In Progress

I recently had to read my first bit of Chomsky for a class, and was as thrilled as everyone else. It’s easy to see why his work has been so influential across many fields. Much of what Herman and Chomsky note in “A Propaganda Model” is strikingly relevant to issues developing around the growth of the Internet. I found two examples of the evolution of the medium that have modern parallels in regulation of the Internet.

Herman and Chomsky cover the rise of media from its beginnings in the 19th century. When a working class media source rose in the mid-nineteenth century, it united workers because it “promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power of working people to effect social change.” This led to taxes, libel laws and other coercive actions to try to muffle radical media by raising costs.

And in the discussion of Size, Ownership and Profit-Orientation, they mention that market forces encouraged a dependent model soon after the rise of the newspaper. In 1918, The Sunday Express spent over 2 million pounds before breaking even (where in 1837, a thousand pounds would yield a profitable newspaper). And by 1945, “even small-newspaper publishing [was] big business.”

With the Internet, one sees similar power plays at work in both challenges to net neutrality and copyright law litigation. Net neutrality is all about access, keeping the barriers to entry as low as possible by keeping costs low, very similar to the taxation model considered in combating working class media. Libel laws find their parallel in the policement of copyright and intellectual property rights, especially by the RIAA, who is still attempting to widen the scope of their property rights even as the corporate album sales industry is dying. It remains to be seen how the Internet will treat independent media sources in the long run and whether the market will naturally run them out of business as was the case in the late 19th century.

Posted on December 3rd, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, School, Uncategorized