Throughout my life I have been involved in media in one form or another. Having had the opportunity to experience professionally both sides of the fence, from holding the mike to being on the business end of one, I still find myself in awe when it comes to the impact that our communication mediums have on the depth of discourse in today’s society.
As a journalist you’re on a never ending quest for the right sound byte or words to effectively communicate the truth of a story in a certain amount of time. On the flip side, you do your best to make your the ideas as clear and concise as possible so that journalists latch on to the right message because in the end you know they have only 30 seconds for you in the next broadcast.
Unfortunately sometimes an idea can’t be crunched down to 30 seconds or even to 5 minutes; you need to explain it because it’s new or outside conventional thinking. But you can’t take the time to explain because if you do nobody will listen, you lose the attention of the audience… and when that happens the advertising revenue that allows media to exist is negatively impacted and can affect their capacity to communicate your message.
Some would say that digital channels change this reality but I would argue that they perpetuate it. Blogs postings have to be short, video clips on YouTube are short, most podcasts’ are short and we text our thoughts in 140 character chunks.
So we are caught in an attention span and media consumption paradox that sometimes limits the depth of thought and advancement of ideas that could positively change our world. But is it in fact a paradox or a reflection of who we are?
Over the last two years whenever I have spoken in public or given seminars related to technology I have taken the opportunity to expose the public to the NetNeutrality issue.
At the beginning of all of this, nine times out of ten the initial reaction that I perceive is one that can be compared to the “blinded deer (or moose) in the middle of the road look”, its to technical and fundamental. But these day’s I am noticing a distinct change in people’s knowledge of the subject, they know more about the issue but to them it’s all about “running out of bandwidth”.
Within two years people have gone from not knowing about the issue to having opinions that are completely off the mark. The only explanation that I have for this takes its roots in the amount of news reports that talk of Net Neutrality from a “running out of bandwidth” perspective.
It’s an unfortunate example of how the press has simplified a story so much that it looses its core truths. NetNeutrality is now a casualty, and suffers from journalist’s lack of research initiative and the unfortunate realities that come with having all but 30-60 to talk about a subject in news reports.
People don’t know don’t grasp the importance of the issue and its not a real “sexy” subject so I can understand it doesn’t get a lot of air play, but when you stop and thing about the implications of loosing the Net Neutrality battle it tends to give me nightmares.
While the candidates for the next US presidential elections are talking about it with the right terminology and from the right perspective, the media and politicians here in Canada are only slowly waking up and unfortunately they are signing the wrong tune and marching to the wrong beat.
In my original blog post on this subject I asked what we could do to put NetNeutrality on the table with other election issues. Today, we seem to have take a few big steps back and the real question becomes how do fix the publics perception of the issue?
