t of fat on top. if they could trim that, like no corporate jets, etc. -- corporate jets, etc., i think it could trim a l of no ..t -- your guest makes per year, but i'm sure it is substantial. guest: a good question, and i think the challenge for all of us is to figure of how we balance the need for the deficit that is there for the hospitals. how do we make sure that we talent that right balanc the hospitals need and whether it is the administrators role or down to the key doctors and specialists that need to be trained and need to be there to help our children. the focus that we are doing at children's hospitals is to provide the day

the "the communicators" is on location of the seventh annual state of the net conference sponsored by the congressional internet caucus. we will be talking with several of the participants in this conference and we begin with clay shirky come author, professor and thinker about technology and its uses. he's written four books on the internet and technology including his latest, called the surplus and generosity in the connected age. mr. shirky, is the internet browser an antiquated technology? >> it's antiquated in the sense that it is nearing 20-years-old now, and that was changed quickly as they do now. anything 20-years-old and somewhat antiquated, but it is also proven its worth and in fact it's starting to disappear not because it's going away bit because it is soaking into everything else in a way the

browser is becoming the background of the full operating systems. google has got chrome and there is an operating system all of which is essentially brings all of these interactions into the browser. as we know the platform for talking to people watching video and so the browser stopping -- my kids just the of the day i asked my 9-year-old if he had a browser window open and he said what is the browser? because to him it's what you use the computer for. it is the edge of the screening and so i think the browser is becoming infrastructure rather than an application people think about. >> with of the new apps, is the browser going away? >> again, the browser is going away in the sense of being more tightly tied to the operating system and less intrusive to the user experience. one of the things that is happening is that the idea of the apps store which is just one

click install software has escaped the iphone and the ipad and now people are bringing it back to the personal computer. apple most famously obviously on the mac in the windows world also working on making software easier to install. so i think what -- one of the things that's happened is the browser demonstrated how easy it was to use software, when you didn't have to install lots of things and now the rest of the software ecosystem is coming to exhibit the same characteristics of the browser. so, the browser stops being the center of our experience, but i think it remains part of the infrastructure we are all going to be using. >> to the effect of wireless mobility on how we use technology. >> wireless mobility is quite interesting because wireless has exactly the same descriptive error as the idea of calling the

cars horses and carriage. it's not the lack of lawyers that's the most important thing anymore. it is the lack of forces that made cars special. what makes wires special is we stop having to think about access and think about space at the same time. it used to be if i wanted to go to the internet i had to use a special room with a special machine and a yellow lawyer in the back, and having an android or an ipad order smart phone does is it says you don't need to think about where you are to think about what you want to do. and one of the things that he raises this old notion of online versus offline. that online is a place we went when we were peacekeeping the real world. somebody was talking to me the other day and asked me how many hours a day you spend online? i thought that's not a question i've been asked and a long time and i sort of struggle for an

answer until i realized that question doesn't make sense anymore because we don't really have the experience of going on-line when you pull out its own to look at a map or get somebody's name off of an on-line directory. we are certainly using the internet just as surely as if we were using it at home. the fact that it's on the phone and we can dip in and out like the all the time means that wireless is really made the experience of using the network much more embedded in our daily practice. it's much less an alternative to write down more of it. >> what about when it comes to the legislative policy or regulatory policy, the use of the android smart phone etc? >> so the huge question i think for regulation is just today a presidential director cannot around e regulation and this idea the bug and regulation versus you know, democratic

theory is it's always in very difficult to get people to participate and regulatory activities even when its regulations don't affect the advocacies. and there is a potential to take the space ideal of regulation which is a regulation should be shaped by people who have a stake in their outcome. and to link it up with this ability for wireless devices to make our experience in the network be a kind of lightweight potentially all the time. so one of the things that is an interesting question for the deregulation is will people's ability to contact and participate wherever they are because of these devices really increase the ability to get people's opinions taken in one regulatory questions are raised, and so that's a huge question and it's not just a theoretical question is designed. can we design interfaces with a mobile phone that will actually

say send me an alert when there are regulations and let me comment or let me read them. regulations have been heavily paper bound process these, and being able to compress the information and hand it to somebody and get feedback back isn't just a question of saying now we've opened up the process. it becomes a whole new design efforts around what are the characteristics of a connected citizen and involved citizen. we particularly using mobile and how can we reach that person where they are? >> clay shirky come in a recent article in foreign affairs you wrote about political power of social media. one of the things you notice that billions around the globe are now connected somehow over social media. what effect does that have on u.s. foreign policy oran space movements? political movements?

