-A majority thinks that the public should have the most to say about what we see and hear on TV. •Choosing Our Future's 1984 pol/findings confirm national findings. An in-depth scientific poll was conducted in the San Francisco Bay area in the spring of 1984. Key findings include: · -People said they wanted an average of thirty-five percent of prime-time hours devoted to reality-based programming. This contrasts sharply with the average of three percent currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area. -Ninety-four percent of those polled said that TV stations should do more to learn what kinds of issues the public wants to know about. -A substantial majority (71 percent) thought TV should have more live, citizen debates on important public issues. FCC Deregulation Has Pushed Control of Programming to Local Stations and Communities •Sweeping deregulation ofTV programming, in 1984, coupled with continued requirementsfor broadcasters to serve the public interests, have produced a new situation of local control over television programming. Formerly, the FCC served as "watchdog" of the public interest; now, all responsibility for programming rests squarely with local stations and commmunities. • TV deregulation presents citizens with a golden opportunityfor bringing democracy swiftly into the Communications Era. New rules governing broadcast communication are still being invented. The situation is ripe for creative social innovation. Our challenge is for local communities to awaken themselves, muster their social will, organize fairly and effectively, and then represent their communication needs directly to local broadcasters who have a strict (but never before effectively enforced) obligation to the community. Addressing the Challenges: Building a Communications Model For the Future Electronic Town Meetings could reinstate the ideals and results of the New England Town Meeting on local, regional, and national scales. They also could provide a new format for Americans to exercise their Constitutional rights to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. The people of the United States are fully capable of building the technological and social system that can support Electronic Town Meetings. The physical technologies required to conduct Electronic Town Meetings are simple, familiar, and readily available: television sets, telephones, and computer hardware and software. Powerful systems already have been developed for business, and it is a straightforward task to apply them to the needs of our democracy. Summer 1986 RAIN Page 29 How Electronic Town Meetings Might Work Imagine that you have just seen a compelling, well-balanced documentary on an issue of great concern to you. An Electronic Forum follows in which a pre-selected, random sample of citizens are asked to give their "vote" on questions raised by a program moderator in the TV station. The citizens are in their homes throughout the community and are watching the Forum on TV. Their telephones are linked to the computer in the TV station, and they "vote" by dialing the number that corresponds to their chosen response to the question. A number of studio discussions, phoned-in ideas, and follow-up votes ensue. The moderator can thereby "talk with" these community representitives and rapidly get their responses to key questions like: •How many care about the issue being raised? •How strongly? •Is more information ·about the options wanted? •What other ideas, compromises or creative solutions are acceptable? •Has a working consensus emerged? •Does the community wish to petition for policy changes? Mobilizing Social Awareness and Social Will •Everything required. to move the U.S. democracy rapidly into the communications era already exists. We have the technology of communication, the clear legal obligation of stations to serve the public interest, the creative talent, the push of hard necessity, the pull of enormous opportunity, and more. What is now needed is the broad social awareness of our opportunity, coupled with the social enthusiasm and will to realize it.
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