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  17. Shift Happens
  18. Twilight of the Media Idols
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  41. Mark Raffey
  42. PSCI 434 – Media and Politics
  43. Dr. Joyce Green
  44. 15 April 2010
  45. We are witnessing the death throes of old media. As the 21st century begins, we find Gutenberg's press decoupling from the tangible world of paper and ink to the amorphous digital realm of hypertext and programming language. Many thinkers have expounded on the significance of this shift in terms of political, cultural, social, perhaps more holistically, anthropological contexts. In the language of McLuhan's ecology, we are entering a new medium of communication, and its content is us. Our penchant for narcissism has driven the locus of our attention inward. Evidenced by Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2006: “you,” we find ourselves reflected in the countless myriad of videos and images we upload each and every second to the Internet. The amount of information is staggering, exponentially growing each day. This geometric growth in the online swell of data is coupled with a rapid decline in reader and viewership of traditional media outlets in the respective forms of newspapers and television. Beginning with youth, the trend emerging is that of a massive paradigm shift from the 20th century media characterized by centralized control, corporate ownership, capitalist propaganda, and the large role of advertising revenue, to the open, free, radically egalitarian and seemingly endless miasma of the Internet. The question arises: what are the implications of this shift from one medium to the next? Are the vast opportunities and promises presented by the possibilities of the Internet as wondrous and free as we have made them out to be? Can this new medium deliver what has been lost under the old guard: a democratic and accountable media perpetuated by and in service to the public? Is old media damaged beyond repair? This paper seeks to answer these questions, and more, what the Internet means for our humanity as we enter the 21st century.
  46. The preeminent area of inquiry regarding both traditional and new media is the demise of objectivity. One of the outcomes of post modern philosophy has been the abandonment of the western tradition of the pursuit of truth: for post modernists, there are simply no such things as universal values. Nietzsche prophesized the coming nihilism of the western world in which we question not only the truthfulness of our claims, but the value of truth itself: “...the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (Nietzsche, 589). Over two millenia of western thought, beginning with Plato, undermined with the simple observation that our own egoism stands in the way of discovering any form of universal truth. Our subjective sensibilities can never reflect any type of objective standard. This mode of thought has profound implications for the individual, but it has an even greater effect on communities, institutions and governments. For if the truth is up for grabs, the power of propaganda rises to a new level of efficacy. Joseph Goebbels knew this, as well as the Soviet apparatchiks and even chairman Mao, as surely as does any entity as powerful as the United States. We find ourselves increasingly disoriented in this world of nihilism as our tentative grasp on the dim light of truth is snuffed out by the concerted forces of corporate interests and government agendas. The picture painted by the right-wing post modernists is one of hopelessness and despair: the dissolution of free will and the absorption of the individual into the mindless, swirling, gyroscopic hordes.
  47. However, there is hope for sanity and meaning in this mess of nihilism and depravity. We would be remiss if we failed to recall the left-wing adherents of Foucault: even though truth is subject to interpretation, our capacity to challenge and guide that truth remains undiminished. This still does not solve the problem of the loss of objectivity, on the contrary, it reinforces the universal void we must face that is our life. What is hopeful from Foucault is his insistence on power existing as a set of incalculable relations, not a hierarchical institution, functioning as some grand, domineering locus of energy. “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault, 93). Institutions and agenda setters can present a picture to us that can be said to represent the world, but these entities cannot own or control this paradigm to any large extent. Once a “discourse” is released, it interacts and commingles with competing discourses, thus facilitating a reaction from the original source. The battle for truth becomes a feedback loop based on competing power relations. Despite never being able to become free of these power relations, resistance to the dominant worldview is still possible: “Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities” (96). It follows that the power of any truth is inversely proportionate to that of dissent, and our ability to control our own lives becomes a matter of strategic principle. These concepts bear similarity to Gramscian cultural hegemony in that they share the concept of power as a natural, self-organizing force that perpetuates itself through a discourse of truth.
