"Our next president can help reconstruct America's fragmented and relatively weak public communications infrastructure by using the most effective tool our youth wield - the power and depth of their digital fluency.

This eager, highly knowledgeable, connected and multitasking first generation of digital natives - "millennials" coming of age now who have used computers and the Internet since childhood - can be put to work in a WPA-inspired Digital New Deal to build out a networked national public commons that bolsters our international competitiveness."

Read more of this excellent editorial by De Michiel, national co-director of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), based in San Francisco.