<nettime> DeeDee Halleck on Herb Schiller's death

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

[The American media critic Herb Schiller has died Saturday. I asked DeeDee
Halleck to write a few words for nettime about this tragic event.
Underneath you can find an interview I did with Herb in Munich, February
1997 which ran on nettime at that time. geert]


Herb Schiller was the founding "reader" of Paper Tiger Television. 
Sitting in front of a subway backdrop, he held forth on the evils of, in
his words, "the steering mechanism of the ruling class", i.e. The New York
Times.  It was a perfect fit:  Herb's Brooklyn accent and the painted
subway; his acerbic humor and the august publication itself; Herb's
dignified decorum and our rag tag scruffy production chaos. 

Herb told it like it is.  He was not afraid of words like imperialism and
hegemony.  When he wrote The Mind Managers in the early seventies, he
foresaw the media moguls and mergers which now dominate the headlines and
our lives.  Around the world this book was welcomed (and is still in print
in many languages) as a key insight into systems of cultural control. 
Many felt that power, but until Herb, no one had clearly articulated the
problems.  A prophet has a problem in his own country and mainstream
liberal communications studies in the U.S. never gave Herb his due.  But
his work is translated into many languages.  He was known and respected by
journalists and scholars from all over the world. 

My last conversation with Herb was a little over a week ago. He had been
sick for over a year and was exhausted. On my drive across the country
last month from New York to San Diego I had visited Harper's Ferry. We
talked about John Brown, the militant whose brazen raid at the arsenal
there was the act that precipitated the Civil War. For a brief moment,
Herb's eyes lit up with a spark of recognition.  Both Herb and John Brown
understood the need for radical change, and the painful toll it exacts. 

DeeDee Halleck

----

Information Inequality
An interview with Herbert I. Schiller
By Geert Lovink

Herbert Schiller is a critic with a clear, political and social view on
media matters. He has been Professor of Communication at the University of
California at San Diego and is well known for his 'Mass Communications and
American Empire' and other writings on American cultural imperialism. One
could position Schiller as a mediator between the US-foreign policy type
of media analysis done by Noam Chomsky and the more conservative, moral
critiques of Neil Postman. Schiller has elements of both. Like Chomsky,
his lack of knowledge about the history of the Sovjet Union, stalinism and
the destruction of people's lives, cities, countries and nature by sovjet
communism is highly disturbing.  But this counts for many of the old
leftists, who are themselves a product of the Cold War (both in Europe,
the US and in the 'Third World'). Net criticism is a movement from '89'
and therefor celebrates the fall of the Wall and the end of these
dictatorships, from my point of view. All anti-US-imperialism, which
rejects to study the tremendous tragedies, caused by 'socialism', is
condemned to history and will itself become another fundamentalism.  But
this was not the topic of our conversation.  Fortunately, the materialist
critiques on large corporations are always true and so is Schiller's
latest book 'Information Inequality'. It deals with topics like selection
mechanisms in the culture industry, the sell out of public properties like
school, libraries and elections, 'data deprivation', special effects for
capturing viewers, the global rule of American pop culture and last but on
least, the inforbahn, being the 'latest blind alley'. Lately, Herbert
Schiller wrote an updated critique on internet and social exclusion in the
French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. This interview was conducted in
Muenich, during the conference 'Internet & Politics', on february 20,
1997. 

GL: Could you tell us something about the pre-history of cyberspace?  When
did you encounter the cyber ideology for the first time? 

HS: One of the earliest was Daniel Bell, who wrote about 'the end of
ideology' and 'the post-industrial society'. Production didn't ammount too
much, in his view, and everything was services, mostly in various kinds of
informational fields. He did not start discussing cyberspace.  But others
started there and began to talk about the 'information society', being the
post-industrial society. The other was Alvin Toffler, a popular writer,
who wrote about these tendencies, in the early seventies. Bell and Toffler
became the unquestioned basis and there was no remarkable criticism at the
time. The elite critisized Toffler for writing in such a popular manner,
but that was nothing serious. So these writers had the field to
themselves.  The electronic basis of these writings is much more recent.
ARPANET and the Internet as an academic communication network preceded
without a great deal of attention. It is only less then 10 years that it
has brusted out into a much more generalized public. My view is that this
development has been very carefully cultivated by the standard forces. 
Like governmental bureaus as the National Science Foundation, which gave
significant grants to individuals for the development of software.  There
was a very delibirate promotion and encouragement. It was not all so
random and accidental or unplanned. 

GL: How does Marshall McLuhan fit into this picture? 

HS: McLuhan was taken up and given a lot of attention by the media itself.
They liked it that he emphasized the media issue, out of an narcissistic
interest. They found somebody who was making them appear very significant.
But I don't see him as a prophet of cyberspace or in any direct line with
the current business. In his early works, like 'The Mechanical Bride', he
was somewhat of a materialist, a social critic. But then he got off into
esoteric areas. 

GL: George Gilder believes that the old, mass media monopolies will soon
crumble because of the empowering possibilities of individuals by the
so-called interactive, many-to-many media. There is a certain similarity
to your critique on the big media corporations. Could you comment on that? 

