Posted 07:46 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ernie Eves - He's just not up to the job

Freudians would have a few things to say about this one. The Globe and Mail reports that even former Conservative premier, Mike Harris, wouldn't vote for Ernie Eves, the man who now leads the party in Thursday's upcoming election. "Asked whether he had any advice for the Tories as the Thursday election draws near, the former premier said: "No. Listen, I was there as leader and involved in campaigns and now it's Mr. McGuinty's turn and his team, and I wish him well and obviously I'm voting for him."

As much as I disliked Harris's policies, and the resulting mess in which our province now finds itself, the one thing for which I will give Mike Harris kudos is that, as a politician, you always knew what the man stood for. He rarely waffled, and always spoke his mind. And much to "Slick Ernie's" chagrin, he just did it once more.
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Posted 14:17 by Mark Federman permanent link
McLuhan for Managers - Now in Stores!

After many, many months of delay, the day has finally arrived. Our book, McLuhan for Managers - New Tools for New Thinking, is finally available in bookstores across Canada, and online at both amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.ca. Paul Saffo, Director of the Menlo Park, California-based Institute for the Future, wrote, "The authors of this book blow the lid off McLuhan’s secret. They have mined his writings and have done a masterful job of setting our McLuhan’s core ideas clearly and in the context of our current digital challenges. But this is just the backdrop to their real task, articulating a set of thinking tools based on McLuhan’s unique way of assessing the future… What the authors have done is deliver fargazing tools for business activists."

Couldn't have said it better myself. For those who like to read the jacket copy, here is what's inside the front cover: "In this engaging, provocative, amusing and stimulating book, Mark Federman, the originator of McLuhan Management Studies, and Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan’s longtime associate, provide readers with an indispensable guide to thinking in today’s rapidly changing business culture.

More than thirty years ago, Marshall “The Medium is the Message” McLuhan predicted the changes to business and society that we are now seeing by virtue of the ubiquitous Internet. Imagine if we could have him beside us now as we try to deal with these changes. In McLuhan for Managers, Federman and de Kerckhove capture McLuhan’s unique approaches to thinking about business and apply them in a form directly useful to today’s leaders and managers.

As the authors show, the McLuhanesque approach to thinking about business is unconventional. Instead of theory, this book presents new thinking tools designed to increase perception and insight so that managers can more readily anticipate change. One set of tools improves the manger’s thinking about particular issues, projects, and situations; the other set facilitates and improves collaboration within the whole company.

Illuminating and unprecedented, McLuhan for Managers combines both business acumen and innovative thinking as it envisions exciting paths forward through the future."
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Posted 10:56 by Mark Federman permanent link
Paul Martin Blogs? Well, Sort Of...

Our Prime Minister to be, Paul Martin, has taken a lesson from U.S. Democrat contender (and front-runner) Howard Dean, and started a blog of his own. in his opening piece, "Why am I keeping a blog?," he muses, "First, it's an opportunity to express my thoughts publicly without having to go through all the sturm und drang that is a major speech or even a media scrum," and then goes on to explain, "the blog gives me an opportunity to record my own views on the events of a given day or week. The media tend to chronicle my travels pretty closely but there's lots that gets missed." Well, pardon me for being a trifle cynical here, but it seems as if our Prime Minister-about-to-be-coronated is a little less open and forthcoming than he might have us believe.

How much of a blogger is Paul Martin? From March through May of this year, he created a grand total of 5 posts. Then in June, with the liberal leadership race heating up and the drive for party memberships in high gear, Paul shared his thoughts with us - and potential supporters - eleven times! But when the tally was in, and it was clear that Martin had the nomination in the bag - and the distant second-place runner, John Manley dropped out of the leadership race - Martin's blog posts dropped out as well. From the beginning of July until today, only 4 posts all told.

