textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp001196.txt

	~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

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               --/\--			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