Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  States once did recognize the significance of television as an instrument of propaganda, socialization, and civic education. (The Berlusconis and Murdochs and Turners of McWorld still do.) In the early days, legislators spoke about the “public airwaves” and essayed to regulate “public broadcasting.” Television was a state monopoly not only in Communist countries, but in many Western democracies as well, where its potential influence, educational or corrupting, was deemed too important to leave to the private sector—which has displayed little other than a monomaniacal concern for profits and an abysmally bad taste that it passes off as responsiveness to popular will. In the United States, a Federal Communications Act was passed in 1934 establishing the Federal Communications Commission and developing doctrines of fairness, access, and social responsibility (mandatory news programming, for example). The legislation called for the F.C.C. to “study new uses for radio, provide for experimental uses of frequencies, and generally encourage the larger and more effective uses of radio in the public interest.”

  Today there are few signs that anyone, least of all the federal government, is looking to encourage the larger and more effective civic uses of cable, satellites, fiber optics, computers, and data banks in the public interest. The supposed explosion of media outlets via cable and fiber optics has created an incentive for government to excuse itself from the messy business of regulation. Although Vice President Gore has tried to focus civic attention on the new technologies, new media monopolies (described below) are coming into existence without so much as a glance from federal authorities who once upon a time would have been screaming for antitrust action. Since earlier regulation depended on “spectrum scarcity” (the seemingly finite character of available broadcast wavelengths and delivery conduits), the explosion of media outlets and delivery vehicles—fiber optic communications that can carry millions of digitalized information and picture bytes, cable systems with a five-hundred-plus channel capacity, and satellites—coupled with our current passion for markets and for privatization have delegitimized the very idea of public regulation. They make it impossible for us to use McWorld’s chief invention—television—to preserve our public goods and identity against McWorld’s values. We cannot even use the public airwaves for public political purpose (elections) without paying the private companies to whom we have licensed those airwaves millions and millions of dollars. Kenichi Ohmae, Japan’s most celebrated management guru, captures the spirit of videology perfectly when he puts his faith in the power of “customers to triumph over man as regulator,” since “it’s the regulators we have to fear.”32

  A few countries still try to maintain some control, if not monopoly control, over the traditional broadcast media, but with diminishing success against the diversifying technologies that undergird new media. As communication shifts from broadcast spectra and cable to computer faxes, telephone lines, and satellites the very idea of governmental regulation—let alone “totalitarian” control—loses its credibility. Congress is currently threatening to privatize or abolish public broadcasting. In theory, this might seem to be a good thing: in dismantling state monopolies, the market puts an end to monopoly altogether. In practice it merely eliminates public monopolies and with them accountability and civic responsibility and leaves the field to new, relatively invisible, private monopolies that, unlike government, are not even accountable in theory, let alone in practice. These monopolies are today becoming ever more visible as companies from the once distinct realms of program creation (software), program distribution (networks and broadcast companies), delivery systems (cable, telephone, satellite), and hardware (the people who make the television receivers and computers) gobble one another up. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, but it owns a global array of media-interlinked companies and services including, in the United States: Fox Television; Fox Video; New York magazine; TV Guide; HarperCollins Publishers; Delphi Internet Services; Scott Foresman educational publishers; News and Electronic Data information services; Kesmai video game development corporation; Etak, Inc., the Digital map data company; Mirabella, the fashion magazine; and literally dozens of newspapers and independent television stations; and elsewhere, The Times of London along with the tabloid The Sun; Ansett Transport, an air cargo carrier; B Sky B, the English satellite broadcaster; Star TV, which is the Asian satellite network described above; Geographia Ltd., the cartography company; and Fox Video companies in Spain, Japan, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. Murdoch’s News Corporation is a one-company, one-man infotainment telesector unto itself.