Now I realize that the future Prime Minister of Canada has little to gain politically, and potentially a lot to lose, by letting his future constituents know precisely what's on his mind before assuming the mantle of office. But the point of a politician keeping a blog and actually speaking directly to those constituents is that it is an "anti-political" process. It avoids what Martin so accurately called "the sturm und drang that is a major speech or even a media scrum." No spin. No editing (or at least not much). No speechwriters. Just Paul, the man - the man who is poised to lead a country that is so well situated for the 21st century. Talk to us Paul! Keep the channel open! And take a lesson from candidate Howard Dean (who is one of the most clueful politicians on the planet today) and open up comments from the rest of us on your blog. Your country will thank you!
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Posted 19:22 by Mark Federman permanent link
Power to the Edge

It's scary when even the military gets clueful. I came across this insightful and exceedingly well-researched and well-documented publication that came out of the Command and Control Research Project of the U.S. Department of Defense, called Power to the Edge. It traces the history of Industrial Age organizations, how their hierarchical structures developed, and how they are an impediment to the modern, Information Age organization. They then go on to describe the power, flexibility and adaptability of the "Edge Organization," making the case that the military must replace its traditional, hierarchical, "command and control" structure with "power to the edge" and emergent management. While its specific recommendations are directed at the Pentagon's bureaucracy, it should be mandatory reading for every executive and manager today.
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Posted 16:26 by Mark Federman permanent link
Opinions You Should Have

Eric McLuhan always tells me that at the root of all humour is a grievance. Well Tom Burka must have one helluva lot of grievances if his wickedly funny Opinions You Should Have is any indication. I've been reading his news satire blog for a while now and laughing myself silly with almost every post. It's American politics ripped large. Tom Burka provides us with an anti-environment as big as Texas, and Lord knows them Texans in Washington done need it!
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Now that you're here, why don't you have a look at the most current entry!

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Posted 00:13 by Mark Federman permanent link
UPGRADE Issue on Open Knowledge

UPGRADE, the European Journal for the Informatics Professional has a Special Issue on Open Knowledge. "The guest editors present the issue, where they have offered the floor to a very diverse set of contributors, united by the effort to understand and promote information-based commons and convinced that a prosperous and more human economy can develop on its basis. They also provide a list of useful references for those interested in knowing more about this subject." Included is the Richard Stallman short story, "The Right to Read." Ironically, the issue is copyright will all rights reserved. How about getting Creative about the Commons, folks!
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Posted 23:40 by Mark Federman permanent link
Rdianeng and Wtirnig

Thanks to Joi Ito for pointing us to this interesting piece on Rdiaeng, err, reading. "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe." Those who have attended one of my Intro to McLuhanistics seminars (at any level) will know that I riff about how order matters - from order comes meaning and comprehendability, and from that comes the reinforcement of causality as an artefact of literacy. So is my riff rong?

Nope. Note that the key issue discovered in the study is that the "frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae." There is tremendous redundancy in the English language, and an underlying context of meaning. But more important is the linkage between the last letter of one word and the first letter of the following word. This strongly supports the linearity imposed by literacy, the correct connection of one word to the other in the right order - connecting the dots writ large, as it were.

Societies grounded in literacy have the compulsion to connect the dots. Societies grounded in orality see the patterns that emerge from the mosaic of dots. Guess which one gets it right more often than not.
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Posted 17:59 by Mark Federman permanent link
Fred von Lohmann on RIAA "Sham-nesty"

Cindy Cohn, the EFF's Legal Director, sent me this article by Fred von Lohmann, their senior intellectual property attorney, that appeared as an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times.

No one can hold a candle to the music industry when it comes to squandering an opportunity. Having gotten everyone's attention by threatening to sue 60 million American file-sharers, flooding Internet service providers with more than 1,500 subpoenas and on Monday suing hundreds of individual file-sharers (or their parents) in federal court, the Recording Industry Assn. of America has blown it again.

Here's what the RIAA has proposed as its "solution" to file-sharing: an "amnesty" for file-sharers. Just delete the MP3s you've downloaded, shred those CD-R copies, confess your guilt and, in return, the most change-resistant companies in the nation will give you nothing. Oh, the RIAA promises not to assist copyright owners in suing you. But its major-label members reserve the right to go after you, as do thousands of music publishers and artists like Metallica.

