Toward the Wired Society: Prospects, Problems, and Proposals for a National Policy on Cable Technology

The city is already encroaching on the countryside in a modest cultural sense. Today many remote New England villages receive more channels of New York City television, and receive them more clearly, than do most residents of the five boroughs of the great city. This anomaly is because of a relatively new and still evolving technology, popularly called cable television. This article primarily addresses the broad problems now confronting the American people on how to devise wise national policies that will put this technology of the new communications to its best uses for the most people. In short, how is the nation to deploy the new wealth of cable technology? Within the context of analyzing these broad questions of public policy, this article also seeks to present practical points and information for local practitioners (and other newcomers) who must face the bewildering problems of fashioning local legal structures—largely in the form of local franchises—for governing cable development at the local level.