More Notes from PDF

I really liked the format of the conference - the 10 and 20-minute speakers kept things jumping!  I had some trouble with internet access and power strips, so I'll just dump in some notes.

Pew Study - Internet and American Life session – 75 M in 2004 did some sort of political activity related to the campaign, online.  In this cycle, half of internet population and growing.

In the past 10 years, went from wealthy white males using the internet for politics, now there’s rough parity between the sexes. Average age in 96 was 33, now it’s risen to age 39. It’s a lot less white, the minorities using the net for politics has doubled. The number of people saying the net was the primary source of political information doubled since 2004. In the competition between the internet and other sources for news, the internet is the one line on the graph that goes up. Spread of broadband has been driving this. People under 35 using broadband are now saying, for general news, the net is almost as important for them as television. And for political news, it’s more important than newspapers.

There’s a highly forensic quality to the type of information people get online. It’s primary source material, they like the transparency, and it’s much more easy to find. They use comedy sites like the Onion and Daily show. People have a more expanded notion of what news is and where it comes from. Candidate sites, and special interest sites. However, local news and local politics aren’t really showing up as much.

14 million people being content creators in the last political cycle.

Speaker from Pew predicts, that just the act of getting wireless will impact politics. New voters don’t think of the internet as a separate realm of "virtual life" as opposed to real life. The notion that the net is in competition will fade – in younger people’s heads, the world is mushing up together in such a way that the old categories don’t make sense. When they’re not with the device they love, they love the device they’re with.

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{PDF got great Sponsors, like Eventful, icontact, FeedBrner, BlogAds, the New York Observer, YouTube…}

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Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School, Author, the Wealth of Networks.

Let’s examine. Democracies began to rely on mass media began in 1840. Rose from $10K to $2.5 million – a bifurcation between production and consumption. Characterizes the next 150 years.

• SETI at home was the fastest supercomputer in the world – by pushing processing to the edge. Every connected person has the physical capital that they need to communicate.

So now, the most important inputs into the most advanced economies, are humans, with non-fungible time, experience, wisdom. Commons based production, increases the diversity of actors and their transactions. Decentralizes authority to act, places it where capacity to act is. So stuff can really get done.

Grid: decentralized at top, centralized at bottom. Left is market based, right is non-market.

TL:Price-system, TR social sharing, BL firms

Democratic public sphere needs universal intake, filtering, dyenthesis and salience, and independence from gonverment. The limitations of mass media is that they rely on one tiny intake funnel, owners have too much control, and the baywatch effect, let’s disperse attention from the difficult and pay attention to fluff.

Different players want different outcomes – government wants less scrutiny, companies want more control, citizens want more transparency, etc.

[Refers to the sunlight foundation, Greg Elin’s hard work…]

[Great chart of Sinclair’s stock price and at what point they said they’re not going to air the swift boat show. Terrific case study!]