Lessig

I'm going to preface this with two statements, one I have to disagree
with the previous poster, and two, please rebut if you feel I get it
wrong. Debate is way more fun than just regurgitation or lecture.

These four sections are about how the internet (and tech advances in
general) functions as a democratizing agent in modern society. The
first section shows how a previous tech advance, Kodak, altered
democratic expression in its time, and then draws the corollary that
we are living in another 'Kodak' moment of history, as well as how
judicial support for the expansion assisted such expression.

The next three sections highlight different aspects of the current
increase in democratic potential due to various technological
advances. Some of the key concepts include the distinction between
read only and read and write cultural participants (p.4 paragraph 6).
Or the lack of economic motivation present in the blogosphere and how
this assists in its presentation of news stories (last half of section
3).

However I take one major issue with this article, in the blog section
specifically, the author closes with the line "When there are ten
million, there will be something extraordinary to report." The idea
of information overload was skimmed briefly in our last reading, but I
believe that it is a serious issue. Human beings are creatures of
habit, we tend to stick to similar routes, be they in our physical
lives like where we eat lunch, or which streets we take to get to
class. But also in our digital lives, many of us have probably a
dozen websites we visit regularly, be they for news, weather, social
networking, or even comics. If 10 million blogs get up and running
how will any particular voice or fact be heard above all the others?
It will simply be another aspect of media fracturing where we can
customize what kind of media we ingest and never have to suffer the
discomfort of an opposing view. At that point the erosion of the
public sphere that G. Thomas Goodnight fears in his essay The Erosion
of the Public Sphere, will have fully occurred. (Hunting for a link,
I'll update when I find a digital copy of the paper.)