What We Need is an INFORMATION Superhighway

The biggest complaint of people living or visiting in Hawaii, is the lack of timely, good, unbiased information -- for which they think the traditional forms of the commercial media, should have as their duty, as the presumptive self-anointed fourth branch of government. However, that status is not a legal obligation but just the media’s selling point -- to their readers as well as advertisers. Unfortunately, in this model, information that is not profitable to propagate is usually not -- and the advertising medium may even insist, “If you want your word to get out, you’ll have to buy advertising, or we’ll provide only misinformation free.”

The editors become very powerful under this arrangement -- while assuredly, the public grows less powerful, less able, less informed, of all the options, and not what just one self-designated person (of limited understanding) may want everyone to know. In that information paradigm, hoarding information has value and profit to a few, controlling self-interested parties -- while the general public (consumer) is at their mercy.

We see this disadvantage often in even that last bastion of imagined free speech -- "the letters to the editors" -- in which what is selected and published, is whatever the editor wants to be revealed and not the total submissions, as their own exercise of power and importance. Few can resist abusing this trust -- especially in a culture in which everyone wants to get to the top, but few know what to do once they get there, except to keep everybody else down.

But the possibility now exists that there can be a total exchange of information -- if it becomes government’s quintessential task. The reason people make bad decisions is usually that they’ve been misinformed, rather than being inherently stupid. News and education have now become supplanted by the more generic information process -- because the technology that came into existence widely only ten years ago, made such a thing possible. It has produced such a rapid evolution in awareness that “computer-literate,” has become the new standard for being a literate, informed person.

It is not education per se that is valued; it is the information transmitted in that process that has value -- and now it is available to anyone who desires it. Of course, that has profound implications for those who have traditionally considered those activities “their turf,” which are the newspapers, schools and universities. It challenges and breaks down their exclusive authority by virtue of being in the proper pecking order -- and having “paid one’s dues.”

Two major controversies in political discussions today really boil down to this: that Bev Harbin in Hawaii and Harriet Miers in Washington D.C., have not properly “paid their dues” and moved up through the ranks in the "approved" fashion -- compliantly putting in one’s time, and in that process, becoming so inured to a way of doing things, that one no longer has the valuable insight of a newcomer (outsider), to recognize that things aren’t right just because it’s always been done that way. That is the new blood and ideas that every organization needs to stay vital, vibrant and relevant -- ready to take on new challenges rather than just retreating to the comfort of the unvarying past, merely repeating itself, as though there is no benefit from learning anything, and that improvement or any other way is not possible.