FCC chair­man Julius Genachowski

Beyond the techno eye candy, dig­ging out the sub­stance at CES

An army of tech and gad­get writ­ers descended on the just-ended Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show in Las Vegas. Rather than dupli­cate their cov­er­age, I’ll offer some snap­shots from my three days at the conference:

FCC chair­man on the need for ‘dig­i­tal literacy’

The Tech Pol­icy Sum­mit (for whom I’ve twice mod­er­ated pan­els in past years) held three days of ses­sions at CES, high­lighed by Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Asso­ci­a­tion CEO Gary Shapiro’s on-stage chat with Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion chair­man Julius Gena­chowski, whose appoint­ment last year won rave reviews from reform groups.

In March the FCC is due to release its plan for mak­ing Inter­net broad­band con­nec­tiv­ity avail­able to all Amer­i­cans. Some nuggets from Genachowski’s talk:

• “Com­put­ers are in 75 per­cent of people’s homes, TVs are in 98 per­cent. … Can TV be part of the broad­band solution?”

• “The con­cept of lit­er­acy and teach­ing kids to read needs to be expanded to include dig­i­tal lit­er­acy so all of our kids, as they grow up, are pre­pared for the new econ­omy.” Absolutely.

• “If you don’t have access to the Inter­net, more and more you can’t find a job.” Many job list­ings can only be found online.

• New web­site launched on Thurs­day: reboot.fcc.gov, with an aim of fos­ter­ing dis­cus­sion of how the FCC can be rein­vented to serve the public.

• “The idea that open plat­forms are good busi­ness is becom­ing con­ven­tional wis­dom, and I think that’s a healthy thing.”

• He said he wants to cre­ate a “base­ball cul­ture,” where bat­ting .300 for a life­time gets you into the Hall of Fame — it also means you failed seven out of 10 times, and inno­va­tion flour­ishes only when your employ­ees aren’t afraid to fail.

• “The fair­ness doc­trine is dead.”

• The FCC will defend the pre­cept of net neu­tral­ity “rigorously.”

Pri­vacy in the age of openness

On Thurs­day after­noon, at the Intel Upload Lounge for blog­gers, Cathy Brooks mod­er­ated a fas­ci­nat­ing hour­long dis­cus­sion about pri­vacy, iden­tity and the cul­ture of open­ness. Chris Kelly (at right), who’s on leave as Chief Pri­vacy Office of Face­book to run for Cal­i­for­nia Attor­ney Gen­eral, was the cen­ter of atten­tion in a con­ver­sa­tion that also included Brian Solis, Frank Gru­ber and Genevieve Bell of Intel.

The pan­elists agreed that there’s a grow­ing cul­ture of priz­ing the authen­tic and the trans­par­ent — up to a point. Some highlights:

• Solis: “I think we’re becom­ing extro­verted as a result of social media, and it’s lead­ing many of us to be more con­fi­dent in our online activities.”

• Kelly told us not to equate pri­vacy with secrecy, and that we shouldn’t expect a higher degree of pri­vacy online than we do in the offline world. (“You take a risk every time you tell some­body some­thing pri­vate.) Instead, a new con­cept of pri­vacy is emerg­ing in which “con­trol over and access to” your online iden­tity is what’s fun­da­men­tally impor­tant. Kelly was a key player in Facebook’s newest round of pri­vacy controls.

• Bell chas­tized the Wash­ing­ton Post for a story that labeled as “refuseniks” those who decline to take part in social networking.

• Kelly made the point that although he sup­ports the open data move­ment, per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able data should not be released and made pub­licly avail­able. Agreed.

• Bell made the amus­ing obser­va­tion that recent stud­ies show that peo­ple are quite glee­ful about the lies they tell online.

Ran­dom tid­bits from CES

• Here is my Flickr photo set of the show.

• I got to play with the Canon HD cam­corder, the Vixia HFM31, at the Canon booth and found it absolutely drool-worthy: amaz­ing high-definition fidelity even when zoom­ing in on objects and peo­ple 20 feet away. It’s com­ing out soon at a price of $800. I’ve found my next video camera.

• Some of the tech press wrote cred­u­lously about the wave of 3D TV and video offer­ings — all of which require view­ers to wear 3D glasses. Let me say this plainly: It will never hap­pen. In the movie the­ater, yes. As a sta­ple of the liv­ing room? Not a chance. Color me unim­pressed with the 3D hype.

• As my friend Steve Rubel observed, wire­less and social are get­ting embed­ded into nearly every device. Now those are trends with some substance.

• Mind-blowing stat: Fel­low at Intel booth holds up a sin­gle micro­proces­sor chip and announces the num­ber of tran­sis­tors on it: 45 million.

• I’ll likely not be back to CES. It’s not just the mad­ness of deal­ing with the crush of 110,000 peo­ple or the 90-minute waits for a taxi, but the way the con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers struc­ture CES: with nearly zero par­tic­i­pa­tion by the audi­ence. We’re spec­ta­tors, not par­tic­i­pants in any mean­ing­ful way. For his talk with Gena­chowski, Shapiro hand-picked the ques­tions from the audi­ence. After­ward, Gena­chowski was whisked away with­out being allowed to talk with any­one in the audience.

CES remains very much a 1990-era conference.

Dis­clo­sure: Intel flew me out for the show. I’m a mem­ber of the Intel Insid­ers social media advi­sory group.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.