Distributing Information through Dispersed Media and Campaigns
Distributing Information through Dispersed Media and Campaigns
This chapter deals with dispersed media. New information technology has created a more dispersed media that, in combination with empirical inquiry and prediction markets, have the capacity to create a politics more focused on the consequences of public policy. Just as the government in the nineteenth century helped distribute policy and political information through the post office, so today it should be careful to facilitate distribution of such information through contemporary technologies. It is argued that our laws should give as much protection to the new, dispersed media as to the old media. The government should also encourage universal access to the Internet—the portal to much of the dispersed media. Finally, the government should deregulate and subsidize the provision of information in political campaigns, because campaigns remain the most effective route for public policy information to reach the mass of citizens who do not follow specialized media or even the news more generally.
Keywords: dispersed media, information technology, political campaigns, Internet, public policy