The Revolution will not be Televised

I'm here to talk about an article Ryan pointed out to me on Clay Shirky's blog, called The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality. It's certainly an interesting article, which makes a decent distinction between three possible characteristics of the media world: diversity, freedom, and equality. Ryan seemed to be arguing, when I talked to him, that the example of weblogs showed that the best way to order the media landscape was in favor of diversity and freedom (forgive me if I've characterized you inaccurately, Rydog), which equals deregulation. It also appears to me that Shirky is leaning in this same direction. I think they're wrong.

Scarcity is the key difference between the weblog landscape and the landscape of newspaper and radio (the two traditional media outlets that I'm going to confine this discussion to). Shirky touches on this difference, but fails to give it an honest hearing.

I take it as a given that the public's taste, as a whole, is decadent and untrustworthy. I think this is simply true (if anyone would like to argue the point, go ahead; I feel confident that I can defend this position adequately); decadence is antithetical to the existence of a media landscape that is seriously concerned with substantive issues and their adequate presentation/representation. The majority of people in this country would not be dismayed if PBS, college radio, and so forth were eliminated in favor of a Clear-Channel-esque conformity and uniformity of formats (i.e. top 40, urban, talk radio, modern rock, classic rock, and country). Thus, market forces cannot be trusted to preserve diversity in a realm where scarcity is active, but regulation is not.

But what about the blogosphere, says Shirky, it is confined to diversity and freedom, which has produced radical inequality but not a mind-numbing decadence. Two facts protect blogging from the decadent taste of the public, I think. First, Blogging is so cheap for the blogger that it is protected from the public's market power by the nature of the medium. There is no such natural protection inherent in the realm of newspaper or radio. In fact, there is an extreme level of scarcity existant naturally in both formats: scarcity of readers and advertisers in newspaper (a certain critical mass must be achieved to have a viable business) and scarcity of airwaves and listeners in radio (with airwaves being the more critical limitation for this purpose). Second, the readership of the blogosphere is compositionally biased in favor intellectually-aware people, unlike radio, or to, a slightly lesser extent, newspaper. Do we really think that InstaPundit and Andrew Sullivan would be such giants in the blogging world if the blogging world were not biased towards the intellectually elite and politically informed? We should note, I think, that the internet as a whole medium is not so: the taste of the public is still decadent, but the readership of the blogosphere is an elite, self-selected group with considerably less decadent taste. I contend that, if the composition of the radio-listening public were identical to that of the readership of the blogosphere, NPR would not require public funding, but be economically self-sufficient.

These facts, however, do not exist in the realms of these two more traditional media outlets, and thus do not protect them from the decadence of public taste. This is why diverse and free is the proper way to 'regulate' the blogosphere, but diverse and artificially equal (with a consequent pinch of artificial freedom) is the best way to regulate the realms of print and radio. I maintain that neither true freedom nor true equality will be achieved by government regulation. So, though equality of mass of consumers and consequent economic viability cannot be mandated, it can and should be compensated for by government regulation: whether positively, as in the case of the public funding of NPR, college radio, and so forth, or negatively, as in the case of laws which prevent one company from owning too many traditional media outlets in any given region.

[I think that it should be clear that the argument that Shirky attributes to some fans of diverse and equal ("we can expect at least some members of the "diverse and equal" camp to advocate regulation of weblogs, on the grounds that the imbalance between Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit.com and J. Random Blogger is no different than the imbalance between Clear Channel and WFMU") is not one that I am in favor of; I think that it is a great thing that the blogosphere can exist in such a manner that diversity and freedom are upheld in an atmosphere free of regulation. I just don't think that this will work for more traditional media outlets which are more constrained by market principles.)