HS: All what one could do is look around. Do you see any indications?  The
monopolies are stronger than ever and the concentration continues.  It now
embraces a wide area, it is not just 'media', All forms of communication
are brought together in these unified corporate conglomorates. You have
Time-Warner, which has assets of about 20 billion dollar and is operating
radio stations, recording studios, film studios, television programming
and increasingly also retail stores, where they sell the apparels that
they produce in their movies. Disney is of course an enormous
conglomorate. Then there is Viacom, which ownes MTV and does a great job
in selling pop culture and making these kids less and less capable of
doing any thinking. But it also includes computer companies, telephone
companies. The television networks are all owned by super conglomerates.
CBS is owned by Westinghouse, NBC by General Electric. ABC was just bought
by Disney and Fox is owned by Murdoch. To think that these are crumbeling,
is like being in a phantasyland.  We have to be carefull in using the word
'globalization' in this context. It may to seem that everybody is
participating in it and you will have to, and if you don't you will fall
behind and lose, we have to be competitive, that thing. Globalization is a
direction of super corporations. They are using the globe to market their
products and penetrate every part of the world. But there is a big
difference between what they are doing and the whole world population. 

GL: It might not be enough anymore to just practice ideology criticism. 
The understanding of this expanding branch might also need an economical
analysis. 

HS: You have to examine how things proceed. You might want to focus on the
commodification of information. What was free, is now owned, proprietary
information. What has to be looked at, is to what extend the net itself
becomes a privatized operation. Another area will be how they are going to
put television and broadcasting onto the internet.  That also is going to
bring commercial advertisement. It will no longer be open, available and
free. 

GL: How do the broadcasting media relate to the rapidly growing, but still
small cyber media? Noam Chomsky does not seem be very interested in the
Net. Perhaps he does not see its strategic importance. 

HS: You have to examine this as things develop. It is an area of
continuous scrutiny and monitoring. Everything you will discover in the
areas of television and film will come back in the Net. The patterns are
going to be very similar. We are nowhere near to what they like to call an
information society. This term serves to camouflage what the current
reality is. The talk about the 'new' keeps the present level left aside.
We are living in a period of innocence and bankrupcy of values. People are
desperately looking for meaning, identity, etnicity, gender. All of which
are legitimate, but when they get to be obsessional, they make it less
possible to recognize what the underlying, fundamental forces are. There
is a lot of escapism in the talking about 'are we now in the information
society?' But many of those people are sincere, so you can't make them
seem as if they are fools. 

GL: What is your view on the role of cultural studies in all this? 

HS: For me it is very ironic because I have tried always to include the
cultural component. I was aware about it from the very beginning when I
wrote about the role of cultural imperialism. All along comes cultural
studies and attacks the political economy approach as being too narrow and
too exclusive. At least in the United States, the main current of cultural
studies is to deny the legimimacy of the political economy of mass
communication.. I do not mean it intentionally, but it has served the
dominant ideology as I see it. They do not want to see the underlying
reality of the images and messages they are looking at. 'The act of the
audience' puts people like myself in a curious situation. I am not saying
that everybody is a cultural dope. But I do have to recognize where the
cultural power is. I cannot accept it when they talk about the opposition
and resistance of viewers. If they are reading women's books, romances,
they are showing their resistance to their way of life... This might be
the case, but I don't regard that as the type of resistance that will take
us very far. 

GL: Where do you see the roots of such a political economy of the media? 

HS: It has not such a long history, a few decades. I am trying to indicate
that the fundaments of a materialist philosophy are crucial to an
understanding. Students should have some sense of the social forms that
have evolved, from early capitalism til now, in terms of labor and wage
labor. These form do not disappear.  There is a great deal of materiality
that can be pointed to, even in the case of the internet. I don't think it
is so remote. You can show how those big companies get involved in all
these different activities. People themselves can recognize some
relationships. You can show the connections to organized sports, to the
apparel industry, which is producing baseball hats, football uniforms and
the rest. The cultural industry is so overt, so visible. 

GL: Do you see a massification of the internet taking place? 

HS: That might be the case. But this concept was mainly an oppositional
idea of what was happening in the media industry in the late thirties and
early fourties. It was an elitist view, which looked down on the masses.
So the term itself has to be looked at as an ideological outlook.
Persuasion, for example, was a big issue in the thirties, but when mass
communication became a formal discipline, they dropped it, because
persuasion would come too close to the nervous system. So they switched
the topic to the effects of communication. But that is a very different
question. 

GL: What do you think of the equation of the internet with American
imperialism? Certain forms of anti-Americanism in Europe are not very
progressive... How do you look at this dilemma? 

HS: I have looked on the phenomena of cultural imperialism for a long
time. This is not someting of the nineties. It even preceded the American,
there was the French, the Brittish and the Dutch imperialism.  It is not a
new set of relationships. But we do have to ask overselves:  does the
internet undermine the old relationships or do it reinforce them? I am
only trying to suggest that there are key people, key levels in the United
States who see a very practical utilization for imperialistic purposes.
That could be an alert signal. If the internet is becoming a major vehicle
for transnational corporate advertising, you are quite justified in
talking about the extension of cultural imperialism into the internet. 

Herbert I. Schiller, Information Inequality, The deepening social crisis
in America, Routledge, New York/London, 1996 ISBN 0-415-90765-9






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