#connectall

[jolymacfie]

ISOC-NY TV - Weds 2pm @mnn59 - Silicon Harlem Inspo Meetup

On Wednesday January 31 2024 the ISOC-NY TV show features excerpts from the Silicon Harlem Inspo Meetup on Jan 18 2024. After CEO Clayton Banks gives his Top Ten Predictions for the year, he sits down with Joshua Breitbart and Jodia Vanel, State and Federal officers responsible for distributing the more than $664 million in funding that New York has been awarded under Broadband Equity Access and…

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[gosharedotco]

Good times today with @connectinsd , @thecoursekey and all of the San Diego startups that came out to support the underserved communities in town #connectall #sandiego #startups #goshare #connect (at Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation)

[michael-pearson-blog1]

The Limitations of the Networked Information Economy

Yochai Benkler certainly presents some interesting ideas, but he largely overstates how much of a revolution the networked information economy/commons-based peer production has created. I want to challenge some of his underlying premises. First of all, Benkler assumes that everyone has universal access to this information and that there are lowered costs of entry. But this simply isn’t the case. In fact, this year, the Obama administration announced its ConnectALL Initiative. Yes, in 2016, we have just now made it a priority to ensure that all Americans, including low-income individuals, have access to broadband internet. Many households do not own computers or have access to the internet. Some school districts even took the novel approach of turning school buses into Wi-Fi receptacles so that low-income and rural students can have access to the internet in order to complete their homework. Just because users now have the capability to generate content, it does not mean that they actually have the ability to do so. Not everyone in the population is computer-literate after all. These seem like pretty significant barriers to me.

Secondly, there are limitations to user-generated content. There is certainly tremendous upside to innovations such as Wikipedia. But just because more individuals can generate content, it does not mean that the content will be higher quality. Anyone can create a blog, but there are limitations to this level of user-generated content. Journalists and authors have access to greater resources, have higher ethical standards and quality controls, and are more credible. Most blogs do not have the same level of quality assurance in the sense that the repercussions for presenting false or misleading information, and plagiarizing content is not as great. In the journalism world, such transgressions are career-enders. I’m not convinced that the democratization of news is necessarily a good thing. Even though the costs of entry have been lowered according to Benkler, user-generated content cannot compete with publications in the traditional industrialized information network. Though there are some popular blogs, most do not have the resources to compete with major news sites and print publications. Few user-generated platforms have created a big enough community to aggregate resources and provide a check on peers. Large scale user-generated sites, such as Wikipedia, are useful to many people, but they have not replaced other sites. Using Wikipedia is a convenient way to learn basic information and research, but it has not replaced other research sites and encyclopedias. A lot of user-generated content already exists, but much of it is largely ignored or unlikely to have a lasting influence.

And thirdly – and perhaps most damning of all to Benkler’s argument – is the fact that the networked information economy is susceptible to capital interests. Benkler claims that the networked information economy is challenging the industrialized information economy, which has an extremely limited breadth, filters public opinion, and focuses on inane issues due to its dependence on advertising money. According to Benkler, the networked information economy solves these issues and removes the barriers to entry. But what he fails to recognize is that the networked information economy is also susceptible to capitalization. “The potential capture point is at the filtration stage” (James Brink, 2007). Only a few search engines, including Google, filter most of the information on the internet, and “the top tools are provided by corporations using proprietary algorithms. (James Brink, 2007). The market may change, but entrepreneurs will always find a way to capitalize on the changes.

[libraryadvocates]

What does it mean to #ConnectALL? - District Dispatch

Last Wednesday, the White House announced the #ConnectALL initiative and a goal to connect 20 million more people to broadband by 2020. That’s right — 20 million! According to the Pew Research Center, only about 67 percent of Americans have home broadband access, or roughly 80 percent when factoring in access via smartphones. Cost is ...