17Crowdsourcing Is the Future
“When you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.”
—Lord Acton
“The future belongs to crowds.”
—Don DeLillo
At the same time as building the various telecoms corporations, I was always looking for television projects that I could get involved with after the excitement of starting the station in Grenada.
I produced the TV show Reading Rainbow once I was back in the United States, which was designed to help kids learn to read over the summer vacation and broadcast by the traditional networks. It had been created before me and was the oldest running educational show when Lancit Media, which owned the production company, went broke. I read about it in the Wall Street Journal, and on the same page of the paper it talked about the number-one kids show being the cartoon series Beavis and Butt-Head. I was appalled. I wasn't a good reader as a child, and later I could see that my daughter, Alex, and many of her friends also struggled with it. My father had been a slow reader, too. Even now I find I am slow because I always have a pen and make notes all over the book, plus the things I am reading always stimulate other thoughts and I find my mind wandering to other things. I don't think I am that unusual in finding it was hard to read as a youngster.
I thought the balance needed redressing in favor of the kids who wanted to use their imaginations and to explore ...