Mitch Radcliffe has posted an essay on Paramedia on his blog.

The new installment of Evolution Media, my podcast, is posted to the podcast feed.

“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks with a purpose, something that media consumers, media makers and marketers need to understand and that, for the most part, is such a novel phenomenon that it is simply misunderstood as being very like the media of our childhoods, when messages came in big packages and audiences numbered in the millions.

Let’s begin to explore this idea by looking to the origins of the word. As I said, it’s been used by author Todd Gitlin and the Cult of the Dead Cow, but “paramedia” is also the name of a consultancy and has been used enough that it generates 81,800 hits on Google (as of this writing). I’d like to formalize the term here and now, so that we can use it with a common understanding of its meaning and scope.

So, here is my definition of paramedia for your consideration: Paramedia are networks of people with access to media publishing tools and training that align through self-organizing or by explicit planning to promote and support the discussion of an idea, agenda or problem.

To read the entire script, continue reading. I don’t follow it strictly, and urge you to listen, too.

The free Audible file is available here. It will play in iTunes, Windows Media Player and most portable audio devices, and you can pass it around.

There are now emerging a number of reasons we will soon demand Big Broadband. Participatory Culture and their open source project DTV and most especially their Broadcast Machine is but one.

Broadcast Machine is software you install on your website to easily publish video files and create internet TV channels. Broadcast Machine gives you the option of using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs, even when you are posting high quality video to thousands of people. It is free, open source software, and is designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It also creates a browsable archive of videos on your website. Broadcast Machine is the prefect publishing tool for making channels that work with DTV: Internet TV.

A second, but not yet released, driver of demand for Big Bandband will be Six Apart’s Project Comet. The goal of the project is to bring multi-media “webblogging into the mainstream.”

A third, but more conventional, driver of demand for Big Broadband will be Super HD [4K TV]. This is the best TV today’s technology can deliver. It requires 1.2 gigabits per second. But hey, we all want the best.

At the same time that these developments are emerging, the cost of connectivity is dropping significantly. One gigabit of connectivity that sold at wholesale for $20,000 per month in July of 2004 now sells for just $13,000 per month. This is an amazing reduction of 35% in just one year. Consider also that well over half the fiber optic strands already in place in America is still unused, or “dark fiber”. It is simply waiting to be lit.

Taken together, these developments have very serious implications for a remarkable growth in demand for upstream bandwidth. Imagine if only 10% of the U.S. population, using the Broadcast Machine or Project Comet, took to uploading creative video works on a regular basis. Sudenly we would have 30 million new TV “channels”. Suppose our educational system started to require students to create projects using full multi-media? How many student TV stations would that create as they sought to share their projects with teachers, friends and family members scattered far and wide? What happens when students want to use Super HD for their productions?

Could this happen? My guess is that 10% is a low estimate. Why?

By: Jean Camp

I am a Reform Democrat. I want to reform the party all the way back to the last century. Decades ago, Democrats defined what we stood for:

freedom of speech
even to disagree with the government

freedom from want
a nation of charity without homelessness and hunger

freedom of worship
no state interference in internal religious debates

freedom from fear
functioning police, military and emergency services

I am blogging this now because it is safe to disagree. For a while disagreement was unpatriotic. Disagreeing was harming young men and women already in harm’s way in Central Asia. I was a bad American. Now I can write this. I know that some people will flame this. I know that common courtesy is now decried as politically correct. But I can speak, and you can declare you desire to silence me. And both are better than any alternative.

By: Dana Blankenhorn

I have written often here about “generational politics,” the idea that current politics are dominated by the issues and attitudes and alliances of the Nixon Era, and that a new kind of politics is needed to move forward.

What has happened in the past is that new leadership groups came along, at the tail end of an earlier era, who began the turn which culminated as the younger cadres they recruited came of age.

Let me shorten that. Young people are the key.

My recent blog post has brought up several interesting email discussions and I would like to quote extensively from two different emails I have written in response….However, I believe that my message is even more radical. It is a message that we need to include in our efforts the intellectually and morally disabled, those people cannot reach down to the underlying basis of our political actions or those people who are driven by greed, lust for power, or any other flaw that makes them unable to act out of compassion….So, I guess what I believe is that we do need candidates talking about hope, talking about the American dream, an America where we do help out our neighbors in their times of need, an America where we help people like Deval Patrick fight their way out of the ghetto, a country that elects people like you and I to lead us, and not patriarchs from with a long pedigree of family privilege.