In other words, once you have come forward, you are more vulnerable to a lawsuit, not less. This is more "sham-nesty" than "amnesty." What a waste. Read more
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Posted 09:44 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Cool Exhibitions

Many cool ínstallations on exhibit at the CyberArts 2003 Exhibition. Two that particularly intrigued me were BlockJam and Instant City, both exploring alternatiive digital music interfaces. And make sure you check out the Trash Mirror.

BlockJam is a research project from Sony. It provides a musical interface through the arrangement of 25 blocks, each of which is a sequencer in itself. By stroking, tapping and circling each block, various tones, rhythms and path directions of the music are controlled. A very cool toy, especially since it combines aural, visual and tactile engagement.

Instant City presents a table matrix upon which the composer builds with translucent plastic blocks. Scanners above the table detect the arrangement and height of the blocks as "buildings" are constructed and arranged around the "instant city." Once the composer is done and removes his or her hands from the table area, the scanners translate the 3-D arrangement of the landscape into sound. Also very cool and a lot of fun. I can imagine constructing a model of a neighbourhood or city and then literally capturing the sound of the city.

How much graphics and music can be packed into 64KB? In the Ars Electronica ElectroLobby demoscene I saw this gem by a team from Germany. Warning: It does realtime rendering so it's processing requirements are non-trivial. But it is only 64KB!

Trash Mirror is an installation by Daniel Rozin. Comprised of 500 pieces of irregularly shaped trash, picked up from the streets of New York, Trash Mirror reflects whatever and whoever is in front of it by pivoting the flattened trash pieces on computer-actuated panels up (reflective) or down (non-reflective). Audile, tactile and visual, it is a very cool medium indeed!

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Posted 08:41 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Miscellaneous Thoughts from Symposia

Some random notes from various speakers.

Friedrich Kittler described code as more of script than language (which continued to engender much debate throughout the week). Code feasibility originated with the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, as opposed to the ideogram. Code is dependent on political power's abilitz to rule via communication technologies. "Code is the language of the empire whose subjects we are." The problem of computer code? "You cannot pronounce and communicate with the code you are writing."

Several interesting conversations with Cindy Cohn, the Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The interests that are attempting to shut down our ability to innovate, and control what we see, hear, disseminate and even think are becoming stronger and more bold than we realize. The threat is as great, or even greater, in Europe and emerging countries than it is in North America. I didn't know, for instance that the tiny country of Chile is being threatened by a de facto economic embargo by the United States if they do not enact their own version of the draconian and horribly framed Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Chile does not need this legislation for itself, but the United States is exercising the most pernicious form of extra-territoriality. Support the EFF!

Joachim Sauter gave us a brief history of interactive, connective and generative or computational art. He described an installation that demonstrates Daniel Liebeskind's architecture that tranlated Schoenberg's twelve-tone musical alphabet and grammar into Liebeskind's architectural alphabet and grammar, and then into a 3-D form. He also demonstrated a generative opera, a performance in Munich of Marlowe: Jew of Malta. In this production, screens were set on the stage and the set was projected on them. The main character, Machiavelli, was tracked via infrared sensors, and was able to control and change the stage set through his movements. He also controlled the "costumes" of the other characters as well, since they too were projected onto otherwise plain white smocks. As Machiavelli lost his power through the unfolding of the opera's narrative, he also lost control of the sets and costumes. The technology served as a metaphor for the story.
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Posted 08:25 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Messa di Voce

For me, the highlight of the Festival so far has got to be the remarkable premier performance of Messa di Voce, "a new concert performance, in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software. The performance touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative." This performance, created by software artists Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, and composer-performers Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara, creates unique and often comical visualizations from their extensive repertoire of vocalizations and body movements that react to, and with, the performers. I can see this production touring the world. If you ever have the opportunity to experience Messa di Voce, by all means do so!
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Posted 08:16 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Symposium Papers

Links to many of the papers of the symposium sessions are posted on the pages for the respective sessions. The index to the entire symposium program is here.
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Posted 07:54 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Collective Creativity Symposium

The afternoon session was on Collective Creativity with Pierre Levy, John Warnock, Marc Canter and James McCartney. Some highlights from their papers are here.

