Bucks On Line

Here's a chart I generated from data from Nielsen//NetRatings as reported by the Center for Media Research. It shows the growth of Internet usage (US) from Sept. 01 to Sept. 02 according to household income.

For the left-brained among us, here's the text version from the Center's coverage:

US households making annual salaries of between $100,000 and $150,000 represent the fastest growing income group online, rising by 20% between September 2001 and September 2002. Following close behind, reports Nielsen, is the income group of those making between $150,000 and $999,999, increasing by 14% over the same period of time.

It is important to note, however, that Nielsen finds the income group with the largest unique audience online is actually that with annual household salaries between $50,000 and $74,999, with roughly 37.3 million people as of September 2002.

Scientific Filters

Bryan Field-Elliot of NetMeme responds to some bloggery about Stephen Wolfram by pointing us to an article by Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic) in Scientific American that wonders why Wolfram is getting far more attention than an equally implausible-sounding theory from James Carter.

...[Li]ke it or not, in science, as in most human intellectual endeavors, who is doing the saying matters as much as what is being said, at least in terms of getting an initial hearing.

Science is, in this sense, conservative and sometimes elitist. It has to be in order to survive in a surfeit of would-be revolutionaries. For every Stephen Wolfram there are 100 James Carters. There needs to be some screening process whereby truly revolutionary ideas are weeded out from ersatz ones.

Enter the skeptics. We are interested in the James Carters of the world...

Yet the article has already pointed to the screening method: Feynman called Wolfram "astonishing" and Wolfram was the youngest person ever to win a MacArthur "genius" award, whereas Carter "has beeen an abalone diver, gold miner, filmmaker, cave digger, repairman, inventor and owner-operator of a trailer park." That doesn't mean, of course, that his theory of "circlons" is wrong. But the screening process is probably working pretty well: Carter published and no one paid much attention. If you're going to pay full attention to every publication, you don't have much of a filtering system.

Law v. Leeway

Michael Fleming responds to the article in my newsletter about leeway with this quotation:

"Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed."

Grant Gilmore, THE AGES OF AMERICAN LAW 110-111 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

I am the Egg Man

New Issue of JOHO

I've published a new issue of my free newsletter:

Contents Digital ID: Four lessons from the DigitalID World conference, including: IDs are nice but not the center of the universe The Need for Leeway: It's the only way we manage to live together, and computers are eating away at it Educational Leeway: A Personal Addendum: Grading kids sucks Hope on the copyright front: Multiple news items actually offer some hope. But don't get your hopes up about hope. Notes and Disclaimers Pertaining to the Above Material: Covering my ass when it comes to using words How to Become a Guru: Ten steps to financial freedom. Why Google Totally Sucks! Really!: Nah, not really. Misc.: Misc. The Anals of Marketing: Jumping the Loan Shark and Yahoo the Censor Walking the Walk: Timex finds the Web changes time Cool Tool: Picasa organizes your pictures What I'm Playing: Grand Theft Auto 3 - reprehensible but so damn much fun Internetcetera: Broadband vs. cell phone adoption rates Links: You send 'em, I run 'em Political Links: Hey, you get ready to start a war, you get a few links Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs: Where are you bastards? Bogus contest: My brain on the Net

Jock Gill on Krugman

Jock Gill, Clinton's original tech advisor, has posted a column on a piece he thinks is missing from Paul Krugman's essay.

Jock agrees with Krugman about the economic divide: the top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of the nation's wealth in the past 30 years, while the median income has grown only 10% in the same time. But he disputes Krugman's claim that "Gilded Ages and Gilded Plutocrats, not relative middle-class income equality, are the norm in American life." Not before the Robber Barons, Jock says, because there weren't yet corporations that "never die and do not vote, yet have the full legal and constitutional rights, and wealth that never dies even when the humans do." The result is a corrupt political system that favors the rich.

Here's why I'm depressed: We don't care. We somehow believe we're in an economy of abundance so the fact that the top 1% have the wealth of the bottom 40% doesn't matter to us so long as we feel ok about ourselves. And when was the last time you heard a politician talk about the poor as anything except a burden to the rest of us? Or look beyond our borders to see the effect of our life on others, much less accept a moral responsibility to help raise up the world?

