Sandra Braman

Where Has Media Policy Gone? Defining The Field In The Twenty-First Century

In recent years, the number of laws and regulations dealing with information and information technologies has exploded. As a result, the boundaries of the field of media policy are increasingly difficult to discern. Problems raised by technologies, media practices, the nature of policy-making processes and the unique characteristics of media as a policy issue area confound the effort. A variety of approaches to defining the field exist in the literature, but, to be useful, a definition of the field of media policy must be valid, comprehensive, theoretically based, methodologically operationalizable and translatable into the terms of legacy law. This essay suggests that, broadly viewed, media policy is co-extant with the field of information policy, defined as all law and regulation dealing with an information production chain that includes information creation, processing, flows and use. More narrowly, media policy as a distinct subfield of information policy deals with those technologies, processes and content by which the public itself is mediated.

The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime

Though international telecommunications regulation, launched mid-19th century in response to the telegraph, is often cited as a model of a classical regulatory regime (Zacher and Sutton, 1996), regime theory has only recently been taken up for analysis of international policy for the information infrastructure and the content it carries (Cowhey, 1990). Regime theory was, however, one of the first types of theory used to address informational issues once they came to be viewed as ‘high’ rather than ‘low’ policy (Gassmann, 1981; Nye, 1999; Oettinger, 1980), a shift in salience that resulted from the informatisation of society. Just as diverse strands of economics came together in the economics of information over the last couple of decades (Lamberton, 1998), so historically distinct policy matters pertaining to global flows of information, communication, and culture are now also coming together into a single emergent global information policy regime. This regime is ‘global’ because it involves non-state as well as state actors, and ‘emergent’ — a concept drawn from complex adaptive systems theory — because both the subject of the regime and its features are still evolving.

The autopoetic state: communication and democratic potential in the net

The relationship between the practice of democracy and the use of new information technologies is dependent upon the technologies of communication and information, rules regarding the use of those technologies, and the nature of the entity making rules regarding those technologies. Since today developments in all three of these areas are turbulent, this article looks to social theory that deals with turbulence and chaos as a way of understanding the democratic potential in the qualitatively different network society. The streams of literature drawn upon include second-order cybernetics and chaos theory, organizational sociology, and the literature on the state. The concept of the autopoietic state is developed as a basis for determining appropriate communication policy principles for maximizing the democratic potential in the network environment

The Framing Years: Policy Fundamentals in the Internet Design Process, 1969-1979

Those responsible for the technical decision making that created the Internet found they had to think through a number of social policy issues, from privacy and intellectual property rights through the definition of common carriage and environmental problems, along the way. Such issues were framed by conceptualizations of the nature of the network, goals to be served by the network, users and uses of the network, and the design criteria that served as policy principles developed during the early years of the design process. This article examines such policy fundamentals as they developed through the technical document series that records the Internet design process, the Internet Requests for Comments (RFCs) during the first decade of that process, 1969–1979.

Privacy by design: Networked computing, 1969–1979

Discourse analysis of the technical document series that records the internet design history, the RFCs, shows that those involved during the first decade saw privacy as a multi-dimensional and interactive problem requiring use of a suite of solutions at the network, individual, and data levels that had to take into account the need to balance privacy against experimentation and innovation. Internet designers were sophisticated in their pragmatic thinking about privacy when evaluated vis-a-vis theoretical developments since that time, viewing privacy as a contextual matter involving boundary setting, and using information architecture and metadata as tools for privacy protection. Those in the social science and legal communities think about the privacy effects of communication on humans, while those in the technical design community must focus on privacy as a set of logistical problems. Bringing these diverse communities into a single conversation can considerably enrich and strengthen the work of all.

THE INTERPENETRATION OF TECHNICAL AND LEGAL DECISION-MAKING FOR THE INTERNET

Not long after computer scientists first began working on the technical design of the network that ultimately became known as the Internet, in 1969, they began to document their discussions, information shared, and decisions made in a series of documents known as the Internet requests for comments that is still being used for this purpose 40 years later. A comprehensive inductive reading of these documents reveals that legal and policy issues were often raised or confronted in the course of resolving technical problems. In many of these instances, the technical decisions that resulted had law-like effects in the sense that they constrained or enabled the ways in which users can communicate and can access and use information over the Internet, whether or not such decisions supported or subverted legal decision-making, and whether or not legal decision-makers understood the societal implications of the technical decisions that were being made. This is one of the two ways in which technical and legal decision-making have become interpenetrated. The literature on legal engagement with problems generated by the technical features of the Internet is vast. This article appears within the nascent literature on technical engagement with legal problems. It does so in an effort to contribute to the building of a shared epistemic and decision-making space that involves both the technical and the legal communities.

Internationalization of the Internet by design: The first decade

The successes and failures of Internet Internationalization reveal struggles between two systems: the network political (oriented around the machinic) and the geopolitical (oriented around the social). The frames through which this conflict are understood, and the technical decisions that enacted such frames, were put in place during the first decade of the network design process, 1969–79. Analysis of the technical document series that records the history of that process provides evidence of internationalization processes that include extension of the network outside of the United States, international participation in the design conversation, the influence of international organizations and associations, support for internationalization in the design criteria that serve as policy principles, and attention to issues raised by internationalization within the course of technical decision-making.

The Right to Create Cultural Policy in the Fourth Stage of the Information Society

The harmonization of information systems that characterizes this fourth stage of the information society has made possible new types of threats to cultural rights such as the right to create. Here these new threats as experienced by avant garde and traditional artists are explored, with attention to the restriction of speech rights by differential application across the information production chain, the paradox of the simultaneous loss of belief in the possibility of creativity and the commodification of innovative processes and products, the effects of computerization of innovative activity, and new legal approaches to the treatment of non-linear behaviours.

“We Are All Natives Now”: An Overview of International and Development Communication Research

This chapter reviews the historical and conceptual parameters of the international communication research area, followed by a focus on communication and development. Both parts of the chapter define the scope of the areas discussed, summarize the main theoretical approaches, and present major trends in research. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

The "Facts" of El Salvador According to Objective and New Journalism

procedure, while the latter accuse all who claim they are objective of inevitably skewing the facts because of biases built into the very procedures objective journalists use. Both types of narrative, however, clearly fall within a single fact/fiction matrix that has dominated English-language discourse for the past 400 years. Where they have come to differ is in the methods used to discern what is fact, and in the claimed relationship of fact to reality. Objective and new journalism both depend on a notion of &dquo;fact&dquo; derived from Locke, for whom facts were boundary-defining techniques for loci of consciousness. Since objective and new journalism differ in the nature of the reporting locus of consciousness, they use fact in different ways. In this comparative analysis of two texts that report on the same subject, reportage of events in El Salvador during June of 1982 by The New York Timesand