Pierre Lévy spoke about creating a language of "collective intelligence." He described how there is an ecosystem of ideas and ideas within a culture suvive - or not- based on an evolutionary, almost Darwinian structure. He proposes that cultures that create conditons most favourable to ideas will survive, those that do not are not viable. The development, and evolution, of language - the code of human interaction - are among those favourble condition, and as we have moved into cyberspace, it is incumnbent upon us as a cociety to develop a model and language of collective intelligence in order to assure our futre cultural survival. The description of collective intelligence and an ecosystem of ideas that permeates a successful society set an appropriate ground for the remaining presentations and discussion.

John Warnock described how corporations become resistent to new ideas and innovations because they tend to focus time, attention and resources on their successful projects. All of the successful projects at Adobe were endeavours that defied conventional marketing - there was no apparent market and no customer demand for products such as Postscript, Illustrator and Acrobat. Successful products become "black holes" sucking any and all resources that come close to them. To innovate, Adobe had relatively non-technical "arrow shooters" who set the distant goals and objectives, "pathfinders" who are fast coders that get to the objective as fast as possible, and finally, "road builders" who are those capable of creating a robust, production ready product.

Marc Canter is a show in himself. He spoke about how new relationship building tools, including weblogs, are beginning to realize the true potential of the Internet to connect people, not only online, but transcending into realspace and life as well. His new company, Broadband Mechanics, is creating services that provide ways to organize your real life through social networks and social software. He also described the business model - allow people to use the products and services for free, but the data is stored on the company's servers. The moment you want to store and manage your own data is the time when you clearly care about the product, and hence, the time to begin paying.

James McCartney makes a number of observations concerning computer code and the process of making sounds and music, and exploring compositional algorithms. He asks questions about how humans can understand - in any sense of that word - what is actually going on in a computer-created, or augmented, work, and explores the nature of "music appreciation" when music approaches the constructs and processes of modern art. He pushes this idea a little further when he notes, "A direction more interesting to me than exploiting the limitations of the digital mediuim is exploiting the limitations of human perception."
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Posted 07:27 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Social Code Symposium

The first session I moderated was on Social Code with Howard Rheingold, Leo Findeisen, Floran Cramer, Fiona Raby and Hans Peter Schwarz. Some highlights from their papers.

At issue in Howard Rheingold's talk is not only what sort of society do we want and how do we architect it, but what are the mechanisms that are being established, relatively unoticed by the general public, that will preclude us from achieving that society? Control of code is an issue of control of the freedoms we have taken for granted: the freedom to innovate, to communicate, to activelz engage with one another, to legally subvert and avoid the commercial dominance of established enterprises. In its zeal to protect vested interests, undeirable consequences can and will occur: legitimate information sharing, reduction (or eradication of competitoin, elimination of societal values and legal precedents that went against the vested commercial interests. The problem is that these consequences are being driven and implemented bz commercial interests, enabled by legislators who are either willing or unwitting accomplices.

Leo Findeisen compares the "Old Codes" of natural languages to the "New Codes" of today that are programming languages. The literature of the information society are the programs created by members of the culture that emerges from, and coalesces around these New Codes. We are faced by the literature (and performance pieces) of this (these) new culture(s). The changes in New Code's environment occur quickly, usually triggered by technological changes or the actions of "code poets" who morph code languages into new dialects. To help us understand the mechanisms through which New Codes originate, grow and thrive (or not, as the case may be), Leo examines the history of two natural languages that developed through an Open Source mechanism: Volapük and Esperanto.

Florian Cramer examines how the tools of technological writing - computer code and interface environments - influences our thinking. In particular, programmers who push code to its limits begin to change the nature of the code itself. One manifestation is the extensin of the language / code, as we have seen in the Open Source Softwrae movement. The other manifestation, and the focus of the majority of Florian's talk, is the transformation of the code itself into poetry. This leads to examining the relatinships among computer / technical environments and the involvement of the user as both reader and writer of aesthetic code, in other words, literature.

