Mon, Aug 25 2008

On taxing non-traditional forms of communication and information

Well, if Dusty Horwitt is serious in his piece from the Washington Post, it does explain why I always had trouble with book banning. I've learned that any time someone wants to force other people to limit what they read or write, if you follow them long enough, they invariably have some other real agenda to promote.

And if the likes of blogging on the internet brings printed newspapers to their editorial knees, maybe there was a sound societal reason for it. Society is obviously beginning to move toward many other vehicles for information. We've known for a long time that most printed publications get the majority of their revenue from advertising and not from subscribers. If subscribers move toward the internet because the papers are working more to please advertisers than subscribers, that's a good thing for those seeking information and truth. And eventually advertisers will catch on and move along with the crowd. The internet itself might be just a fad, but even if it is, cell phones or some other device will no doubt come along and steal attention from it. And so it goes. We may never go back to having printed publications as a standard for disseminating information. We can whine over it or we can find ways to make it work for us as a society. If the internet is part of a bigger problem then maybe it can also be part of a bigger solution. Why rush to tax knowledge that is becoming more open to people? What is Dusty Horwitt seriously really afraid of? That is, if he's even serious at all.

posted at: 18:42 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry