[Air-l] capitalism always lies ?

[Jonathan Marshall]

Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:

> I learn something new from this list all the time.
> 
> Reading the digest today, I learned that Capitalism is basically
> responsible for media lies.
> 
> Which I guess excludes socialism, fascism, theocracies, 
> authorianism, etc.

At the risk of repeating others.
No one, as far as i can see, argued that: 

"Only capitalism produces Media Lies"

In which case the objection might have validity.

but in general if A=> B
Then C=> B is not a refutation.

I am not sure at all that the internet can be studied, as 
*might* be being implied here, without reference to the 
society it is largely embedded within, and that society's 
main organisation of power - which surely includes corporate 
capitalism and a corporate controlled and organised mass media.
(We might add a largely corporately run and dominated Internet 
while we are at it, but i'll stay conservative and 
leave that out :)

Within the context of the immeadiate discussion, the question 
remains whether dean's campaign has been 'derailed' by the 
exercise of power, or whatever, which is not primarily based 
in the Internet but elsewhere.  

Thus, while he could do things which may not have been possible 
without the net, this is not sufficient to counter other factors, 
one of which might be the power of the media to disseminate another 
line.  There might be other factors as well - the sequential 
organisation of the primaries being one of them.

These are areas for research surely?

It also indicates that poltics is a major way that people interpret 
the responses of others when engaged in online discussions, and 
that we cannot be free of offline categories that easily.

They might even take on a greater importance than they do offline, 
because online we only have cliches to resolve the essential 
ambiguity of language, and partly because we tend to have fairly 
simple, non-complex, ties with each other which might lead to us
looking for more complex interpretations.

jon
 



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