Except when Paul Wellstone spoke.

Werbach on Decentralization

Kevin Werbach has a terrific article on decentralization at news.com:

Centralized systems are failing for two simple reasons: They can't scale, and they don't reflect the real world of people.

The Palladium Paradox

Scary Google

Googling for People

The debate continues over how to solve the DNS mess. The mess exists because there are more people than there are names. So, who gets davidweinberger.com? (Hint: I didn't.) Not to mention who gets Disney.com, Schwarzenegger.com, and PamelaAnderson.com.

Dan Gillmor a few months ago said that Google had solved the problem, at least for now. If I want to find my pal Bob Smith, the Mulholland furrier, I google him with a query like "bob smith furrier mulholland." Very likely, Google will get it right.

So, why not build on this? Google could enable us to fill out a standard form with fields for name, email, web pages, parents, town, high school, college, jobs, employers, hobbies, publications, summer camps, etc. Then add a tab to Google.com called "People." Weight the form very heavily when searching for names, so that if you searched for "david weinberger herricks," the Google engine would notice that "herricks" is listed on my personal form as my high school, and thus would move my web pages (the ones I've listed on the form) way up the list. No one besides me would ever see my form itself.

Google has the heft to pull this off. If you know someone at Google, wanna pass this along? Alternatively, you might want to point out the gaping hole in my logic that makes this idea not just implausible but actually humiliating.

The Future of Competition

Scott Kirsner writes in yesterday's Boston Globe about two Boston-area companies coming out with anti-spam products. The founder of one of the companies, Spamnix, was one of the founders of the other company, InterMute. (InterMute is best known for AdSubtract.) Even though the Spamnix guy signed a non-compete, he claims it only pertains to ad-blocking software, not spam. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine InterMute suing, if only to slow the launch of competitive software.

Nah:

"We're both attacking spam because we both hate it," Jaspan says. "There are a zillion people using e-mail, so there's room for lots of [anti-spam] products. If I do pretty well or they do pretty well, maybe one of us will acquire the other."

"My passion against spam is even greater than my competitiveness," says Paul English. "I think there can be lots of good solutions, and I wish him luck."

Now, that's the way it ought to be.

Letter to FCC: Fail Fast

A bunch of netty women and men have sent a letter to FCC Chair Michael "Son of" Powell. The basic message is: When the telecommunications industry goes bankrupt, don't try to resuscitate the corpse. Let it go. Its infrastructure and the business model based on it are obsolete. It can't be fixed. Instead, let the market bring forth a new era of innovation and connectivity, let a hundred flowers bloom, let the moon enter the house of Aquarius, etc. The alternative is that we sink billions into companies that are doing everything they can to prevent telecommunications - the whole schmear of telephones, cable, broadband and the stuff we haven't invented yet - from doing what it wants to do: go digital, go IP, go everywhere.

Stephen Wolfram

[From PopTech] I'm supposed to blog an hour with Wolfram? Ay caramba!

I'm going to write some general comments, and then I'll post my running notes.

Comments

I haven't read Wolfram's book and I am in no position to evaluate the truth or usefulness of what he said.

I hear what he says through a couple of filters. His general thesis - that structures as complex as the universe itself can be generated from incredibly simple rules - resonates. It's the basic claim of chaos theory. And, for me it helps get around my lifelong discomfort with the nature of scientific laws. The idea that the universe is governed by laws is too clearly an application of the governance paradigm to the physical universe. And, while Wolfram's theory gets us past this, in the same way, of course, Wolfram applies the computer paradigm to the universe. And the fact that his paradigm maps to the paradigm of current technology isn't just a coincidence.

Wolfram's presentation was surprisingly clear. I followed more than I'd thought, although I certainly got lost as he went on. Unfortunately, I got lost as he got more and more interesting. I hate when that happens.

Ultimately, of course, the question is the extent to which the rules describe the universe or generated the universe. Not having read the book, I strongly suspect the answer is that the question is phrased entirely wrong. I'm definitely gonna buy the book and pretend to read it.

Anyway, on to the running notes...

[Ernie the Attorney's take on Wolfram is very funny.]

Notes...

