Why Open Spectrum Matters - The End of the Broadcast Nation

[6]What could beImagine a world in which we've changed policy to adapt to the new metaphors. There will be changes in three dimensions: short term, long term and deep term.Short term, we will see a sudden breaking free from wireless gridlock.

This will not only bring new, smaller players into a broadcast industry that has been locked up by media mega-giants. More important, it will enable consumers and citizens to communicate with one another.

We will create our own content, but we’ll also be in constant conversation. From these connections will emerge new social groupings, just as simple text messaging on telephones has created “flocking” behavior in Japan and Scandinavia.

 We will see innovations wherever action at a distance or ubiquitous access makes sense –  including, incidentally, object-to-object communications as our household and office devices start to “talk” to one another.Long term, we cannot predict the sort of innovation that will happen, any more than Marconi could have predicted WiFi 100 years ago.

Predictions range from ubiquitous access to "personal knowledge avatars" to even Star Trek-style transporters "beaming us" across space. The only certainty is that our current predictions are inadequate to the reality that we will invent for ourselves.Deep term, the unleashing of wireless connectivity will eat away at one of our last remaining social dependencies on broadcast media."Broadcast" isn't simply an industry.

It is a network topology, an economic model, and a social structure with direct consequences for the political process as well.  As a network topology, broadcast assumes that the messages are sent one to many.

As an economic model, it assumes the "channel" is an expense and revenues come from the content that is broadcast (via subscription or advertising). As a social structure, broadcast assumes that the ability to communicate is unequally – and unfairly – distributed.The result of these assumptions is a population that by and large is presumed to be sitting quietly, facing forward, consuming content developed by commercial interests.

The effects of having become a "Broadcast Nation" are profound. Our freedom is defined by the channel changer nearby.

We expect power to be concentrated in the hands of those who have access to media. We expect politicians to be talking at us more than listening to us.

We expect consumer goods to be "broadcast" the way messages are: identical goods flowing from a single source. We even experience The Famous as a special class of person whose lives are played out over the broadcast network.We can get a taste of the effect of breaking free of the broadcast metaphor by looking at what the Internet is doing.

The Net enables people to connect with one another, circumventing the broadcast chokepoints and the organizational chart formalities. We are at the beginning of a generational phase of innovation not only in technology but in ways we human beings are organizing ourselves.

We're inventing new types of groups, new ways of writing, new rhythms of social intercourse.To gauge the effect of opening up spectrum, take the energy of the Internet and multiply it, for all of that Net's passion and commitment comes from a medium that until now is overwhelmingly used to transmit text.

It is a typed medium. Imagine when our connectedness is no long constrained to the speed of typing and the limits of a text-based presentation of ideas.Certainly new businesses will arise commercializing the new inventions.

More important, however, is the great democratizing effect this will have on our culture. We will get up off the couch and face one another.

We will expect — demand — direct responses. Cant and marketing messages will be worse than insulting; they will be boring.

We will be able to organize ourselves not just around ideas that can be typed but richer expressions of thought and attitude. Mood, emotion, and art — hard to convey in ASCII — will re-enter the global connection.

A bottom-up conversation can begin over the ether, helping to make participatory democracy real.We are not in the Information Age. We are not in the Age of the Internet.

We are in the Age of Connection. To achieve the ideals this country was built on — equality, freedom of speech and thought, the basic fairness that let’s people determine their own destinies — we need everyone connected to everyone else.Spectrum is ubiquity.

Open spectrum is equality and freedom.Endnotes[1] Jock Gill, Dewayne Hendricks and David Reed contributed ideas, information, links and words to this paper. All errors and infelicities are mine, however.[2] Dave Hughes, as told to Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 157-8. See also http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html.[3] The story of the invention of spread spectrum is actually far more complex.

In fact, Lamarr’s invention wasn’t developed and used by the military until after direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS aka CDMA) was put into practice in the early 1950s.

Lamarr’s contribution was real, but the story is so appealing that it has been over-played…as in the body of this very paper. For more information about the history of these inventions, see "Spread Spectrum Communications" by Charles E. Cook, Laurence B. Milstein (Editors), IEEE, December, 1983.[4] http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art02/slides02/ree/ree_slides.pdf[5] David Reed, “The Sky’s No Longer the Limit,” Context Magazine, http://www.contextmag.com/archives/200212/Insight2TheSkysNoLonger.asp[6] David Reed provided the content for the “Today’s Technology” section of this paper.

Many of the phrases are his.Sources and additional readingDavid Isenberg, “The Rise of the Stupid Network.” http://isen.com/stupid.htmlDavid P. Reed, “The Law of the Pack.” Harvard Business Review, Feb.

2000. http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/feb01/F0102A.html#3David P. Reed’s Open Spectrum page: http://www.reed.com/OpenSpectrumJ.H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, D.D. Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in Systems Design.” http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html2002 (c) D. Weinberger.

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