MTN & Portals
From:
Laura Waterman Wittstock
Date:
2007 Nov 10 13:49 UTC
Short link
On Nov 9, 2007, at 10:30 PM, Timothy J. Salo wrote:
>
> A proposal to shift the City's funding that enables residents'
> communications from cable TV to the Internet appears to me to
> be a good, if belated, move.
>
> My short answer is: Cable TV is so twentieth century.
>
> What role, if any, is left for public-access cable TV in the era
> of ubiquitous Internet access?
The short answer is this is not a question of either media or
Internet. It is not broadcast versus one to one information. There is
very little on the Internet that is actually two-way interactive. The
public needs both public access and Internet access. The 21st century
I am sure will see integration happen to a high degree with more
interaction as the public demand goes up. And along the way we will
still need "portals" like libraries that even the field between rich
and poor in terms of total information access.
Taking money away from cable public access channels is central
decision making without regard to the public's actual needs. If the
commitment to Internet access was so thin that $100k was a make or
break figure in deployment of the service what for goodness sake was
the plan? Taking money from another public service surely wasn't a
decision made in 2005 or 2006, was it?
Laura
Southeast/Como
Laura Waterman Wittstock
President and CEO
Wittstock & Associates
913 19th Ave SE
Minneapolis, MN 55414
612-387-4915
www.laurawatermanwittstock.com
.