  The elementary theory of markets argues that with the dismantling of state communication monopolies, monopoly will go while the public interest stays; in fact, the public interest has gone and monopoly has persisted, in new privatized and thus unaccountable forms. There is nothing wrong with profit. As the engine of capitalism, it is a good thing for shareholders, consumers, and society at large. But it has turned out to exercise a sovereignty no less coercive but far less public-spirited than the state’s. It imposes a uniformity all its own, but one hidden behind the screen of free-market competition. Murdoch’s global influence may be scarcely recognized, let alone felt. Hollywood’s hegemony may feel good—certainly it feels better than Stalin’s or Deng’s or Honnecker’s—but it may be as depressingly uniform in its formula hits as Socialist Realism was in its heroic monuments. The common currency of sex and violence may be minted by an uncoerced (if arduously manipulated) private market, but it depreciates as quickly as greenbacks minted by a state that has gone off the gold standard. Under Soviet communism, dissident poetry could be published only surreptitiously and read only in private. Under Russian capitalism, dissident poetry isn’t published at all, in part because there is nothing obvious to dissent from, but mainly because poetry doesn’t make a profit and cannot compete with Stephen King. French policy scientist Dominique Moisi’s lament about France applies around the world: “There is less and less of France abroad, and more that is foreign in France.”33

  As television and computer information takes to the telephone wires, which in turn either become fiber optic or get tied in to the new “switched” networking capabilities that let old-fashioned phone wires carry much heavier two-way traffic, software producers will have ever greater access to the world’s population.34 From their point of view, the goal is an instantaneous, interactive, holographic, enhanced sound/real picture virtual network in which every human on earth can be accessed by every other human being and everyone is linked to every company with something to tell or to sell, whether a durable good, a service, some species of information or entertainment, or an explicit political message—albeit in McWorld’s videology entertainment is the political message. Will this increase real choice? Multiplying the access routes and diversifying the delivery systems will not necessarily increase product pluralism or program diversity. It could mean a thousand different new ways to promote and sell just one universal product—Coke, the Simpsons (either ones, the Barts or the O.J.s—you choose), Michael Jackson, or a candidate for political office.

  The distance between Paramount Pictures and the Home Shopping Network was shrinking long before QVC tried in vain to acquire Paramount or the Internet offered computer shopping services. Five hundred channels will not necessarily make viewers feel freer than fifty or even five, and in any case, with the same old handful of cultural providers offering the programming, there will not necessarily be greater variety: only a different and far more effective monopoly and a radical segmentation of what will remain the same old markets: American pop culture instead of Indonesian pop culture; a global political policy forged by markets rather than French state policy forged by technocrats; an unofficial MTV aesthetic rather than an official Hindi cultural line. And such differences as are built into special “narrowcast” programming of the kind the multiplication of channels will facilitate are likely only to divide viewers into horizontally segmented consumer markets—a sportsman’s chan
nel and a couch potato’s channel, a Latino mutual fund holders’ channel and a Jewish gold standard channel, a gay Republicans’ channel and a Democratic smokers’ channel.

  Choosers are made, not born. For free markets to offer real choice, consumers must be educated choosers and programming must proffer real variety rather than just shopping alternatives. Much of McWorld’s strategy for creating global markets depends on a systematic rejection of any genuine consumer autonomy or any costly program variety—deftly coupled, however, with the appearance of infinite variety. Selling depends on fixed tastes (tastes fixed by sellers) and focused desires (desires focused by merchandisers). Cola companies, we have seen, can no more afford to encourage the drinking of tea in Indonesia than Fox Television can encourage people to spend evenings at the library reading books they borrow rather than buy; and Paramount, even though it owns Simon & Schuster, cannot really afford to have people read books at all unless they are reading novelizations of Paramount movies. By the same logic, for all its plastic cathedrals, Disneyland cannot afford to encourage teenagers to spend weekends in a synagogue or church or mosque praying for the strength to lead a less materialistic, theme-park-avoiding, film-free life. Variety means at best someone else’s product or someone else’s profit, but cannot be permitted to become no product at all and thus no profit for anyone.