  48. Indeed, what is true? We ask ourselves this question more as each day passes: our traditional values and customs bear little relevance in the emotionless din of consumerism. Drawing from traditional media, Coca-cola and McDonald's, Microsoft and GM: we find these are the truths of the North American experience. It is obvious corporate capitalism currently enjoys a powerful cultural hegemony over the west: its values and effects are held to be self-evident and never seriously questioned in public debate. Corporate hegemony is deployed and maintained by traditional media: television, newspaper and radio sources. As the centre dissolves into nihilism, public discourse becomes polarized. This can be easily illustrated by the combative nature of both the theatre of politics and the mass media which promulgate it. Instances lacking some oppositional narrative are often pigeonholed into a highly partisan mentality which is easy to assimilate and reassures the public that the narrow debate presented is all part of a healthy and vibrant democracy. This myopic tendency is what Jonathan Bignell calls the “mythic climate of opinion,” a fantasy view of the spectrum of possible public debate which accepts some ideas (such as capitalism) as given or untouchable (Failler, 223).
  49. One of the largest and thus far virtually unchallenged research projects into this system is the propaganda model (PM), advanced by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. According to the PM, traditional media utilize five media “filters.” “The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print” (Herman & Chomsky, 1). These include: 1) corporate ownership size and concentration of major media outlets; 2) advertising as the main source of revenue for media; 3) the reliance on expert government or corporate sources for information; 4) “flak,” a reactionary mechanism designed to still dissent and alternative views; and 5) the anti-Communism filter, which can be applied to this century's “War on Terror” or simply as the negation of “the other” (1).
  50. The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that result from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news 'objectively' and on the basis of professional news values (2).
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  52. This model, based on solid empirical evidence collected from thousands of newspapers in the United States, fits well with cultural hegemony or power relations theories because it regards power as self-organizing and its very existence perceived as a deliberately opaque mask of reason and logical assertions. Despite the admission that “media elites” can set the agenda regarding news and events, the PM does not espouse some kind of highly regimented conspiracy: the filters are not “constructed” in any conscious way, they simply exist as natural facets of any complex system.
  53. The details of the PM are extensive and cannot be discussed at length here. However, it remains useful to keep their coordinated action in mind when discussing how the media tend to frame what they report. To summarize, media businesses (specifically in the U.S.) were allowed to indefinitely consolidate as the slow process of the disintegration of anti-trust laws were finally put out of their misery by Reagan in the 1980s. Newspapers grew too quickly to remain dependent on reader subscriptions, and turned to private advertisers for revenue. The pressure put on news agencies to compete with one another for “the scoop” resulted in an over-reliance on bureaucratic or other governmental officials as sources for stories. This tendency to require official sources left news agencies open to manipulation and punishment from said sources. Finally, a virulent strain of nationalism was injected over the whole thing in the form of anti-Communism (now, usually anti-terrorism; sometimes Communism and terrorism are equated, occasionally along with fascism: a view advocated by followers of the astroturffed Tea Party movement).
  54. The hegemony represented by the PM can be tied to neo-liberalism in any number of ways. The reliance of advertising revenue as an economic force behind media agencies has resulted in a union between the two. Much like the economic and industrial oligarchy created by finance capital, corporate advertising and news agencies are the perfect marriage for the so-called free market of ideas. Since the publication of the PM, Chomsky has even argued that advertisers no longer sell products, they sell audiences to other advertisers. We are consumers are no longer: we are the product, what is consumed. This inversion of roles represents a unique facet of neo-liberal ideology. Far from its siren song of egalitarianism and efficiency, neo-liberalism facilitates monopolies which destroy open market competition and fosters a false sense of individualism. Chomsky explains:
  55. “Business certainly doesn't believe [in individualism]. All the way back to the origins of American society, business has insisted on a powerful, interven- tionist state to support its interests, and it still does... The point of the ideology is to prevent people who are outside the sectors of coordinated power from associating with each other and entering into decision-making in the political arena. The point is to leave the powerful sectors highly integrated and organized, while atomizing everyone else” (Chomsky, 57).
