Communication is not a Civil Right - it's a Civil Necessity.

We're social animals, and our own survival depends on the our relationship with the group. Groups are created and sustained through communication - it's the primary tool of survival and it always has been. This is something that is even more fundamental than democracy itself.

But even a cursory look at our current media laws and institutions shows that they are designed to prevent communication from taking place, except when it suits the needs of those people making the laws and maintaining the institutions. For example, if we look at radio we can see what to expect for any new communications media.

Certainly more people have radios than have computers, but even more people have radios than TVs. In fact many more people have radios than telephones. So when you combine the accessibility of radio, with the flexibility inherent in radio technology, we see that radio is the most ubiquitous democratic tool that we have. The only problem is that it isn't legal to use it that way.

The law says that only radio stations of a particular size can exist by law. This only allows commercial use of the radio medium. The cost of running a station for a small community wasn't high enough to prevent people from doing it, so laws had to be passed to prevent people from doing it. A micro radio station that serves only your block or your little village just isn't big enough to generate the obscenely large profits that corporations demand.

But it's not just the sense of community that's being attacked here. It's our right to have a community that's being undermined. In other words, what happened to radio is a picture perfect example of a many to many communication medium being legally confined to a one to many medium to almost everyone's detriment. Recently we've seen new telecommunications laws, along with "anti-terrorist" measures and government restrictions on the freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment and the bill of rights. This is all required to apply the same constraints to new communication media as have been applied in the past to radio.

I think that what we need to ask ourselves very seriously, is how we can have democracy without democratic tools. Any maybe more to the point, how can we have community without communication.

In light of the problems that we face, there is a special urgency. We have to decide for ourselves how technology best suits our needs and use it in that way regardless.