Re: [GZG] FTverse colinies

["Robert Mayberry" <robert.mayberry@xxxxxxxxx>]

Another issue is control.

Right now, we're making the costs of journalism so low that the best
reporting often comes from citizen journalists on the scene filing
dispatches onto their blogs. In the grim future of the Tuffleyverse,
the situation has been reversed.

On major planets, you'll have an internet with a pretty integrated,
globalized world-wide culture, lots of voices, and a very short news
cycle. However, news BETWEEN colonies could be tightly regulated, at
least in highly regulated states like the ESU. Distribution costs
become enough of a bottleneck that only a few large (possibly
state-owned, state-supported, or state-coddled) news organizations can
be supported by the market.

Plus the *expectation* of instant news isn't there. You have time even
when a ship docks to get the Official Story straight even if you know
you can't keep the information totally bottled. That means that
overall control of information would be pretty tight, certainly enough
to place a politically expedient spin on even bad news.

You couldn't keep the people from finding out about a massacre, for
example, but you could minimize it, create "context" for it, or
surround it with "news analysis" to justify it. Or even just
manufacture some domestic story that eats up all the air.

Yet another reason why GZG's universe is so balkanized.


On 5/13/08, Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Jon T. wrote:

> >...There may
> >well be international/Interstellar media about filming and reporting
> >on everything, but then even if they can smuggle the footage offworld
> >(or transmit it to a courier waiting to jump outsystem) it is still
> >going to be days/weeks/months before the public back home get to see
> >it. So there may well be plenty of firm evidence to court-martial
> >people after the event, but still no way of actually stopping
> >seriously bad stuff while it is happening.

> How is that - no way of stopping seriously bad stuff while it is happening
> - different from today's situation...? Sure, we often get to see seriously
> bad stuff happening almost in real time, but we still can't do anything
> about it unless we happen to be *right* there *right* then... Srebrenica,
> anyone? Rwanda?


-- 
Robert Mayberry
(678) 984-5113
Robert.Mayberry@xxxxxxxxx

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