Noticed on the web site of the Heritage Foundation, the announcement of a new blog by their Director of Media and Public Policy. The foundation is beginning to wonder if all this publicly visible opinion, as well as links to research, analysis and other forms of documentation will have some impact on government transparency and accountability.
Let’s call it an early weak signal of something or other .. the “something” being transparency and accountability, and the “other” being increased control and manipulation of information to keep general and widespread control operative.
Seems clear to me that over the next ten years or so, one or the other of those two eventual outcomes will predominate … either the corporations and the government will get the upper hand, or the humans will exert the force inherent in what Jim Moore has called “The Second Superpower”.
Can the Blogosphere Transform Government?
11/17/04 02:03 PM
Tapscott’s Copy Desk is the new weblog of Heritage’s Mark Tapscott.
Tapscott is director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at Heritage, a longtime journalist and media critic, and an expert on FOIA and government information.
Tapscott asks in his first post, can the Blogosphere do for government what it has done for the mainstream media? We think this is the most important bit:
[T]he Internet is sparking an explosion of publicly available data from government at all levels and putting it in the hands of millions of citizens, journalists, political and community activists, academics and think-tank experts with the skills to make sense of the numbers. Government officials can no longer control the means of measuring the success or failure of public policies.
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How long before vast networks of Internet-savvy citizen analysts apply the same immense fact-checking power to pork-laden government programs as the emerging Blogosphere is now doing with Big Media? Then the Freedom of Information Act will have real muscle.
How long? We fear it could be a while. After all, incentives at all levels of government are perfectly contrary to this end: Why release information when it will only cause controversy or funding cuts?
Tapscott knows, more than most, the extremes to which bureaucrats will go when threatened with having to release information to the public.
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