>> the effect of political moments come in fact the foreign affairs article is partly just a description of what is happening in the social media landscape and it is partly -- it's partly an attempt to argue to the people thinking about these effects that we often overestimated the effect of access to information and underestimated the effect of the access to each other as a function of the digital network. so one of the things i see in the paper is access to information is less important than the access to conversation. the big effect you can see this playing out into nisha right now. it still affects the tools not to give people information they didn't already have come it's to help people who are who want to engage in the government in some way whether constructive work in the case of to nisha in insurgent ways it helps them communicate with one another and coordinate their activities so the effect of democracy is going to be strengthening in the

public sphere. this democracy and the will be a net positive. for the autocratic governments strengthening it is too rigid soared because a strong public sphere also makes it easier and improved the economy and civic life. on the other hand, it tends to threaten the autocratic rules, and so far agreed i think open question is a debate among many people in these issues and how autocracies are the positive affects of strengthening the public's fear going to outweigh the potential of the autocrats to use the internet to control were not. is this a net gain for democracy or gain for autocracy? i am on the game for democracy side because i think that tools are strengthening the public's steerer tend to strengthen democracy over the long haul, but it's not because it drives rapid insurgency or gives people

access to information. it's because it strengthens the ability of citizens to know their own mind to take action together. on the other hand, you know, the autocratic states want to prevent that from happening and they're willing to invest considerable money into helping keep it from happening. as much as those looking on the event into nisha are hoping that they now get a space government, that rewards the insurgency will be self governance of the tunisian people. the autocratic leaders are studying those defense trying to figure out how to keep anything like that from ever happening. >> so should the state department has a policy of promoting social media? >> well, i mean, you know, we did have a policy for the last year. secretary clinton, about this time last year, made a speech unveiling internet freedom and

say formal policy in the state department, something we wanted to promote and we would be willing to demonstrate the country's. however, that has turned out to be tremendously problematic in the light of wikileaks, because suddenly the exposure of the interested our conversation is not only complicate it from the point of view of material, but again, to the tunisian example it became obvious to everyone that the united states knew that the regime was completely corrupt, but also that they were pro-western and so they were tolerated. and that actually enormously complicated the secretary's job because whatever they taunt the united states now sets up with the new government it is going to be with this whole description of the previous tolerance of the tunisian. so it isn't clear to me that the u.s. should do anything specific

to promote social media as a foreign policy objective. in part because of these, and in part because the world's autocratic governments are increasingly worried. in fact he was a promotion of social media and some quarters makes it easier for the autocratic governments to crack down. so, and who i disagreed with about a lot, but not about this said it may well be that the best policy the state department and internet freedom is not to say anything in public about the internet freedom. but to simply work to see that people are able to use the internet to communicate as they will without making a formal policy. >> as we are taping this interview, hu jintao, president of china, happened to be in washington. said facebook and google and bing of the world be held accountable for policies that they as corporations, private

corporations, develop in china? >> it is the really complicated question, and i feel ultimately i have to take the democratic punch which is that is a question for congress, that is a question that is so large and touches so many things that i think there is no -- there is no legitimate regulatory answer to that question. i think that only the most legitimized body which is to see the representative we all send to congress can actually hash out the questions of do we want americans to be able to compete on a level playing field which means giving in to autocratic countries and abiding by their rules, we want to adopt the motive saying every company has to abide by the local rules because that is what we expect here? to we want to see that we -- the u.s. as one of the world's anchored democracies regards democracy promotion as a set of regulations we would be willing to put on our firm?