  When Channel One brings television advertising into the classroom, teachers can be sure it is not in order to provide an audiovisual tool for teaching critical thinking.35 Without a concerted pedagogical effort, television is unlikely to enhance learning: it is better at annihilating than at nurturing the critical faculties. Private consumption cannot help youngsters develop an empowering sense of the need for public goods—something that might throw the very premises of McWorld into doubt. Television enmeshed in commerce cannot but view schoolchildren as prospective consumers rather than prospective critics and citizens.36

  Education is unlikely ever to win an “open market” competition with entertainment because “easy” and “hard” can never compete on equal ground, and for those not yet disciplined in the rites of learning, “freedom” will always mean easy. Perhaps that is why Tocqueville thought that liberty was the most “arduous of all apprenticeships.” To grow into our mature better selves, we need the help of our nascent better selves, which is what common standards, authoritative education, and a sense of the public good can offer. Consumption takes us as it finds us, the more impulsive and greedy, the better. Education challenges our impulses and informs our greediness with lessons drawn from our mutuality and the higher goods we share in our communities of hope. Government, federal and local, with responsibility for public education once took it upon itself (back when “itself” was “us”) to even up the market and lend a hand to our better selves. Now via vouchers the market threatens to get even with public education. This sorry state of affairs is not the work of villains or boors. It arises all too naturally out of the culture of McWorld in a transnational era where governments no longer act to conceive or defend the common good.

  8

  Teleliterature and the Theme

  Parking of McWorld

  AS SURVIVORS OF aging print technologies, books are relics of a slowly vanishing culture of the word—democracy’s indispensable currency and a faltering bulwark against the new world of images and pictures flashed across screens at a speed that thwarts all deliberation. Democracy, like a good book, takes time. Patience is its least noticed yet perhaps most indispensable virtue. Television and computers are fast, fast, faster, and thus by definition hostile to the ponderous pace of careful deliberation upon which all public conversation and decision making on behalf of the common good is premised. One reason it is hard to use the speed-of-light medium of television for civic education is that while television wants to fly, education lumbers along with all the ponderous tedium of a deliberate and prudent pedagogy. It is unwatchable—unless the aim is to learn and to grow. Finally, educational television is a contradiction in terms.1 Where then do books belong in our videoland helter-skelter? They belong not at all—unless they acquiesce to assimilation and takeover and become one more genre in the infotainment service telesector’s commercial culture, what we can call teleliterature.

  Assimilation of the new for publishers entails modification (read: adulteration) by the very technologies by which they are being supplanted, and the book format is particularly vulnerable to computer technology. TECHNOLOGY THREATENS TO SHATTER THE WORLD OF COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS, screams a Wall Street Journal article, which features the somber warning, “If textbook publishers don’t wake up and learn how to make, market and distribute something other than a book, the rug will be pulled right out from under us.”2 The Authors Guild is sufficiently impressed to have alerted its members. In a “Position Statement on Electronic Publishing Rights,” it announces that “publishing technology is changing fast, and a writer’s work can now be made available in many forms—on databases, CD-ROM discs, and CD-Interactive (Cd-I) discs, among others. New technologies make it easy to combine works of journalism, literature, art, photography, music, and film and video in multimedia and interactive formats.” Costs for publishers for these formats are “far lower than for traditional publishing,” it adds.3

  Disc manufacturers would rather not pay royalties, of course. A company called Bureau Development has gathered together hundreds of excerpts from antique public domain (i.e., no royalty) editions of classic works, thus often of lesser quality, sometimes bowdlerized, and put them on a “Great Literature” CD-ROM disc. The postmodern reader’s ticket to the classics requires “a PC or a PS/2 compatible computer, a CD-ROM drive that supports the ISO-9660 standard, with interface card, cable and software, Microsoft Extensions version 2.0 or later, a minimum of 640K RAM, with 500K available, and DOS 3.1 or later.” It’s a little more complicated than opening a book, but once you have the equipment “you can run Great Literature directly from CD-ROM drive. Simply log onto the CD-ROM drive and type LIT.”4 New-format great literature may be as little read and innocuous as faux leather “Great Literature” sets of the kind that have decorated the homes of television-watching nonreaders for decades, and CD-ROM formatting certainly need not directly alter literary content any more than textbooks re-created as videotext communicate in anything other than words.