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  57. Individualism for some: cooperation and domination for the rest. A telling event was the 2008 financial meltdown and the Federal Reserve's $700 billion dollar tax-payer bail-out of the banks that were “too big to fail.” At the time, dubbed “social neo-liberalism,” the bail-out in fact represents corporate welfare and neo-liberalism to an exactness that has never before been demonstrable on a scale so large. Indeed, at no point during the ensuing debate over the justification for the bail-out were questions pertaining to the nature of neo-liberalism or the overall structure of finance raised in any serious way. At no point did television advertisements modify their incessant compulsions; never did any Wall Street CEO pledge to change his practices or refuse to accept company bonuses. If a collapse of the entire economic system is not enough to derail the fundamental tenants of the status quo, then corporate hegemony is extremely powerful indeed.
  58. This is the state in which we find traditional media outlets today. What about corporate influence over the world wide web? The Internet, a loose connection of computers made possible by phone lines, was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an R&D arm of the Department of Defense in 1969. Originally designed for military applications, APRANET (as it was then termed) was soon found to be useful by academics and private interest groups. In 1993, the World Wide Web went public and became a commercial medium, much to the chagrin of intellectuals and scholars who viewed it as a learning tool. In the ensuing seventeen years, this medium has gone from an esoteric, expensive novelty to a ubiquitous behemoth, universally considered an essential tool for 21st century communication. How did this happen? Unsurprisingly, given the current climate of economic enterprises dominated by corporate interests, it was large telecommunications companies who saw the obvious advantages to the instantaneous transfer of massive amounts of information as compared to the telephone or the fax machine.
  59. With every door this new system opens, the world wide web, which operates using the Domain Name System (DNS) on top of the Internet, which utilizes Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), has created controversy. One of the basic tenants behind TCP/IP is its egalitarian nature: any data packet sent from one IP address to another is not discriminated against by means of sender size, receiver location, etc. This is not, however, to confuse the web as being completely democratic, as Everitt & Mills point out: “So although the TCP/IP level of protocol enables the free flow of information from node to node on the network, the Domain Naming System, with its top-down hierarchy, is a protocol that enables control” (761). Since web traffic is controlled by TCP/IP, web users have as much access to sites operated by their friends and local communities as they do with Internet giants such as Google and Amazon. This is known as net neutrality. Thus far, net neutrality has been enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has allowed for some server providers to diverge from net neutrality as a last resort.
  60. Make no mistake, this issue will be the defining debate over the future of the Internet. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which are owned and operated by the telecommunications corporations, see net neutrality as antithetical to their business model. They cannot afford to allocate massive amounts of bandwidth (the ability to send and receive information by any single user) for individuals who use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) or bit torrent programs to download illegal pirated software, usually coming in the form of online games, music and bootleg Hollywood movies. Suffice it to say the largest portion of these illegal downloaders are youth, whose position as low-income and web savvy rebels have led them to make their dreams of “total information freedom” a reality. This paper does not seek to answer queries regarding the legality of such actions: what is important is to monitor this collective behavior's implications.
  61. This month, a superior court in the U.S. struck down the FCC's attempts to deter ISP giant Comcast from throttling the bandwidth of its users who utilized P2P and bit torrent software (Anderson, 1). The court ruled the FCC did not have jurisdiction to sanction Comcast. In the past few years, Comcast has operated as a gate keeper for web users as opposed to a simple facilitator, TCP/IP equality be damned. Comcast's decision has the potential to influence millions in the way they access the Internet; the superior court decision could be challenged in the Supreme Court. The battle is being set for the future of net neutrality.
  62. Sympathizers to net neutrality argue an ISP which has the power to give priority to some servers and less to others completely threatens the supposedly egalitarian nature of the Internet. The end result would be a two-tiered system in which corporate giants receive preferential access to users, and activities involving P2P and community based discussion forums would be suppressed by means of bandwidth throttling. The threat of bending the Internet under the powerful sway of commercialism becomes very real.