there is also the way in which u.s. cities may have a stake in this debate separate from our elective representatives and people were enormously upset when it turned out that the siemens nokia equipment was being used in iran to uncover dissident during the so-called green wave, and they were enormously upset with yahoo! helping the chinese government find dissidents that they were searching for. so i don't think this is an easy policy and i don't think there is a policy answer at all, but i think it is worth the question, and i hope that congress offers some clarity the house in a way the worst thing that could happen is that everybody muddles along thinking they know what the rules are without some kind jequirity, some hand of clarity to being produced legislative. >> looking six months, five years, ten years of sutter down the road, what are you most excited about when it comes to technology? >> the thing i'm most excited about when it comes to technology, the same thing i'm

always most excited about, which is i'm excited about what happens to the society when it gets boring. these tools don't get socially interesting until they become technologically boring. it's not a moment when a shiny new tool shows up in the hands of a 15 year old that it changes the world. it's when your mom takes it for granted that she can make a video and uploaded to youtube. it is when a group that wants to form doesn't even think about using the internet as a tool for finding members, raising money, accomplishing material peacocks that is the limit of social change. and so i think of a lot of the stuff that we have already factored in as a part of the technological landscape like this about one year less mobility still has yet to show up in american society as its full social ramifications. and those changes when they happen they are always slower but separate because the sort of double the the end of the day

it's really the social changes catalyze the technology that turn out to be the really big deal. >> if you could redesign the fcc -- where would you start? >> i would start with spectrum policy. spectrum policy, which seems to be about spectrum, about how we manage spectrum -- i'm sorry -- >> you can just keep talking. >> it seems to be about -- spectrum seems to be about the retial engineering in the early 1930's and the way we managed spectrum was to say one and only one can broadcast on any given spectrum in any given locale because we have no way to manage interference. one little slice of spectrum that didn't matter was 2400 gigahertz, because it is the frequency of which one is the microwave frequency so they said

fine, a garage door openers and microwave ovens, do what you like, and this one little spectrum is where wi-fi showed up which is plainly the most incredible change in the networking technology these last ten years. and if i could redesign the fcc i would make it clear that when the engineering changes, the regulatory apparatus changes as well. because we could get so much more value, so incredibly much more value out of the sec managers on our behalf if we approach it in the 21st century engineering. >> how did the art major from jail get interested in these topics? >> welcome you know, by accident, like a lot of people who got interested in the internet in the early 90's. i was actually doing some research and a library for a theater company i was running and my mother said when you're giving that kind of research? we've been learned about this kind of the library school, you should know about it it's called the internet. okay, mom, i will check it out.

and so i was given by my mother this and it is a giant library so i thought it was a source of information and when i got there and i saw the social aspect of it, it was the most interesting thing i had ever seen. and so there was this kind of jawing at left turn i was extremely fortunate in two ways. one, i was using a service was populated by the brilliant system that is willing to take time out to teach someone like me this is how this thing works. and number two, hours at the time when people had formal degrees in any of this stuff and so i was just sort of accepted into one of them a kind of liberal arts major chongging to understand the analogy. and between the two benefits, excellent teachers and a forgiving culture, i just sort of over five years hammered out a new life for myself. >> what is cognitive surplus? >> cognitive surplus is two

things. it is combined free time and talent of the population will over a trillion hours in a year, and it's a medium that allows us to pull that kind of surplus, that time and attention into large collaborative projects. wikipedia is an exit. it is built out of the ability of literally millions of people worldwide to contribute time. a lot of people contributed a little bit of time. a few people contributed a lot of time, and the result of that participation has been this most used reference of the world. ten years ago this saturday, and in those ten years, well over 100 million hours contributed out of the surplus to create this new resource. as the idea part of the book is not only has it happened in the six symbols we can point to the

this is a social resource we can design around it in general. what concerns you the most is looking six months, five years, ten years on the road and of that technology what concerns me the most is what always concerned me the most which is all the good aspects of the internet are built on top of mont just one years and antennas and computers, they are built on standards and regulatory agreements and behavior. they are built on the ability of individuals and companies and governments to say i would rather abide by these rules than opt out because this network is good. and if we were to push, again, by the world's autocratic leaders or by the telecom companies who would rather have the commercial catcher of the networking set, all of that could be sycophant the damage. and so i think constant vigilance is always the thing

that keeps the free systems free. essentially the vigilance we need now is to keep the internet from either structuring were being dismantled by the forces who would rather a network that is this open to not exist because it interferes either with their business goals or commercial. >> clay shirky, what you teach at new york university? >> i teach social media. - for the last year's at the telecommunications program which is my intellectual home, and i just have taken a joint of wheat and with the journalism department because one of the places where the effects of digital media are most enormously visible right now is in journalism, and i want to be part of figuring out how in the middle of these enormous changes in both practice and business model we continue to get the amount and quality of journalism and the functioning democracy needs. >> what choice is have you made in technology?

