Stumbling toward "Vast Wasteland 2.0"

I delivered these remarks at the New Research for New Media Conference on the University of Minnesota campus, Thursday, September 15, 2005.

I’ve been asked to speak today about how my discipline, Rhetoric, addresses itself to new media. The short answer is that we pursue critical and analytical understandings of the discourse and the communicative strategies used to persuade in new media, much as rhetoricians have interrogated persuasive arguments in all media dating back to the 5th Century BCE’s hot new technology — the alphabet.

The advent of the Web has driven a turn toward the visual in rhetoric and associated disciplines. Rhetoric first directed itself at understanding persuasive communication in speech. These practices were adapted, ported if you will, to written communication. And we are in the midst of a similar effort to adapt rhetorical principles to the richly interactive and visual spaces common throughout the Internet.

But this effort, and others across disciplines, will only succeed if we, as academics, offer better stewardship of the media we find so inspiring. I turn here from my discipline to a a topic that I believe concerns every discipline represented here, and many that are not.

In a 1961 speech, then Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow famously described television as a “vast wasteland.” Minow’s speech arrived roughly two decades after the United States public had embraced television. And this embrace included all of the assertions of liberatory and educational potential that the people in this room have heard with reference to the Internet.

I’m not here to echo Minow. Indeed, I think his characterization was somewhat excessive. But I do see the very real prospect of an FCC Chair giving a precisely parallel speech with a precisely parallel indictment of the Internet in the next decade or so. But this will happen for vastly different reasons than those Minow pointed to. And I very much want to do what I can, with your help, to prevent the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, from ever being fairly described as a “wasteland.”
The heart of Minow’s criticism was that broadcasters were not honoring their collective obligation to serve the public interest.

Minow attributed this to commercial pressures, contempt for the mass audience, and inattention to the needs of children.
Elements of these criticisms pertain to the Web, but the overarching concern, to my mind is that the Internet is starving for content. And it will continue to starve so long as it is subject to copyright laws that were developed and optimized for print media two centuries ago. The Internet is only as strong as the content available within its virtual libraries and archives. For too long, we have settled for terms and policies that radically altered the balance away from the public interest and toward the “heirs and assigns” who typically own copyrights.

Every major piece of copyright legislation enacted since the advent of the World Wide Web has curtailed or circumscribed rights that used to be considered common and unremarkable in a print context. The worst example is the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1999, which effectively shut down the public domain for a generation. No works will enter the public domain until 2019, at the earliest. For everything published since 1922 (that’s virtually all of American cinema, the overwhelming majority of recorded American popular music in genres from jazz, bluegrass, and the blues forward, and literary works from the Harlem Renaissance forward) scholars, researchers, and the public are presented with repeated opportunities to descend into “permissions hell.”

Consider the case of a scholar who simply wishes to made an annotated edition of a work published in 1923 available for free via the Internet. That scholar must commence researching whether copyright was renewed, whether the work is still under copyright. This information is NOT available in any online database, but the Library of Congress (this nation’s registrar of copyrights) will helpfully research this question for the sum of $75 an hour until the status of the work is established. Send them a letter, and they’ll get right on it. In a hurry? Try FedEx-ing the letter.

This approach to copyright is now cutting off the oxygen supply that the Internet will need to grow and develop. Sure, it is possible for an organism to function on one lung. And the rise of the blogosphere is just one example of the innovative and compelling approaches to developing content that are part of the story of the Internet to date. But, to my mind, new media should also (at least in part) be about the best of what was available in old media. Television eventually accommodated the best of cinema. MP3s, to use Bolter and Grusin's term, re-mediate LPs and compact discs.

But to date, scholars, even rhetoricians, have failed to persuade courts and legislatures that we need to pursue a more streamlined approach to the use of and compensation for copyrighted material.

I close by asking scholars of all disciplines to become copyright activists. Failing that, I want all academics to at least become copyright conscious. The laws on the books are, from our standpoint, practically unbelievable. The general public appears to have opted for a willful ignorance, the better to continue downloading popular music off the latest peer-to-peer client. It falls to scholars and researchers to make a case for access to and use of information for the purposes copyright was initially developed.

The first United States copyright law was entitled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.” Shortly after the advent of the Internet, copyright stopped serving this critical function. I implore my colleagues to help steer copyright back toward its foundational purpose, and spare us the specter of “Vast Wasteland 2.0.”