~She wears an egyptian ring, it sparkles before she speaks~ The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 4.2 The Anarchives Published By The Anarchives The Anarchy Organization The Anarchives tao@lglobal.com Send your e-mail address to get on the list Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\-- Brother Chomsky Speaks / / \ \ Big Business & Big Brother ---|--/----\--|--- \/ \/ /\______/\ Following is an excerpt of an interview brother Chomsky gave on the emerging media. His analysis is always right on, 'cause he doesn't front; he knows who owns it, and therefore who controls it. Will enough people realize the impending reality, or will apathy lead to total corporate domination? This issue is dedicated to richland@village.ca Noam Chomksy - interview in "GeekGirl" magazine Noam Chomsky interviewed by RosieX and Chris Mountford Chris Mountford: Professor Chomsky what do you see as the present influence of technology - primarily low cost small powerful computers and global public information networks - the technology of the so-called information revolution, on the mass media power in the future? Noam Chomsky: Well, I think it's double edged and you can already see the competing/conflicting tendencies developing. Up until now it's been pretty much a monopoly of relatively privileged sectors, of people who have access to computers in universities and so on. Say, in the academic world it's turned out to be a very useful way of communicating scientific results, but in the area we are talking about it has been used pretty efficiently in distributing information and setting up interconnections etc. In the US and particularly Europe, Peacenet puts across tons of information and also loads of specialist Bulletin Boards where groups with particular interests and concerns interact and discuss all sorts of things. The main journal that I write for is Z magazine, an independent left journal. They have a Z bulletin board which leftie types subscribe to. They are now bringing in the readership of other media left, so on some issues (eg East Timor) it's just been invaluable in organising. The reason for that is most of the information about it isn't in the mainstream. So for example a lot of it comes from Australia and until recently the Australian press was really accessible only to special lucky people...it was accessible to me cos I have friends here, who have been clipping madly for 20 years and sending me stuff, but that's not much help to the population. These days it's readily available, like say the Dili massacre, you know all the news was out at once. Other issues have come to the fore, which is all a positive consequence of the technology. **BIG BROTHER INCORPORATED* The big effect which I still haven't mentioned and the one that worries me most is what the corporate world is telling us they have in mind. And what they are telling us they have in mind is taking the whole thing over and using it as a technique of domination and control. In fact I recall reading an article in maybe the Wall Street Journal or somewhere which described the great potential of this system and they gave two examples to illustrate their point; one for the female market and one for the male market. Of course the ideal was to have every human being spend every spare moment alone in front of the tube and now it's interactive! So for women they will be watching some model advertising some crazy product which no sane human being would want, but with enough PR aura around, and since it's interactive they can have home delivery in ten minutes. For men, they said every red blooded American male is supposed to be watching the super bowl. Now it's just passive and you watch the super bowl and drink beer with your buddies, and so on, but with interactivity what we can do is, before the coach sends in the next play, everyone in the audience can be asked to punch in what they think it oughtta be. So they are participating, and then after the play is called they can flash on the screen 43% said it should have been a kick instead of a pass...or something, so there you have it something terrific for men and women. And this was not intended as a caricature; that's exactly the kind of thing they have in mind and you can see it make sense ...if I were a PR guy working for Warner Communications that's just what I'd be working on. Those guys have billions of $ that they can put into this, and the whole technology including the Internet can go in this direction or it can go any other direction. Incidentally the whole thing is simply reliving things that have gone on with earlier communication technologies and it's well worth having a look at what happened. Some very clever left type academics and media people have charted the course of radio in US since the 20s. In the US things took quite a different course from the rest of the world in the 1920s, the United States is a very business run society with a very high class business community. Like vulgar Marxists with all the values reversed, their stuff reads like Maoist tracks have the time just change the words around. *BACK TO THE ROOTS* NC: In the 20s there was a battle. *radio* was coming along, everyone knew it wasn't a marketable product like shoes. It's gonna be regulated and the question was, who was gonna get hold of it? Well, there were groups, (church groups, labor unions were ex tremely weak and split then, & some student groups), but it was a very weak civil society, and it had been a very repressive period just after Wilson's red scare, which had just smashed up the whole society. There were people who tried to organise to get radio to become a kind of a public interest phenomenon; but they were just totally smashed. I mean it was completely commercialised, it was handed over under the pretext it was democratic, cos if you give it to the big corporations then it's pure democracy. So radio in the US became almost exclusively commercialised - they were allowed a student radio station which reached three blocks or something. Now the rest of the world went the other way, almost everywhere else it became public. Which means it was as free as the society is - you know never very free but at least to whatever extent people can affect what a government does, which is something after all - to that extent radio was a public good. In the US, the opposite. Now when TV came along in the US it wasn't even a battle. By then business dominance was so overwhelming that the question never even arose. It became purely private. In the 1960s they allowed public radio and tv but in an interesting way. [The] public could act to some extent through the parliamentary institutions, and congress had imposed some conditions on public interest requirements on the big networks, which means they had to spend two percent of their time at 3am Sunday allowing a community group on...or something...and then every year they had to file reports to the federal communications commission saying, 'yeah here is the way we met our responsibility', which was mainly a nuisance as far as CBS was concerned. Actually I knew someone who worked in one of their offices and she told me they had to spend all sorts of time lying about what they were doing and it was a pain in the neck. At some point they realised it would be better to just get the burden off their heads and allow a marginal public system which would be very poorly funded and marginalised and under state corporate control anyway, and then they wouldn't even have to pretend any longer, and that's pretty much how those two modes of communications turned out. NC: I think the way the technology is likely to go is unpredictable... if I had to make a guess, my guess is corporate take-over, and that to the extent that it's so far tax payer supported and it's a government institution or whatever people call it, in fact it's a military installation/system at base and they are letting it go, and the reason they are letting it go is cos they are not concerned about the positive effects it has, because they probably feel, maybe correctly, that it's overwhelmed by the n egative effects...and these are things people have to achieve they are not going to be given as gifts...like the Pentagon is not going to give people as a gift a technique for free communication which undermine the major media; if its going to take out that way it will be cos of struggle like any other victory for freedom. NC: First of all the business...about level playing field is all a bit of a joke, I mean type writers and paper are also a level playing field but that doesn't mean that the mass media system is equally distributed among the population. What's called a level playing field, is just capitalist ideology, its not a level playing field when power is concentrated. And even if, formally speaking, a market is meant to be a level playing field...but we know what that means..as to using this type of technology, the threat to left institutions is severe in my opinion. If people do or become so anti-social and so controlled by market ideology even people on the left, that they will drop their support for independent left media institutions because they can get something free, those institutions will decline and they won't be anything over the Internet, as what goes over the Internet now is things that come out of the existing institutions. If those are destroyed nothing is going to come out that counts. There are ways around this, for example you could subscribe to some Internet forums...for example Time Magazine are putting their stuff out free on the Internet and this makes a lot of sense for them because a journal like Time does not make money when they sell subscriptions, they lose money. They make money from advertising, so they are delighted to not have to distribute the thing physically...they are delighted to give it away free, because then they don't have the cost of selling it at news stands and sending subscriptions. They still get the same income mainly from advertising, but that's not true for say Z magazine, they don't live on advertising they live on subscriptions.. chomsky@mit.edu or something like 'dat ~She never stumbles, she's got no place to fall~ TAO keeps rollin' the fattys