Conclusion and a Call to Action
Conclusion and a Call to Action
The United States stands at what could be the beginning of a democratic renaissance, enabled by innovative social practices and powerful technologies. With multiple tools of communication, dynamic institutions for promoting knowledge and the exchange of ideas, and renewed commitment to engage in public life, Americans could find themselves in a brilliant new age. People would enjoy unprecedented capacity to fulfill their individual aspirations and to collectively shape the future of their communities. Community discussion, collaboration, and accountable public decision making could make life better in every neighborhood, town, and city.
To thrive in a democracy, America’s local communities need information ecologies that support both individual and collective community life. They need accurate, relevant news and information to fuel the common pursuit of the truth and the public interest. Improving local ecologies requires public policies that support the production and dissemination of relevant and credible information, enhance the capacity of individuals to engage with information, and promote people’s engagement with information and with one another. Informed communities require well-designed strategies to make these objectives a reality.
The questions America faces at this point in its information history, however, go beyond questions of strategy to questions of values. The Knight Commission has recommended a series of strategies that, in various ways, exhort our major public and nonprofit institutions to give new priority to values of openness, inclusion, and engagement. The values questions posed are equally profound, however, for individual citizens and for the institutions of the media.
Communities throughout America need for their members to re-examine their individual roles as citizens in the digital age. The opportunities of the current moment are conspicuously interrelated with new technologies of human connection. More than ever, these technologies enable each citizen to be a productive part of the community.
Those opportunities, however, and the social benefits they offer, imply a reciprocal responsibility to participate. Americans’ sense of their very identity as citizens should entail a sense of responsibility to “step up” to the digital age. They need to attain the skills necessary to support first-class citizenship, to demonstrate an active willingness to acquire and share knowledge both within and across social networks, and to support democratic values in the way every person interacts with the information ecology that serves his or her community.
It is critical that Americans take the time to embrace the quality of community information flow as an issue worthy of their concern and involvement. The Commission has directed many of its recommendations to government agencies and officials. They are far more likely to respond if their constituents are campaigning day-in and day-out for a pro-information agenda.
Likewise, media institutions must confront how new technological capacities and social practices are challenging their core values. The evolving relationships among journalists, media firms, and the public should engender a deep discussion about how these changes affect the proper scope of intellectual property and such values as objectivity, privacy, and accountability. An increasingly uninhibited information culture creates opportunities not only for social benefit, but also for slander, harassment, fraud, pornography, spam, theft, intrusiveness, invasions of privacy, and all kinds of falsehoods, from innocent mistakes to intentional mischief.
It is unlikely that the formal instruments of law or the private initiatives of single individuals can fully address these challenges. Institutions that stand as critical nodes in America’s information networks need to examine their own practices. They should consider how changes in institutional practice can protect core values at the same time that new ways are emerging for creating, organizing, and sharing information.
Society can be lulled into feeling that the very availability of exciting new tools will bring the solution to all problems. Alternatively, as long-standing practices are upended, people may imagine a past somewhat rosier than reality and exaggerate the threat to enduring values and allegiances. This Commission has tried to resist both impulses. This report is intended to help America maintain its commitment to enduring information ideals, even as individuals and communities create information ecologies more relevant, participatory, and inclusive than ever. There need be no second-class citizens in the democratic communities of the digital age. Whether America fulfills that vision will require individual and collective initiative at every level of society.
The Knight Commission has attempted to provide through this report a set of durable principles and broad recommendations that can frame the pursuit of the informed communities America needs. The Commission, however, understands “informed communities,” like democracy itself, as a vision always to be pursued, not as a final state of perfection ever likely to be achieved. In that spirit, our first call is for an outpouring of additional ideas, dialogue, and action in communities throughout the United States. The “information issue” is everyone’s issue.
