Monday, October 10, 2005

the public discourse

i was reading al gore's comments on what the threat to american democracy and found it to actually be very interesting reading about what has happened to the public exchange of ideas that american democracy depends on...

al gore mentions trying to address the erosion of the public forum with his own television broadast and to that end i have an idea for him...

in canada, specifically on citytv, we have this thing called speaker's corner - it's the starting point for the idea... consider the possibility of having kiosks (like speakers corner) spread around the country with live video (screen in screen) from other kiosks showing people engaged in debate... consider further opening up the
conversation(s) to being accessed over the internet by webcam and/or text-based chat sessions... obviously there will need to be some sort of moderation facility to prevent abuse of the facilities that would interfere with the public forum...

if you then broadcast the resulting conversations on network television you could quite conceivably bring the 'marketplace of ideas' to the television airwaves...

apparently he's already taking in and broadcasting 'viewier content' but that's hardly the level of interaction necessary to truely have a public debate - you need to multiplex feeds together in real-time so that people can interact with each other in the debating process...

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