Technologies often precipitate revolutions against those in power.
We can understand the crowds massed in Cairo or Tunis or Bahrain or Libya.
They’re rising up against a repressive, arbitrary and unelected dictatorship that has controlled their lives for a generation or more.
They want democracy.
They want a say in what happens in their lives.
They want an end to aged autocrats.
In this country we have an elected government.
What we don’t have, however, is an elected media.
And in the long run, it is the unelected Media that has a far greater impact on our day to day lives than does any government.
The government, after all, does not control what we get to see for news (ie, no Al Jazeera), or what our entertainment choices will be.
The government may have some nominal control over this, but the real, day to day, minute to minute control over what we get to see or watch or experience or come into contact with during the 8.5 hours a day we are on screens – computers, movie, TV or ipads, is really in the hands of a very few old and out of touch dictators who were not even elected.
Mubarak was, at least, in theory, elected once.
Who voted for Sumner Redstone to control most of their lives?
Who voted for Rupert Murdoch?
Where did these people come from?
How is it possible they have so much power?
Not to mention so much money – enough to make Mubarak and his Swiss bank account look like a welfare case.
We may have a democratic government, but when it comes to our media world, it is strictly the world of Feudalism
Yes my Lord Murdoch – (now tug your forelock).
So if they can do it in Tunis or Tripoli or Cairo, why can’t we do it in Manhattan?
Why can’t we have a hundred thousand people in Times Square or Sixth Avenue saying ‘enough with the dictatorship’.
By what right do these people decide what YOU get to see?
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