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Part II: B

Part II: Commission Findings and Recommended Strategies

Enhancing the Information Capacity of Individuals

A community may be awash in timely and relevant information, yet not get maximum benefit from its information richness. That is because people cannot fully utilize the information available to them without the tools to access it and the skills to use those tools effectively. America already faces serious literacy challenges with regard to making sense of text. The proliferation of digital media raises further challenges with regard to understanding and communicating through new and often complex outlets.

America’s current media landscape boasts an astonishing array of technological innovation for the creation, analysis, reshaping, and distribution of information:

The online local news and information ecology now includes local news aggregation sites, hyper-local information aggregators, citizen journalism sites, local social networking, and place-specific blogs.

The blogosphere and other social media platforms have emerged as powerful vehicles for individual and community expression, for community-building, for news aggregation and interlinking, and for community discussion.

Tools are becoming available to improve the journalistic quality of blogs and to link them to sources of advertising support.

Moreover, the pace of technological innovation is matched by cultural innovation in the use of new tools for civic and social purposes. Prominent examples include microblogging as a tool for emergency response and journalistic reporting, online maps as a tool for community organizing, and mobile telephony as the basis for citizen journalism.

Public Media 2.0, a compelling recent report by the American University Center for Social Media, identified five critical ways—choice, conversation, curation, creation, and collaboration—in which new tools and social practices are changing people’s media habits:

Choice. Rather than passively waiting for content to be delivered as in the broadcast days, users actively seek out and compare media on important issues through search engines, recommendations, videos on demand, interactive program guides, news feeds, and niche sites. . . .

Conversation. Comment and discussion boards have become common across a range of sites and platforms, with varying levels of civility. Users are leveraging conversation tools to share interests and mobilize around issues. Distributed conversations across online services . . . are managed via shared tags. Tools for ranking and banning comments give site hosts and audiences some leverage for controlling the tenor of exchanges. . . .

Curation. Users are aggregating, sharing, ranking, tagging, reposting, juxtaposing, and critiquing content on a variety of platforms from personal blogs to open video-sharing sites to social network profile pages. Reviews and media critiques are popular genres for online contributors, displacing or augmenting other genres, such as consumer reports and travel writing, and feeding a widespread culture of critical assessment.

Creation. Users are creating a range of multimedia content (audio, video, text, photos, animation, etc.) from scratch and remixing existing content for purposes of satire, commentary, or self-expression, breaking through the stalemate of mass media talking points. Professional media makers are now tapping user-generated content as raw material for their own productions, and media outlets are navigating various fair use issues as they wrestle with promoting and protecting their brands.

Collaboration. Users are adopting a variety of new roles along the chain of media creation and distribution—from providing targeted funds for production or investigation to posting widgets that showcase content on their own sites to organizing online and offline events related to media projects to mobilizing around related issues through online tools, such as petitions and letters to policymakers. “Crowdsourced” journalism projects now invite audience participation as investigators, tipsters, and editors. So far, it is a trial and-error process.³⁹

The Commission concurs with the authors of this report that “[t]hese five media habits are fueling a clutch of exciting new trends, each of which offers tools, platforms, or practices of enormous possibility.”⁴⁰

It is obvious, however, that these trends help people only if they have access to necessary hardware, software, and Internet connectivity, and have the skills to use them. Americans are potentially excluded from these trends by at least three overlapping “gaps.”

First is a broadband gap. Today, broadband Internet service is insufficiently defined by the federal government at the lowest common denominator, including speeds as slow as 200 kilobits per second. That speed is inadequate, for example, to transmit video programming at a level of quality comparable to video that consumers already receive over today’s cable or satellite systems. Quality video on that order would require Internet speeds at least 10 times faster than the lowest speed the current FCC standard accepts as “broadband.” Further, only about 25 percent of American households with annual incomes below $20,000 have a broadband connection even as currently defined.⁴¹ Thirtyseven percent of adult Americans still do not subscribe to broadband services at home,⁴² and roughly one-third of rural American communities cannot subscribe to broadband services at any price.⁴³ As a consequence, millions of Americans are simply being left out of the communications revolution.

Within the broadband gap, there are two especially troubling and widening geographic divides. One is between some communities in the United States and otherwise comparable communities in other countries that offer superior broadband service to a larger percentage of their populations. The other is between rural and urban Americans. Several developed countries from Asia and Europe offer significantly faster average broadband services than are available in the United States,⁴⁴ threatening to put even our high-penetration cities at an economic disadvantage. At the same time, within America, the broadband gap often hits poorer and more rural states hardest. Only about a third of the populations of Mississippi and West Virginia have broadband at home, for example. Median household income alone explains nearly three-quarters of the variation among states in rates of home broadband adoption.⁴⁵

Second is a literacy gap. According to the 2003 literacy survey of the National Center for Education Statistics, 43 percent of adults fell short of the standard for “intermediate” prose competence. They were unable to read and understand “moderately dense . . . prose texts.” They fell short in “summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose.” This means, for example, that more than four in ten adults would have trouble “consulting reference materials to determine which foods contain a particular vitamin.”⁴⁶

Statistics on high school graduation rates reinforce this discouraging picture. Across the country, roughly 30 percent of high school seniors fail to graduate on time, with graduation rates in some major cities at barely 50 percent overall.⁴⁷ Of the 13 percent of adult Americans scoring at “below basic” literacy, the lowest standard on the NCES survey, fully 55 percent had never graduated high school.⁴⁸ This fact strongly supports the intuitive connection between schooling and literacy. To the extent local information flow remains largely text-based, adult literacy and high-school dropout rates pose serious challenges. Indeed, the increasing technical complexity of public issues in areas like health, the environment, and telecommunications is likely to intensify the civic disadvantage of citizens with limited text literacy.

These two gaps combine to reinforce what leading media scholar Henry Jenkins has dubbed the “participation gap.” This is the gap “in social experiences between [people] who have a high degree of access to new media technologies at home and those who do not.”⁴⁹

As explained by Professor Jenkins, “There’s a huge gap between what you can do when you’ve got unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how long you can work, when there are already federally mandated filters blocking access to certain sites, when there are limits on your ability to store and upload material, and so forth.”⁵⁰ Having a home computer correlates with higher rates of school enrollment and graduation rates, even controlling for other factors associated with levels of educational attainment.⁵¹ Home Internet use also results in higher standardized reading test scores for children of low-income families, without regard to the age of the children involved.⁵²

Those not participating confront both reduced digital literacy—the understanding of and capacity to use new information technologies—and reduced media literacy—the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of media. The Commission concludes that anyone caught on the wrong side of these three gaps runs a significant risk of being relegated to second-class citizenship. Without public-policy intervention, people who are currently disenfranchised are unlikely to “catch up.” Those Americans advantaged by geography and personal resources will continue to pursue the cutting edge in both technology and training. Without public action, however, there will continue to be gaps between the information haves and have-nots. These threaten to create a two-tiered society with limited democratic possibilities for too many individuals and communities.