Editor’s note: This is being posted for Josh Wilson, one of our guest bloggers today at Google.
It’s an overcast Monday morning in the Bay Area, even down here in
one of the most economically upbeat corners of America — Google HQ, in
Mountain View, Calif., not far from the Shoreline Amphitheater.
The famed Googleplex is like walking around a giant college
quadrant. It hearkens back to visiting a pal at MIT once upon a time,
the architecture open and breezy and brightly colored, the interiors
done up like a series of playrooms for brilliant pre-teens gifted with
the world’s biggest box of Lego or Tinker Toys.
On my way down to to this event, I am struck by the diverse
information services and stark social contrasts I experience en route.
* I logged on the night before to reserve a car through San
Francisco City Carshare, and printed out directions via Google Maps.
* That morning I scanned SFGate.com for updates on local news and
issues, but learned little about where I live, or the South Bay
communities I was headed towards. The headlines were all about
Hollywood, and sports, and local sensational crime, and the evicted
tree sitters over at Berkeley.
* Cruising the highway as the morning rush hour flowed and pulsed, I
listened to KFJC 89.7 FM, an LPFM radio station out of Foothills Junior
College that specializing in unusual and noncommercial music,
particularly of the local variety.
* On the way, their public service announcements informed me about an
art space in San Jose, Space 47, that besides sounding genuinely
groovy, made me realize there is a thriving, self-starting cultural
community in Silicon Valley that is largely cut off from the main
information circuitry of the region.
* My Google map is rife with wrong turns. I get stuck behind impatient
commuters leaving the tree-lined boulevards of their Palo Alto suburban
enclaves, make a few more wrong turns and like magic wind up the
markedly lower-income city of East Palo Alto.
* Here, the buildings are not shiny, nor new, and are usually concerned
with cheap food and automobile repair rather than software development
and online commerce. This transition is abrupt, approximately 30
seconds total of driving time. I do a u-turn and finally spot the Four
Seasons hotel that is my primary landmark, perched exactly between the
two cities, gleaming like a beacon, guiding me back to the information
superhighway.
Localized information sources CAN serve community needs … but only up to a point.
Information on about that San Jose art space is probably not turning
up too often in the Mercury News. Those local bands on KFJC are most
likely not getting reviewed in the major metropolitan newspapers of the
region.
Similarly, I found a disconnect between what the panelists brought
together by Knight are asking for, and what local media are providing.
In the following posts, I’ll identify some of those specifics.
But the question remains: What next?
Now, having learned specifically what communities — or at least some
of the diverse communities of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area — are
looking for, how will our media landscape change, here, to fulfill democracy’s articulated but unmet needs?
