The Internet is the ultimate tool for the triumph of the individual. It allows each of us to stake a claim to a piece of limitless space. It allows our voices to be heard amidst an ever-expanding world of technologies that seek to reduce us to a statistic, a demographic within a consumer market. It serves as a rigid meritocracy. It values quality, transparency, and ingenuity and it perpetually rewards the outliers instead of the median.
But no matter how much we want to believe the Internet brings us a beautiful, unfettered, diverse cross-section of the world, it doesn’t. In fact, it does just the opposite. It creates echo chambers. The Internet has a unique way of bringing us more of what we already know and confirming what we’ve always believed. Thus it falls on each of us to accept responsibility for seeking out and owning a better understanding of the things that matter most to us. To learn that the issues that affect us aren’t black and white. We need to challenge ourselves to seek out opposing viewpoints and to learn that different positions are part of healthy discourse. The responsibility to bust these echo chambers doesn’t just live with the user. It also falls on the content creators and the sources of information themselves.
So, in the spirit of dismantling knowledge silos and making ideas maximally accessible, NCTA has done away with the old Cable Tech Talk, its now-former official blog, and created platform. platform is a place to learn about the future of technology, television, and the role the cable industry plays in supporting the networks on which the Internet thrives and grows. We wanted to design a space that allowed anyone to discover the latest news, statistics, opinions, graphics, and videos on cable. We wanted it to be fun to explore and easy to engage with. We wanted it to fit in with our website, giving visitors a chance to paint a full picture of the cable industry as it sees itself. And we wanted it to challenge people’s idea of what the cable industry is, what it does, and where it’s going.
The writers and editors of this blog are truly passionate about the Internet, technology, TV, and the issues that bind them together. We love sharing the story of cable and we love challenging others to open their minds to our industry. We hope you explore the site, engage with it, leave comments, share the content, and use it to grow your understanding of the cable industry. And we hope you use it to talk to us directly so we can learn how to better share the story of cable. After all, that’s how the Internet illustrates the future. It lets us directly communicate with each other and share our vision of how things should be. It offers us a glimpse into today and how, with open minds and a desire to learn, the future can be even better. From the platform team, ENJOY!