Be Informed, Please? Tracy Mitrano Said So!
Last night, the non-partisan group Americans for Informed Democracy held a roundtable discussion on Net Neutrality led by Tracy Mitrano, director of Information Technology (IT) Policy at Cornell. The dinner-discussion is the first in a six-part weekly series* aimed at raising students’ awareness of issues pertinent to the 2008 Elections.
What is Net(work) Neutrality (NN)? It’s kind of complicated, but PCMag.com says it “states that all traffic be treated equally… that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.” Basically, NN would have Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Time Warner not be able to discriminate torrent-downloading traffic from mp3-downloading traffic from whatever. Unfortunately for us ‘Nets-lovin’ kids, Mitrano suggested that Net Neutrality and other internet issues — most notably archaic copyright laws — are not really election issues.
“I’ll vote for the first candidate who utters the word copyright,” Mitrano stated, qualifying that she has been saying that “half-jokingly” for the past several months. The real joke is that copyright laws, to anyone with half a brain, are archaic and outdated, and the recording and movie industries are holding onto their ancient business models instead of keeping up with technology. But what can we informed Democrats do? “You guys haven’t gone out into the workforce and made this an issue,” she said. We’re down.
Mitrano may look like one of those cute moms whose ditzy e-mail correspondence with youngins would show up on “Postcards from Yo Momma,” but don’t let her nifty scarves fool you: she knows what she’s doing on her computer and is very much an academic type — she even teaches a popular Info Sci class called “Culture, Law and Politics of the Internet.” But that doesn’t mean she still can’t make really, really cute/insightful comments! When CornellWatch wasn’t prodding Mitrano about why lonely students hog so much bandwidth for their “romance movies,” we were scribbling down awesomecredible things that Tracy said. Some gems follow:
On internet trolls: “Sometimes people think, O-M-G people can be so mean.”
On Google turning evil and taking over the world: “It warms the cockles of my liberal progressive heart to see people interested in Google privacy issues.”
On marriage counseling**: “Like a mortician or a beautician, you will always have a job in this society.”
*For more information on the dinner-discussion series, contact the President of Americans for Informed Democracy, Lesley Hernandez (lah56@cornell.edu). You get free dinner at Alice Cook House, too, which is pretty prettty prettttty sweet.
**Why did this come up? Because Mitrano was asking us all what we wanted to do with ourselves, and one person answered that she wanted to become a marriage counselor. (I wanted to be an astronaut, but apparently that job is not always necessary in our society.)
