Obama vs. the iPad:
There’s a reason why the president thinks information is “a distraction.”
  • Obama’s disdain for new media has become so consistent that it is hard to dismiss as mere posturing. This is all the more ironic because Obama’s political movement supposedly mastered the new art of communication. During the 2008 campaign, the Obamistas let the world know they were cool by, among other things, speaking digital as a first language.

    By contrast, since taking office, Obama has sounded downright nostalgic about the old newspaper era, all the while warning that the new communication revolution is producing more information than people can digest.

    Confused? You shouldn’t be.

    now that he has to govern, President Obama would just as soon dispense with all those niggling critics carping about his policies. It was better in the days when three liberals — say Cronkite, Reasoner, and Brinkley — had a monopoly over deciding what the news was every day, and synthesized it every night on TV. Then they let the New York Times echo those views the next morning. Those were the days.

    it’s beginning to dawn on this White House that the Internet is not its friend and, in fact, that the web stands for the opposite of what has emerged as the Obama administration’s animating spirit. The Internet is centrifugal, dispersing power outward; the Obama administration is centripetal, concentrating power at the center. Google is moved hither and thither through choices made by millions; Wikipedia relies upon the wisdom of crowds. In the blogosphere, everyone can have an opinion, and every opinion has a chance to be considered — and perhaps to prevail — in the online marketplace of ideas.

    The Obama administration, conversely, prides itself on offering top-down governance by the best and the brightest — not realizing that, as most Americans see it, that type of thinking creates a self-selected elite prone to hubris and atrocious error. In a mere 15 months, the Obama administration has concentrated in Washington control over important parts of industries as important and diverse as automobiles, banking, and health care. It wants to do the same with energy.

    Given these two opposing forces — the centripetal, governing one and the centrifugal, technological one — a collision was inevitable. It has happened so early in Obama’s first term because his administration has been in such a rush. Its single-minded will to bring all this power to Washington quickly cannot countenance debate and criticism, which are the mother’s milk of the Internet.

    What the Obama administration will do about all this is another question. The FCC recently announced that it will ignore its own previous determination — and a court ruling — and proceed to regulate broadband communications.