  Once they are on CD-ROM discs, however, allied technologies press in on old and new books alike. Meg Cox reports in the Wall Street Journal that as the new computer technologies displace text books, “assignments will routinely include multimedia projects, mixing words with sound and video.”5 Bureau Development’s Personal Library on disc comes with pictures and sound that turn some of the great works into virtual son et lumière shows. When books become subordinate to multimedia projects and words are tied to pretty pictures, print culture is put at risk.

  The status of books in McWorld today teaches lugubrious lessons about the corrupting reach of the image makers into the world of print and via that world, into the world of democracy. When we allow Chris Whittle to insert advertisements into books and television (with ads intact) into public school classrooms, literacy and literary pleasure clearly are no longer our aim. When a single picture of a brutally abused soldier’s corpse takes the place of careful debate and the reasoned discourse of words in forging political foreign policy priorities, democracy itself as a deliberative practice is jeopardized.

  Television and film do not, to be sure, wholly displace books. Rather, they are parasitic on them. Rather than making television literate, television tends to make books illiterate. Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh “write” best-sellers that are extensions of their radio and television personalities. Reading becomes another form of gossip—as in the O. J. Simpson “book,” published in conjunction with his televised murder trial. Given the scarcity of readers, the trick is to publish books that people who do not read books will nevertheless buy, whether or not they actually read them: for in McWorld, consumption demands only that we purchase but no
t that we actually utilize products, many of which we do not actually “need” in the first place. An avalanche of embarrassingly huge-selling how-to books finally led The New York Times Book Review to remove them from the regular best-seller list, for they had come so thoroughly to dominate it that “real” books had ceased to be competitive. But the how-to’s were quickly replaced not by real books but by genre novels designed explicitly to meet the imperatives of a quick and lucrative film sale. In the fall of 1993, of the top ten “fiction” listings on The New York Times list, seven were filmic suspense thrillers by just two authors: Michael Crichton and John Grisham, whose previous books included the recent film megahits The Firm (Grisham) and Jurassic Park (Crichton). Indeed, in 1994 both authors sold future books—then not yet written, let alone published—to Hollywood for millions of dollars.

  To be sure, suspense and mystery novels geared to movie adaptation have topped best-seller lists for a long time. Media incest has been spreading, however, and now dominates the nonfiction list as well. The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for November 28, 1993, listed five media-linked best-sellers in the top fifteen, with “books” by TV conservative Rush Limbaugh, trash-radio star Howard Stern, and comedian Jerry Seinfeld in first, second, and fourth place. William Shatner’s Star Trek Memories followed in ninth place with Michael Jordan’s NBA memoir Rare Air in fifteenth on the hardback lists and simultaneously in second place on the nonfiction softcover list, right behind an earlier book by Limbaugh that was first among paperbacks—giving Limbaugh the top place on both lists. During the same week, MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head, a cartoon book based on the MTV series (whose banal cruelty and teenage knownothingness had forced producers to move it out of prime time to a later time slot), was fourth on the “Advice and How-To” list. The fastidious New York Times not only reported on but contributed to this dazzling mediocratic spectacle, offering both daily and Sunday reviews of Howard Stern’s exercise in confessional porn (over a million books in print within a few weeks of publication and possibly the fastest selling book in publishing history) by reviewers who were astonishingly polite and respectful, as if they had before them a slightly puzzling but not unpleasing work of postmodern skepticism from a delightful cultural eccentric—an FM Oscar Wilde for our own radio times.6 Howard Stern himself recognized how pusillanimous the “literary” marketplace was. On the air, he confided to listeners that he was already the master of radio, and everything he knew about books and publishers persuaded him that they were an easy mark. So they proved to be. When literature becomes an outpost of McWorld, laying siege to it presents little challenge to commercial hustlers of Stern’s audacity or Limbaugh’s hubris.