[Air-l] capitalism always lies ?
Jonathan Marshall
Jonathan.Marshall at uts.edu.au
Sat Jan 31 21:10:46 PST 2004
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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