John Benditt began by summarizing Stephen Wolfram's idea: "The entire universe is the output of an algorithm the size of a four or five line computer program."

Wolfram physically looks a bit like Jason Alexander, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. He's British and, of course, some type of genius.

He came to his idea while writing programs that try to break down into primitives the things humans want to do (e.g., Mathematica). Suppose you could do the same for nature. What kinds of computer programs might be relevant? From writing mathematical programs, he thought it would have to be quite complex. But suppose you look at very simple programs, one line of code, even chosen at random. Pick the simplest programs and see what they do. So, he looked at "cellular automata." A simple starting point and a simple rule can create complex patterns.

There are 256 simple (8-bit) ceullular automata, so he decided to look at all of them. With rule 30, truly random patterns result. Very simple things go in and very complex things come out, which is against our normal intuition.

So, he decided to point this new "telescope" at other phenomena. The same behavior occurs in a "vast array of systems." It wasn't noticed before because you need computers "and tools like Mathematica," and because it goes against our intuition.

Why does the phenomenon happen? You need a new conceptual framework to explain that. All natural processes can be viewed as computations. Sometimes you know what the output will be ahead of time, e.g., with cellular automaton designed to do squares or to find primes. But there can be universal cellular automata that emulate other, dedicated automata, by being given different input.

The principle of computational equivalence: Any system whose behavior doesn't look obviously simple to us will turn out to be performing a computation similar to any other." [I may have blown that. The pool is getting over my head.] That is, if you look at a system with only simple rules, it will show behavior that's simple and regular. But if you make the rules for the system just a tiny bit more complicated, you jump to having a system that is as sophisticated as any other.

This principle yields predictions: A system like this should be able to do universal computation. And it can.

You wouldn't expect to find this in nature since human-made universal computers are highly complex. It suggests that there should be lots of systems in nature capable of sophisticated computation.

This explains why Cellular Automaton #30 looks complicated to us. Imagine a system and a observer who's trying to decode what the system is doing. The PCE says that in many cases, the behavior of the system will be as complex as the systems inside the observer. That's why #30 seems complex. This leads (somehow) to the Principle Computational Irreducibility. E.g., we can figure out where the earth will be in its orbit 1M years from now just by plugging nubers into a formula. But in some cases, the only way to work out will happen is to run the system, to do the experiment. That defines a limit from what one can expect to get from science.

For example: "The Weather has a mind of its own." The PCE says there's some sense to this in that fluid turbulence in the atmospher is doing as sophisticated a calculation as what's hapening in our minds.

Q&A with John Benditt

Q: You postulate that there is a rule for the universe itself. That seems preposterous because the universe is enormously complex. Defend yourself.

A: I might not believe that had I not seen all that the programs I was studying could do. Physics gets more complex the smaller the object of study gets. But that doesn't have to be the case. A very simple program might be able to produce all the complexity.

What might that program might be like? If the program is small, then the things immediately visible in our universe can't be visible in that program. Also, there has to be as little as possible built into that program. Cellular automata already have too much built in: it has the notion of cells arranged in space and that the color of the cell is different from the cell itself. In the end, one doesn't need anything except space. [This is so similar to Hegel's Logic which generates the universe simply from Being. "Sein. Reine Sein." and we're off and running.] I ultimately suspect one doesn't need anything more than pure space to generate the universe.

But what is space? In traditional science you don't get to ask that question. But my guess is that space ultimately is a collection of discrete points and all we know is how those points are connected to other points.

Q: Isn't this at odd with common sense and 300 years of science?

A: Yes. Newton and Einstein both see space as a background without its own properties. Einstein explored the idea that space is all there is later in his life. Space is a collection of nodes where every node is connected to three others.

So how does time work? Traditionally, time has simply been another dimension. But when you think about programs, time operates very differently than space. I think time is much closer to programs. For cellular automata, every cell gets incremented in sync. But there's probably no universal clock. So, maybe only one place in the universe gets updated at a time. It seems simultaneous because until I get updated, I can't tell if you've been updated. Some known features of physics can be explained this way (e.g., relativity).

"What's encouraging is that from so little one gets out so much." So, if we go all the way, we may be able to define the universe in one small program. "It won't be as exciting as one might think because when the universe ran this program, it took 10B years to run the program." And the Principle of Computational Irreducibility means that we can't catch up: you have to actually run the program.

