Category: Perspectives

Some people quiver at the sight of a dog. Others sleep with a light on or cower at the sound of thunder. For me, the ultimate dread has always been potluck suppers and all those murky casseroles of unknown provenance.

If the experts are correct, my future is grimmer than I had thought. That’s because the sharing economy that has taken the world by storm very much resembles a global potluck supper. A tech company sets up a trestle table and everyone gathers around to pop open their Tupperware containers.

The casual embrace of collaborative commerce has been sudden and swift, probably because it’s an economic extension of the broader, technology-driven social trend toward sharing. Social media has unleashed the age of faux familiarity and diminished the boundaries we once used to stratify our personal relationships. The word “friend” has become a verb—and an increasingly meaningless one at that.

Only a few years ago, we were warned to never accept rides from strangers, and never meet privately with people we knew only from the Internet. Now, we’re paying for the privilege of doing both.

Still, according to experts, there’s a lot more of this ahead.

As mobile digital technology propels us away from the traditional model where corporations accumulate resources and produce goods and services, we move toward a more deconstructed model. The platforms that support digital commerce may still be large companies, but they increasingly draw resources from a widely distributed and diverse crowd.

Sharing economies allow these individuals and groups to make money directly from their underutilized assets. As a result, we increasingly have an economy where physical assets are being shared as services. Put another way, people no longer need to accumulate things they don’t want. Instead, they can literally tap into a stream of services that the things provide.

For example, you want a hole in your wall, but you don’t own a power drill and you don’t want to own a power drill. Until fairly recently, the transaction cost of hiring a handy man or owing your brother-in-law
a favour, was higher than the cost of buying a drill. In the sharing economy, however, excess capacity—whether a good or
a service—can be monetized. A stranger can come over with a drill and do the job in their spare time for a fraction of the cost, or trade that service for another item or service.

Just as businesses like eBay and Amazon allow anyone to become
a retailer, the sharing economy and the abundant apps that now support it, can transform individuals into taxis, food delivery services or boutique hotels as and when it suits them.

However deep your aversion to the principle of potluck commerce, it’s tough to argue against the economic ef ciency of such a crystalline form of capitalism and its majestic balance of supply and demand.

That said, there are daunting challenges ahead.

Corporations, regulators and all levels of government have been left scrambling to catch up and to offset the revenue that is now leaking out of their clutches. For investors, that’s a red ag: There’s always heightened risk when regulation and process follow the creation of a market. The introduction of taxes, insurance requirements, labour codes and other operating standards invariably skew the business model by adding costs in ways that may not have been anticipated.
And that has a direct impact on the competitiveness of new and old paradigms.

For those who love a potluck supper, a big part of the charm is the variety and the element of surprise. Who knew that tomato juice could be turned into Jell-O?

But even potlucks are not immune to the sudden intervention of provincial health- care of cials. After at least one death and several cases of serious food poisoning, they were banned in some jurisdictions.
In others, like Manitoba, they must now adhere to the Community Dinner Guidelines published by public health officials.

We’ve all become hooked on the drama and the chronic upheaval that comes with perpetual technological innovation. And that suggests that as compelling as the sharing economy may be, the pendulum will eventually swing back to privacy and exclusivity.

As the sharing economy matures, it’s likely to be a lot less rowdy and a lot more regulated. But then again, no one will get sick from eating a bad devilled egg either.

Cars

WAZE

In today’s media world, we now deal with what was once unimaginable: Everyone can now communicate his or her opinions and perceptions. Blogs, social media feeds, podcasts and smartphones give citizens unprecedented voice, and sometimes place them at the scene of breaking news that, in an earlier time, would have gone unreported.

This disruption of traditional news media has been underway for a long time. But it has risen to a new plane with the consolidation in unseen hands of both Internet advertising revenues and control of who sees what among the thousands of competing political and social narratives. The loser is not just the incumbent news media, whose models and management have struggled to adapt. The question now before Canadian policy- makers is whether democracy itself is being put at risk.

Canada has always pursued public policy to ensure there is journalism by Canadians for Canadians. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is an instrument of public policy. So is the CRTC. As is Section 19 of the Income Tax Act, introduced in 1965 to assist Canadian-owned media in the competition for advertising revenue.

Supports for periodicals and minority- language publications also ow from public policy. The rst postal subsidy predates Confederation. Foreign-ownership restrictions are a policy. The Ontario Media Development Corporation’s tax credit for digital media innovation, radically altered for scal reasons in 2015, is a policy. Several provinces have chosen to exempt newspaper subscriptions from their provincial sales tax.

Much of this policy, however, was created for a pre-digital age. Governments in many other countries have responded more quickly with initiatives to level the tax playing field.

But before deciding what can and should be done in Canada, it is crucial to determine whether and to what extent a crisis truly exists.

New technologies have made it possible to customize news consumption, but have also increased the supply of news and opinion dramatically. They have also allowed for the bifurcation of production and distribution, with nancial returns heavily skewed to the latter. Moreover, the Internet, once a freewheeling information market,
has quickly come to be dominated by a pair of global giants—Google and Facebook— that are not only lacking in passion for news, but actively avoiding the responsibilities of a publisher.

To some extent, the increased supply may be an illusion as the same news
is being replicated in many locations. If so, such repetition constitutes a net good in that it creates more opportunities for citizens to encounter information of civic importance. But the critical issue for policy purposes is where it originates, not how and where it is accessed.

The media ecosystem ceases to deliver on its democratic role without this diverse wellspring of original news, especially the variety we call civic-function news: the coverage of elected of cials, public institutions and supporting public services; issues and debates related to these of cials and bodies; and the ability of communities to know about themselves for civic purposes.

Public policy should hold no interest in who produces this news—whether
a television network, a newspaper born in the 19th-century, an independent journalist or a digital startup—only that it exists. The focus should be on the role news plays within a democracy and the critical question of whether the transition from one model of journalism to another poses an acceptable risk.

The 2016 U.S. presidential race raised awareness of the dangers of lter bubbles and fake news on the giant platform sites, particularly Facebook, but also Google. The debate over the responsibility of such companies to control falsehood and bias in the content they present and promote brought into sharp relief how the norms and practices of established newsgathering organizations differ from those of the entities that have risen to challenge them.

Journalists, media executives, academics and policy analysts are all wrestling with what the waning status of traditional journalism truly portends. Are we merely passing through a turbulent transition
to a more open and diverse future, or witnessing something that could in ict lasting damage on democracy? What interventions are warranted if the new information marketplace proves to be a poor guardian of the public good–if not, in fact, antithetical to it? Can we afford to wait and nd out?

This excerpt has been condensed and edited from The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age, published by the independent and non-partisan Public Policy Forum in January 2017.