying, chilling power tool to shut down Napsters, sue Googles and force ISPs to "take down" any material that might break their copyright. 

The DMCA in its material abuse of power, promoted by the Clinton/Gore administration at the behest of primarily the corporate entertainment lobbies, needs massive revision to reflect our dynamic digital age.  In its abuse of power, in the failure of the public to participate in its creation, it stifles our media system and itself needs to be taken down and revised.  That's why I'm active in USC Free Culture.

What's particularly interesting is that the American economy suffered due to this misconceived economic, trade, commerce policy.  That is, Clinton Gore administration counted on American Intellectual Property being protected via the DMCA while opening up our industrial base to "free trade" a la NAFTA etc.  The ensuing decade provides a clear rejection of such one-sided trade policies as the Walmarts and cost-cutting post-industrial market imperatives have driven thousands of job production to foreign countries, devastating the American poor, working and middle class who struggle to adopt to this new knowledge economy.

On the USC Free Culture blog, I wrote, "Over the last decade with the rise of the Internet, the struggle to promote freedom and human rights has entered a new stage. Access to knowledge and broadband connectivity provide us with unimaginable gateways to cultural riches. At the same time, as [my professor, Manuel] Castells writes in his most recent paper, 'Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society' (link), there is a 'direct link between politics, media politics, the politics of scandal, and the crisis of political legitimacy in a global perspective.'

In a sober warning given basic human nature so evident in Iraq and Murdoch’s role in promoting the invasion of that country, Castells closes, 'Thus, as in previous historical periods, the emerging public space, rooted in communication, is not pre-determined in its form by any kind of historical fate or technological necessity. It will be the result of the new stage of the oldest struggle in humankind: the struggle to free our minds.' A new spirit of humility and commitment is needed, one that seems very far away (link)."

Castells point is that a new potential flowering of the "creative commons" linked to the blogasphere is possible, but before we points fingers at the press, let's remember that there all all sorts of powers working to undermine the flourishing of such a new space.   Thus, let's have a little humility and first examine how much real sacrifice we, as individuals, in the real world, not the blogasphere, will undergo to promote change.  Let's work with institutions, both from the inside and out, that are opening up, encourage them, not bash them.

Most importantly, let's recognize that a new center is needed in our country, one that honors civil debate, respects authority and traditions (those silly blue-state things) while relishing the differences that make up this crazy fabric.

Things are heating up world-wide; the only questions is will we go down in flames, will the American decline continue in its embrace of the frivolous, consumerist junk/unrestrained corporate global commerce or will we put limits on corporations, learn to channel the heat, our passions into real substance in the real, yet digitally synergized, world?