Q: What is the experimental program that will let us find this program?

A: The core of my new science is a type of abstract science. If the rule is simple enough, we could just search for it. Search through the simplest one trillion rules. Some will be promising but, e.g., won't have time. Many elaborate tools need to be buit.

Questions from the audience

Q: Is this falsifiable?

A: The core of what I've tried to do is more like mathematics than natural science. Falsifiability isn't that relevant for mathematics. Math is tested on whether it's useful in modeling the physical world. He expects there will be thousands of papers in ten years proposing very simple rules. Wolfram himself has proposed some models for fluid turbulence that are surprising.

Q: What effects does your thinking have on fields like philosophy.

A: There hasn't been much time for people to integrate it into other fields. But his book does talk philosophy and is already making an impact on philosophy, e.g., the effect of computational irreducibility has implications for Free Will.

Q: What about the size of the initial conditions? In order to get universality, you can't start with one bit on. What's the number you need? Randomness is the most complex thing. When you come across complexity, you may be looking at it wrong and there may be a simpler way of looking at it. E.g., fractals may be complex and beautiful but result from a single line program.

A: The idea is that you can characterize the complexity of an entity only by looking at the complexity of the program that generated it.

Q: Count the amount of computer time you dissipate, not just the initial state, you can get complexity.

Q: You show that we see simple patterns at various scales.

Warren Spector and Amy Jo Kim on Games

[From PopTech] I've spent many, many hours playing the games Warren Spector has created. Deus Ex, for example, broke ground in providing an open, interactive playground. Also, things blew up real good.

Spector says gaming isn't what we think. It's not usually a solitary activity. And violent games aren't just about violence but also about thinking, planning, acting and reacting. Finally, games are not apart from the real world but are part of the real world,

Spector says we'll see more user-generated content. "Will Wright [The Sims] is the best game designer in the business." And we'll see more "virtual affiliation."

Games, Spector says, can be art. His are commercial and reality-based, he says, but they can be art.

The exciting new trend is "shared authorship," as opposed to games in which you decipher the single author's intention. Spector finds Grand Theft Auto 3 "reprehensivle" in its content but the game play is revolutionary. "The negotiated narrative" is unique to games as a mass medium. Spector gets chills thinking about the way in which games will allow us to assume personae, interact and grow.

Plus, the screen shots from Deus Ex 2 look great.

Soundbyte: "Our tools are pathetic. Try having a character smile in a game. It's insanely hard. We have four control points. Try getting a tear to role down a character's cheek."

Amy Jo Kim is now at a stealth startup called "there." "What's going on in gaming today is what you're going to see in the rest of technology in 3-5 years."

She laid out the basics of online gaming and pointed out how complex and rich the social networks around online games typically become, including "self-organizing fan ecosystems." She told us about the development of The Sims. Very interesting. For example, Maxi (the Sims' creator) noticed that people started telling one another stories about their characters. So Maxi facilitated this by allowing users to upload their stories for sharing with others.

During the Q&A, moderated by Dan Gillmor, Kim and Spector disagreed over the future of fan sites. Maxi

The Experience Economy

[From PopTech] Joe Pine, the author of "The Experience Economy," tells us that "experiences are a distinct form of economic output, as distinct from services as services are distinct from goods." He takes as his example the American Girl store in Chicago where they don't just sell American Girl dolls but provide an entire entertainment experience with a stage show and a perfectly dainty little world to play-act in. I've seen a video of the store and it certainly seemed like a great example of selling experiences, but also seemed like a sign of the coming collapse of civilization. That is, it made Davey-kins wanna pwuke.

Pine admirably includes a discussion of the objection to his theme. He says that when he was teaching in The Netherlands, every time he gave a talk, someone would say, "You Americans...you like your experiences phony and packaged, but we like ours real." Pine replies that because all experience is internal, it is all equally real. This is pretty unsatisfying, so he continues, quite amusingly, to point out that all of The Netherlands is unnatural. It's below freaking sea level, after all.