On June 03, 2004, Bill Moyers gave an excellent keynote speech: This is the Fight of Our Lives at the Inequality Matters Forum hosted by New York University.

“The middle class and working poor are told that what’s happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand.’ This is a lie. What’s happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.”

Moyers goes on to call this lie by its proper name: Class Warfare.

You just can’t make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans – and to the workings of American democracy – is no laughing matter. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California power market in telephone calls in which they gloat about ripping off “those poor grandmothers.” Read how they talk about political contributions to politicians like “Kenny Boy” Lay’s best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in loans to low-income, high risk borrowers – the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few clicks later, you can find the story of how a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip off the government and the poor.

Let’s face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs – if this isn’t class war, what is?

It’s un-American. It’s unpatriotic. And it’s wrong.

Over a year has passed since this speech was given, and video taped, and still the opposition to the Bush regime, Republican, Independent and Democratic has been unable to call the rampant pathology attacking our core values by it proper name: class warfare.

Until we find the courage to unabashedly name the pathology besetting us with its true name, there can be no cure. When will we find the courage to speak the truth to power? How many Katrinas and Iraqs must we endure?

Video, Windows Media Player format, of Moyer’s talk is here. Or here with videos of Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Franklin, William Greider, David Williams and more.

Note: Works with MS Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player ONLY!

Thomas Friedman asked a key question in his recent NY Times op-ed: Eating Our Lunch.

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it’s not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone – including us.

Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Friedman left off a very important question: Is the internet for corporations or the people? Is it a force for fossilization or a force for enabling the future?

To put it another way: is the internet about the government working as the hand maiden of the Hollywood cartel in a vain attempt to stop evolution and lock us in the past, or is it about the government working with the people to catalyze innovation and new economic opportunities for our future?

What does it mean to be a ‘Reform Democrat’? … It is about a belief that we are all in this together, that everyone should have a voice that can be heard, that we are at our best when we are working together to help one another out. It stands in stark opposition to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Professor Dr. FAROOQ HASSAN [1]
Special UN Ambassador for Family

Synopsis of Paper presented at the Paris International Conference on Women (Conference internationale des femmes a Paris) on Women, Islam & Equality ( Les femmes, l’ Islam, l’egalite ) held by Women, Auvers sur Oise, Paris

Paris, France, 27 August 2005

I am very privileged to address this learned and distinguished gathering of outstanding contemporary scholars of Islam and trans-national culture and historiography. Such intellectual leadership of acknowledged theoreticians and activists of these fields would greatly assist the enormously delicate subject of Women in Islam as evident and perceived in the troubled contemporary prevalent time.

In this analysis the doctrinal and place of women as found in the basic sources of Islam in contra-distinction to such an evaluation from “fundamentalist” perspectives will be examined. The “delicacy”, to which I refer to, arises not because of a priori intricacy of the theme or content of this topic. It is also not connected with any specific inherent predilection about such a consequence being inevitable while analyzing Islam. It emanates in the context of the current highly charged political, strategic and social upheavals that are in evidence since the beginning of the present millennium in countries where we have large Muslim populations.

To understand this subject with objectivity, it is necessary to draw a balance between doctrinal purity on the one hand and the felt “necessities” of time on the other. Thus pragmatism is necessarily relevant in this inquiry. Any other manner of approach based upon purely academic niceties devoid of the realties that clearly confront us would not result in a meaningful awareness of this subject. It is further to be noted that any inquiry regarding how the so called “fundamentalists” view Islam’s perceptions about women without examining the totality of the surrounding phenomenon, which is essentially political and cultural in nature, would be incomplete, perhaps giving rise to even misleading conclusions. As such I sincerely felicitate the organizers of this truly significant meeting as they manifestly have the vision to find answers to such contentious inquiries at the present time.

Dr. Robin Meyers’ Speech during the 11/04 Peace Rally at OK University

As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. But you would most likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most number of angry letters to the editor.

Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian. We’ve heard a lot lately about so-called “moral values” as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I’m a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral Value—I mean what are we talking about? Because we don’t get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.

Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:

Read the whole speech here