what do you use? >> i chosin android colin, i've got to the e leffinge macbook air, i have a genex desktop and i play with the audit had although now that i have the phone in the air it fills a enough of the gap. i liked it, but i'm not one of those people that's transformed by it because so much of what i do with these devices is to write, not just read and the laptop is better for writing. >> author, professor and technology thinker clay shirky has been our guest on the "the communicators." shirky.com is the website. >> thank you so much.

to the new health care law. the original deed for the plans was 2017. the president also talked about the economic stimulus plan and the rights of public employees unions during a speech before the national governors' association. from the white house, this is 30 minutes. [applause] >> hello everybody, it's good to see you all. [applause] thank you very much i'm joe biden, i am jill biden's husband, which i am getting to be known around here. [laughter] we decided to bring in the second team now to talk to you all. folks, welcome back to the white house, and for those of you this is your first visit as governor, welcome and congratulations on your e elections. over the last two years, the older governors will tell you, at least the ones who have been

around for two years will tell you they probably got tired of hearing from me. i was on the phone with you all so often during the recovery act. i know none of you liked the recovery act much. [laughter] but i just want to start off by thinking of the governors who've been here for the last two years for the way in which you implement it. and i just wanted to give you a little fact. there were over 75,000 individual projects that went on in your states, and a total of 250,000 awards, meaning a check had to be cut to 250,000 different entities. and a group of white cheese and outside examiners pointed out there is less than one of 100th of 1% of fraud in the entire operation. and that's because of you. that's because of all of you. [applause] and it's because of the mayors and the new governor's although there's no recovery act, there will be continued relationship between the federal and state and local.

we plan on trying to use that as a template as to how to move forward so we can save the taxpayers' money. the recovery is underway although i'm sure a lot of you, having to cut your budgets, don't feel it. it's a very difficult time for you all. and i just want you to know that i think we probably can all agree on the major initiatives. we may have a different prioritization, but we all know we have to do something about the long-term debt. we all know that we have to do something about preparing ourselves to compete in the future in terms of education, innovation and infastructure. but i want to remind you all that i know you all know that sometimes our constituents, you look at some of the polling -- they think we've already lost the future to china. they think we've already lost the future date to india. they already the we are behind the eightball. we're better positioned than any country in the world, any country in the world to own the 21st century economically.

our were gdp is bigger than that of china, japan and germany combined. we are in a situation where a hearing in the united states of america the median income is close to $50,000. in china, its $4,500. we wish them better, but just to put this in perspective, it's important to know where we stand now, the platform from which we now offer eight, and why if we do the right things we have an overwhelming prospect, an overwhelming prospect, to not only recover here in the united states, but leading the world in the 21st century. the man i'm about to introduce to you shares your view. americans have never settled for number two, literally. this is not hyperbole. it's not one of these chauvinistic things. we what other nations to do well, we will do better if they do well. but we are not -- we are not prepared, nor are you, to settle for being number two in anything. and so, folks, that's why we've laid out -- the president has laid out in his state of the

union speech the need for us to innovate. we have the most innovative economy in the world. we have the freest of the free enterprise systems. we know what we are doing. we want to unleash the free enterprise system. we also know that we cannot rank tied with five nations for number my in the world in the percentage of people we graduate from our universities. it's not acceptable. it's simply not acceptable. that's why by 2020, we will in fact be once again leading the world as we did in the past. that is a goal, a goal we will meet. as my wife you just heard from, a duty college teacher -- community college teacher would say any nation that out educate us is going to out to pitas. it's simple as basic as that. and third, we cannot have it when it century infrastructure for the 21st century -- and 20th century infrastructure as all of you know, that in fact in some areas is teetering on the needed

major, major repair, and by and for stricter we not only mean ports, roads, airports, we also mean a modern