[Nevertheless, there is a difference between cultivating the earth and creating a calculated environment intended to simulate another human-made environment; there is a difference between The Netherlands and the "Dutch village" at Disney Epcot. - DW]

Pines ends with the good point that businesses can't give you authentic experiences because businesses want to get your money. But his advice is "Get real," which raises more questions than it answers. But his half hour is up.

KM Nonsense

Tom Wilson has a kickass article on knowledge management in Information Research. This is from the abstract:

The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge.

Gen. Zinni on Why the Iraqi War Will Be Harder than W Thinks

Salon links to a frank keynote given by retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni. Zinni is the "former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, who has worked recently as the State Department's envoy to the region with a mission to encourage talks between Palestinians and Israelis." The talk is surprising for two reason:

First, it is quite critical of the Bush administration for being naive about a war with Iraq.

Second, someone apparently did a search and replace on the article, turning every instance of "question" into "Ambassardor Edward S. Walker." As a result, we get sentences that begin "The Ambassador Edward S. Walker becomes how to sort out your priorities," and a question from the audience becomes:

Ambassador Edward S. Walker: I have two Ambassador Edward S. Walkers...

A Blogger Code of UnProfessional Ethics

I love you, Doc.

Some mighty fine blogging on this topic going on over at AKMA's place. For example, he writes: "When we’ve been most effectively seduced, we’re not aware of it ourselves." As they say in churches around the land: Bingo!

Full Disclosure

Why I Can't Ever Tell the Truth about Microsoft, Ever

To satisfy the requirements of the new Standards of Integrity and Professional Ethics for bloggers (for a discussion, see Dave, Doc and Mitch), I am hereby posting all the influences Microsoft has had on me, pro and con.

I use and like many Microsoft products	Microsoft products have been crashing on me regularly for over 15 years
I got a reviewer's copy of XP for free	I've bought thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft stuff, including upgrades that I felt had been forced on me
I competed against them at three companies	I cooperated with them at the same three companies
The Microsoft Word product manager listed the product I was flogging on a slide at Documation 1992 as an excellent complement to Word	Word eventually incorporated many of that product's best ideas. (You like them right mouse button menus? You're welcome.)
I got a free beta of their Word-to-SGML software	I couldn't get the free beta of their Word-to-SGML software to work
When I was liaison to Microsoft for a company I worked for 1991-1993, the Microsoft manager I was working with paid for my lunch a couple of times in their cafeteria	During all the time that I was liaison, they never once took me to a nice place for dinner
I have routinely installed single-user Microsoft products on two or more household machines up until XP and Office 2002	Having to pay to multiply install software I've bought means this was my last upgrade, pal
Every Microsoft engineer I have ever met has impressed me with his or her intelligence, customer focus, and integrity	I routinely curse the stupidity of the assholes who design dumbass fucking Microsoft products. What are they, a bunch of morons?
I hate Microsoft's de facto monopoly of office productivity software	I am happy that everyone uses PowerPoint because it makes complex events so much simpler
I am very glad I am not Bill Gates	I am envious of Bill Gates

Instant Idea Generator

Pretty darn amusing.

Bryan Field-Elliot's DIDW Recap

Bryan, CTO of PingID, has blogged his recap of DigitalID World. He captures it well. (PingID is a "member owned identity network," the sort of ID system that privacy-obsessed webheads would create ... and I mean this in the very best sense.)

Generous writing

The DigitalID World conference would have been a success for me even if I didn't go to any sessions because of who I got to hang around with. I even got to fly back with Jon Udell, whom I first met 15 years ago. I've been in awe of him since I began reading Byte over 20 years ago. We've had intermittent interactions, but never really had a chance to talk at length.

(Jon reminded me that the first time we met, I'd driven up to Byte's headquarters to demo a new Interleaf product, which meant schlepping a Sun workstation and monitor. But when I unpacked, I found that the optical mouse hadn't been included, and there were none to be found in the entire Byte offices. No demo. We laughed about it now, although Jon was laughing just a bit harder than I was.)

Anyway, we were talking about writing. Jon said how much pleasure he gets from shining the spotlight on other people. I talked about the unpleasant neurosis I share with many writers: the need to be the smartest person in the room. If I write about someone else's ideas, it's usually to "surpass" them by expanding on them, and sometimes to undercut them. This leads to a fundamental intellectual dishonesty in which ideas are more valuable if they're mine.

