Commentary Regulation, media literacy and media civics

The locus of our regulatory concerns needs to shift. In the new media world, a world that still includes old media and old yet resistant values driving institutional processes of mediation, the concern with markets, competition and content needs to be rethought. This is not only because of the decline of spectrum scarcity, or the incapacity of national governments to control international flows of information and communication, but because new media are challenging what it means to be human, through their increasing salience as both information and communication resources, and, as such, as crucial components of our relational infrastructure and our social life. I want to suggest, in this short article, that an understanding of what it is to be human is, or certainly should be, the central question underlying, and in the final analysis regulating, the development of the mediated world in which more and more of us live, and by which almost all of us are affected. I intend to argue that existing forms of media regulation, at best operationalizations of what can be called applied ethics (Christians, 2000), at worst mindless enforcements of veste