Al Gore was on the Daily Show last night and had a good interview with Stewart. Gore criticizes the news/tv medium for its efforts to relate Congregational conversations to citizens. Television is a broken system that produces a one way conversation. Here is a snippet from the show.

(the full segment is on comedy central.com part1, part2, or if you want a copy you can edit goggle may help you)

Gore like others sees potential for improvement of these system of communication and governance via “The Internet”. In this respect Gore highlights the problems that we hope metavid will help address. Mainly making Congressional video more accessible and re-usable. We can imply by Gore criticism of television as a one way conversation that when he says “the Internet” he means the kind of Internet Lessig describes, a participatory read-write web. In software metaphors the existing television system is read only, closed source and proprietary. So if we aim to address this problem our social software design decisions should be informed by the ideals of free software and participatory culture. see metavid thesis

Gore goes on to say this Internet potential was not actualized in 2003. While true the� invasion, occupation and total devastation of Iraq was not prevented :(… more than a million people in the US and around 10 million people worldwide did hit the streets to try and stop it. This un-paralleled mass action was enabled in no small part by the improved social communication infrastructure. If we are to hail improvements in communication infrastructure as the savior of our democracy it would be good to highlight not only what “the media, the President, Congress, and CIA”, did wrong, but also what the people did right.