Fiona Raby describes an atypical approach to design and product development. She notes that conventional "future forecasters" extrapolate from present behaviours, often in a utopian way, to predict the adoption and usage of new technologies while maintaining a relatively conservative view. Unlike conventional product design that focuses on features and functions, "Design Noir" products twist the assumptions of both design and product deelopment. Design Noir creates conceptual products that in turn create an active narrative of experience in which the user is not a consumer of the product's meaning or functionality, but rather a co-producer (with the product's designer) of "existential moments." Existential moments are experiences that confront the user with active choices, as opposed to forcing the user into the limited choices that are pre-programmed into conventional prducts. Design Noir products create existential dilemmas for its users, rather than merely serving as a mechanism that allows users to adapt or conform to situations.
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Posted 05:02 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica - Golden Nica Awards

Over €100,000 in gold, in the form of the Golden Nica Awards was awarded last night at a gala celebration of outstanding achievement in digital arts. The big winner was Romain Segaud, Christel Pougeoise from France for their entry in Computer Animation with "Tim Tom". "What will happen if two spiral-bound writing pads come to life and turn into two jolly young fellows who crave to meet each other? Many unexpected things, since their creator does everything to thwart their plans. Tim and Tom have to use all their cunning... The resulting animation is a wonderful homage to the Tex-Avery style fantasy world of cartoons. A logical and self-contained story full of fun and wit in flawless animation won the two young artist-graduates from Supinfocom - France's computer animation elite forge - this year's Golden Nica in Computer Animation as well as 10,000 Euro in prize money." More on yesterday's symposia later.
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Posted 08:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
Bradford Paley and Code Profiles

I saw a fabulous example of code art last evening from Bradford Paley. His art is a program that comments on itself by tracing its own execution in three ways: The actual code words are highlighted, the lines of code as they were written are traced, and the flow of the program while it executes are highlighted. You can actually see the result running here. Interestingly, he is displaying his work without revealing the presence of the computer. Instead, he has framed and matted the screen in much the same way that fine art is displayed. In doing so, he wants to emphsize the ground of art and encourage our aesthetic appreciation of his work as art, as opposed to an artefact of computers. Brad understands the role of artist implicitly: A person with integral awareness who probes the effects of the things we conceive and create to reveal their effects on us.
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Posted 08:33 by Mark Federman permanent link
Ars Electronica 2003

This week, the blog is coming from Línz, Austria and the 2003 Ars Electronica Conference and Festival. Its theme is "Code: The Language of Our Time." This morning's symposium session featured several divergent and interesting perspectives on the question of The Meaning of Code. Professor Friedrich Kittler, a media scholar from the university in Munich, described code as more of a script, rather than a language per se. In this, he addressed the view of code more in realm of process. In looking at the history of code, he tracked back to the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, a ground that is not unfamiliar to those who have followed the Toronto School of Communications. But he noted that code was dependent on the agents of political power being able to rule via communications. (Note that this is one of those instances in which effects cause causes, and causes cause, in the words of James Joyce, "alter-effects." Kittler said, "Code is the language of the empire whose subjects we are." From this, he makes the following observation about computer code and programming: In computer languages, we cannot pronounce and adequately communicate the code, or words of this language, that you have written. Consequently, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in translating ideas is inevitable.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke this morning as well. She identified some of the major issues of both code and law: Elegance, Transparency, Clarity that all comprise its design. She spoke about the Bernstein case in the U.S., in which a mathematics professor was prosecuted as an arms exporter for publishing encryption code for peer review. This case set the precedent that code is speech in the constitutional sense. More than that, code is a speech enabler. One of the areas that Cindy did not explore, that I hope we can accomplish during my session tomorrow, is the use of code to implement regulations through the backdoor that legislatures will not, or cannot, implement through the front door.

Peter Bentley proposed a controversial view: a biological approach to developing code, in which code evolves autonomously, as opposed to being written by a top-down process of problem decomposition. He noted that biological processes are dynamic and context sensitive, and that eventually, code will be able to become similarly aware of its environment and adaptive in nature. While he attempted to draw a comparison between the elegance of well-written code and poetry (a topic that Florian Cramer will explore on the panel tomorrow) it was pointed out by members of the audience that the elegant evolution of biological forms have taken 250 million years. We really cannot wait that long for the next version of Word.
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Posted 19:03 by Mark Federman permanent link
Noney - The People's Currency

From Understanding Media:
"Currency is a way of letting go of the immediate staples and commodities that at first serve as money, in order to extend trading to the whole social complex."

