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Al Gore's "Marketplace of Ideas"

From his speech "The threat to American democracy", delivered to the Media Center:

Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.

Why does this matter?

But in spite of these developments [in Internet-based streaming video], it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.

The risk comes from the cost of television programming:

The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.

Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.

And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion.

That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.

The not-so-subtle message is that relative success of the Republicans in the US is attributable to expensive TV marketing countering inherently superior Democratic ideas.

That George Soros spent double the money (around $23 million) of the Swift Boat Veterans (in the $10 million range) is never mentioned.

To Al Gore, Americans are helplessly glued to their televisions, and while television is biased against the Democrats (I know, just go with his logic for now), democracy is at risk in America.

Well, when you break it down, the analysis becomes much more subtle:

Television and personal computer (PC) ownership and usage varies significantly across cultural groups, according to new findings from Knowledge Networks (KN). The difference in usage and ownership of these technologies -- considered along with demographic and household income data -- offers a valuable decision-making context to advertisers and marketers attempting to reach these audiences.

According to the just-released Spring 2005 Ownership & Trend Report from The Home Technology Monitor, African American households have more TVs and larger sets, compared to Hispanics and whites. In addition, the medium plays a more important social role among both African American and Hispanic households. The data also shows striking contrasts in personal computer ownership: white households own more PCs and pay more for high-speed Internet connectivity.

In the new report, 62% of African American households were found to have more than two TVs, as compared to nearly 51% among whites and 44% among Hispanics. And roughly half (49%) of African American homes have large (30 inches or bigger) TV sets, versus 44% for whites and 41% for Hispanics.

In the KN report, almost 57% of Hispanic respondents and an equal number of African American respondents agreed that watching television was the household's favorite way to relax, as compared to nearly 53% of white households. More striking, 45% of African American respondents and 50% of Hispanic households said that "much" of their family time is spent with TV, versus 29 percent of white households.

So apparently white Americans are more easily able to resist the siren call of television and go to the Internet for information and entertainment. As a group, they will enjoy the benefits of the new media.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium [the Internet] of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.

The new media is reminiscent of the early history of the republic:

Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press.

Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.

Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.

Sounds like the Internet is re-inventing that printed medium. But according to Al Gore, television still dominates.

But dominates for whom? As the other study noted, widespread Internet use replacing television seems to be a white phenomenon. This is just speculation, but I would expect the differences noted in that study to grow larger, that is to say, as time goes by, the Internet will draw even more white Americans, while black and Hispanic Americans will probably continue to use television at the same rate.

In the United States, 75% of the population is white, 12% overall is black, and 12% Hispanic. More and more of the largest segment of the population are moving away from television, which Al Gore considers a threat to democracy (and Democrats), and to the Internet, where the "marketplace of ideas" holds sway. Meanwhile a quarter of the population remains stubbornly addicted to television.

And yet, that Internet crowd voted in large numbers for the Republicans, and the TV crowd remains solidly Democrat.

So it may be that the marketplace of ideas is already at work, and where it functions in its purest form, on the Internet, conservative ideas are winning the war.

Maybe democracy is working just fine. It's just that Al Gore can't believe that in the marketplace of ideas, his ideas aren't winning people over.

In support of the marketplace meme, here are some postings around the blogosphere, from various points of view:
Al Gore, I Hrdly Knew Ye
Godless libertarian
All this hullabaloo
Al Gore on the media
Truth and Politics
What is Al Gore talking about?
Vote for the firebreather
Al Gore and the Marketplace of Ideas
Road to surfserfdom on the refeudalized Internet?

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