From: "Milton Mueller" <mueller@xxxxxxx>
To: <governance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <plenary@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [WSIS CS-Plenary] Civil society activism and
Communication-information policy
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 10:50:34 -0400
This may be of interest....
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Syracuse University's Convergence Center releases report
on citizens' role in shaping communication and information
policy
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"Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy
in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy,
1960-2002"
The research report analyzes the role of citizens groups in
shaping communication and information policy. The full report
and the data on which it was based can be downloaded for
free at http://dcc.syr.edu/ford/tnca.htm
The study traces the evolution of citizen advocacy from the
broadcast licensing challenges of the late 1960s and 1970s
through the telecommunication regulation reforms of the
1980s, the battles over privacy and Internet censorship of
the 1990s and the conflicts over digital intellectual property
and media concentration in the early 2000s.
The report had its genesis in a realization that there was
no long-term, strategic analysis of public interest advocacy
around communication and information policy, despite the
fact that philanthropic foundations and members fund such
groups and many people join or support them.
For activists and policy-oriented advocacy groups, the
report provides a sense of historical perspective, an analysis
of different modes of advocacy used in communication and
information policy, and an assessment of its sources of
strength and its weaknesses.
"This is a long-term analysis of organized efforts by citizens
to change public policy toward communication and
information," says the report's principal author, Professor
Milton Mueller of the Syracuse University School of
Information Studies
The research was funded by the Ford Foundation's
Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program.
Report Summary:
Chapter 1: A Vision of the Policy Domain
We define and defend a vision of communication and information
policy (CIP) as a comprehensive and integrated policy domain.
We also define and describe the three primary modes of advocacy
around CIP issues.
Chapter 2: A Goal: Institutional Change
We draw on theories of institutions and institutional change to
provide both a goal for specifying what citizen collective action
could achieve, and a benchmark for assessing its impact.
Chapter 3: A Bird's Eye View: Four Decades of Congressional
Activity and Interest Group Organization in CIP
A macroscopic overview of the quantitative data.
Chapter 4: The 1960s and 1970s
We describe and assess the mass media activism of the mid-
1960s and 1970s around broadcasting and cable, the period
of the most rapid rate of growth in the population.
Chapter 5: The 1980s
We describe how the 1980s was characterized by major
changes in both the political climate and the type of
communication-information policy issues under consideration.
We document the appearance of computer professionals and technologists
organizing around computer-related policy issues
in the organizational population for the first time.
Chapter 6: The 1990s and early 2000s
We show how digital technology became the focal point of
institutional change in CIP, leading to an explosion of
Congressional activity, bringing in a new generation of advocacy
groups and creating a major change in the composition of the
advocacy organization population.
Chapter 7: Conclusions
We attempt to summarize our findings and draw some conclusions
about the future of CIP advocacy organizations and their policy
agenda.
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