"Money talks because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. ... As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money - like writing - speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community."

"As work is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work merges with the informational forms ... there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the movement of information itself."

"When the one object is exchanged for another, it is already assuming the function of money, as translator or reducer of multiple things to some common denominator."

"For tribal society, not knowing the specialisms of job or of work, does not specialize money either. ... In the electric age the "job of work" yields to dedication and commitment, as in the tribe."

And now, introducing Noney.
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Posted 17:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
Office Locks Down Documents - Does it Ultimately Lock Out Microsoft?

According to a CNET News.com report, New Office locks down documents by employing a proprietary implementation of Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing, all wrapped up in a warm and fuzzy Digital Millennium Copyright Act security blanket. Essentially it works like this: Office 2003, when implemented along with Windows Server 2003, allows you to secure documents by requiring anyone who opens the document to verify permissions with the server. Nominally, this is a boon to people who produce highly sensitive documents, as the security mechanism prevents those who may inappropriately possess the document from actually opening the document. Never mind that all prior versions of Office products will be incompatible, forcing everyone to upgrade just to open documents sent by suppliers, customers and others with whom they interact. Never mind that the same sort of safety is available today via many alternative mechanisms, including the built-in password protection that currently exists in Microsoft Office products, and other server-based authentication mechanisms. But many enterprises will undoubtedly go for it, even though it will entail a huge expense (not to mention replacing the ever-growing, relatively secure, relatively inexpensive Linux servers with notoriously insecure, more expensive Windows 2003 servers.) Then the fun begins.

Think down the road a couple of years. Microsoft changes the terms of their license for Office products, requiring an annual license fee for their continued use. If you don't pay for every single workstation throughout your enterprise, Word doesn't run, and your documents don't open since they cannot be authenticated. No other application will be able to open the documents either, since no other application that can open Word documents will run under Trusted Computing. Besides, writing a document-compatible application will be illegal under current U.S. law (DMCA) as it would technically be defeating a security mechanism. Congratulations, you have just handed the keys to your business, not to mention your bank vault, to Microsoft.

When, not if, businesses realize the inevitable and obvious outcome of this scheme, they will be, or at least should be, loathe to implement newer versions of Microsoft products. With the assurances of the tech folks, from sysadmins all the way up to CIOs that Linux is indeed doing yeoman's work in the server room, there may be new impetus to implement Linux desktops and OpenOffice throughout enterprises. By extending Office beyond the limit of its potential, what was a dominant market share may indeed reverse into a declining market share.
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Posted 11:52 by Mark Federman permanent link
Media, Culture and the WTO

There is yet another front emerging in the battle against media concentration. "This September at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, Mexico, the US Trade Representative will attempt to expand the WTO's power over Communications and Audiovisual Services — including film, radio, television, video, and music production, as well as media distribution services such as satellite, cable and broadcast. This is part of a quiet pattern of closed-door negotiations that could spell disaster for vibrant media systems worldwide." If the US proposal is adopted, local regulations that favour media diversity, local content regulations and even broadcasting in the public interest could be deemed as "barriers to trade," with the infringing countries subject to massive financial penalties. Grants, loans, and tax incentives that encourage the development of local cultural media industries could be found in violation, and become a thing of the past. In fact, any discussion or debate with regard to concentration of media ownership worldwide will be rendered moot. "As more and more pressure comes to bear on Congress to reverse the FCC's recent relaxation of media ownership rules, media industry lobbyists are trying to achieve their goals by moving the fight to another venue that precedent has shown will be more friendly to them - a venue that they believe is impervious to the democratic process." If you are an American (since the petition is addressed to one's specific member of Congress) sign the petition urging the American Trade Representative to withdraw the U.S. proposal, and keep media diverse, vibrant and vital. If you are not an American, direct your American friends to the petition site.
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