Most writers suffer from this disease for writing itself is often an act of arrogance: "Call on me! I've got something worth cutting down a tree for!" (Among politicians, Gore has the disease but Clinton does not; it's why Gore lost the debates to a moron.)

But, ah, the Web! The Web's architecture is hyperlinked. Every link sends readers away from your page. It encourages generosity as surely as writing for print facilitates arrogance.

As informal evidence of this, the one place I can consistently see threads of generosity in my own writing is in my weblog. I find it deeply satisfying to point to people who know more than I do, write better, have better ideas.

In at least this one regard, the Web has made me a better person.

Doc Rocks

Doc started with a joke that isn't really a joke at all: Instead of Digital IDs, why aren't we talking about digital Egos? At the center of this should be the self with all its vagaries, desires, and complexity. It was a great talk and should have come at the beginning of the conference because it raised issues we should have been talking about all along.

Doc covered a lot of territory (very entertainingly), but there are two points that stuck out for me.

First, he properly made the simple complex: our web identities are much richer and more intricate than what the digital ID folks are talking about. Doc took as his example RageBoy, Chris Locke's online alter ego. Doc talked about how RageBoy was born and how "he" exists via multiple links and identities. What makes us think we can manage these identities, Doc asks?

Total agreement and I was very glad to hear Doc say it. Maybe the best thing would be to keep Doc's sense of self conceptually apart from the type of self that the digital ID folks are talking about. They mean by identity something simple: a verifiable connection to a real world self and a way of negotiating transactions with that self. That's a serial number and a bunch of attributes, and that's about it. Real identities are incredibly messy, digital IDs should be as simple as a dog tag, and we'll be fine so long as we don't start to confuse the two.

Second, Doc said that since there's no user demand for digital ID, we need something that will "mother necessity," something that will make it catch fire with users. That not only seems right, but it illustrates just how alien digital ID seems to us messy selves.

Unfortunately, IMO there is demand for digital IDs but it's coming from the traditional content owners and will be driven from top down. Doc is more optimistic about this than I am these days. (Grant strength to Larry Lessig!)

AKMA on the Day

Digital Rights Management

I moderated this session and thus (ironically?) am unable to blog about its content in a trustworthy way. (Nathan Torkington has blogged a rough transcript of the session.)

The session was way too short and I found it frustrating not to be able to drive issues very deeply. My take-away was pretty depressing, from my point of view: there is a generally shared assumption here (as far as I can tell) that of course DRM is a technology issue, that so long as the technology allows for the enforcement of a wide range of usage policies, then the technology is itself neutral. But it's not. The transfer of the application of rules from humans to machines is not neutral. Software has no judgment. It is incapable of judging context or intention. We thus are going to get for digital content the dystopia we've been imagining for 100 years: an absolutist bureaucracy that believes that the perfect world is the one in which rules are enforced perfectly.

The DRM Paradox

I asked why we don't have DRM yet and one of the panelists said that it was because users are happy with things the way they are. I wanted to say - but didn't because I was the moderator - that you get a paradox if you put that together with what Doc Searls said yesterday: DRM won't take off until someone builds something that users actually want. Well, the market has spoken. DRM is a constriction. We don't want it. So it can only come into existence by being imposed, for it is doing to users something that we don't want done to us.

That's not to say that if the market wants free CDs, it should get free CDs. But it does at least mean that claiming that DRM is a user service is a crock. If it's something that, for the sake of establishing a sustainable marketplace, has to be crammed down the throat of users, then let's at least admit it. (But, see the next point...)

The DRM Fallacy

"The technology merely enables users and vendors to negotiate a license." "This is purely opt-in. If a user doesn't like a license agreement, he doesn't have to say yes."

These would be good arguments if the market weren't already skewed by an OS monopoly and a content cartel. "Opting out" of seeing Hollywood movies is like opting out of our culture. We can always be media hermits. Some choice.

(Chris RageBoy Locke, my friend and co-author, says that this focuses too much on Mass Media and ignores the many voices that will come from the grass roots. Definitely. But although mass media may not be the only source, it is one that people will continue to care about.)