  63. Another area of inquiry regarding the Internet involves its manipulation and exploitation by the U.S. military and venture capitalists as both a tool of propaganda and a money-making machine. Since its inception in 2006, YouTube has become the preeminent video sharing site for public, commercial, and, as evidenced by the 2008 Presidential campaign, political platforms. As such, it has even been utilized by the U.S. military in an attempt to paint a rose-coloured picture of its ongoing campaigns. Christensen explains: “The clips on the channel are clearly an effort to win the battle for the 'hearts and minds' over the Iraq/Afghanistan occupations, but that should come as no surprise, given the US military's history of propaganda and information management” (172). By attempting to use an open forum like YouTube to present its own discourse, the military risks losing the message amidst the thousands of other possible discourses which can be uploaded by those holding countering opinions and a few minutes' time to spare. The decentralized nature of YouTube has thus far proven ineffective for sophisticated propaganda campaigns like the one attempted by the U.S. military (172). Indeed, the military was hardly able to control its own content, let alone that of others. Competing voices distilled the intended effects of the military's message, creating what Christensen calls “'propaganda dissonance': moments when overt propaganda is placed side by side with material that renders such propaganda impotent” (172). YouTube, along with its owner, Google, Christensen argues, “have begun to restructure the balance of story telling power” (173).
  64. This glimmer of light, however, is not without its caveats. Everitt & Mills point out that the so-called “Web 2.0” is not any more democratic or egalitarian than traditional media. Web 2.0 is a term used to define “the next generation” of online content, one characterized by user creation and participation, the increasingly blurred line between online and real-life activities, and community based groups. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Myspace, Craig's List, and a few other mentionables are at the top of this new form of community. “Web 2.0 is very much a venture capitalist chocolate box that doesn't just misunderstand the open source roots and ethos that lie at the core of the initial Web 2.0 intentions, but blatantly exploits them” (761). Corporate capital, they argue, is not only exploiting the open nature of this new medium, it is the driving impetus behind the Web 2.0. (764). We must reconcile the rapid growth of the free and open nature of the Web 2.0 with its influence from the very institutions and corporations we sought to escape, represented by traditional media.
  65. One of the greatest benefits of the Internet espoused by its adherents is its ability to empower whistleblowers. Chomsky & Herman's PM's third filter necessitates a reliance on the public relations bureaucracies of official sources in government and industry. Coupled with the 24-hour news cycle, journalists face increased pressure to produce stories without having an adequate amount of time to verify sources, commit to proper research or validate any opinions: quality has been sacrificed for quantity. The result is an all-consuming, omnipresent eye of Sauron, but without the ability to penetrate even a millimeter under the surface of things, thus rendering any such ubiquity inert. The media have spread themselves too thin. Gone are the days of Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers or Woodward & Bernstein's exposure of the Watergate scandal which took down a president. By becoming swallowed up in industry and sacrificing journalistic standards, the media no longer possess the ability to challenge government policy in any substantial way. The lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 is a telling example, but there are countless others. The mass media no longer qualify as a platform for whistleblowers: this role, like so many others, has been passed to an online source.
  66. Recently, the website wikileaks made available, on YouTube, footage taken from a U.S. military helicopter killing men on foot in the streets of Baghdad in the summer of 2007 (Collateral Murder). Two of the men killed were Reuters news agency journalists. The video produced ripples of equal parts shock and disgust throughout the web, displaying the supposed callousness of the American military at war. The story eventually became large enough to become picked up by major mass media outlets, including the CBC (CBC News, 6 April 2010). This is an example that brings hope for accountability and transparency in our institutions, but we must delve further. In a recent interview on The Colbert Report, a satirical comedy program taking its cues from Fox News, wikileaks director Julian Assange admitted he had edited the original video for maximum political impact (Assange). Despite giving a long, drawn out argument over freedom of information being the lifeblood of society, Assange still manipulated that information to achieve a political goal. However, he did add afterward that the entire video in full could also be viewed on the wikileaks website.
  67. This begs the question: are Internet whistleblowers any more accountable than their old media counterparts? Perhaps less? The anonymity created by the Internet creates an artificial hubris in its users. Nesbitt-Larking explains: “Like any motor vehicle or a gun, the Internet provides both a degree of anonymity and a vicarious sense of power and entitlement” (217). This is perhaps what gives Internet detractors their greatest fuel: by virtue of the distance between one another, we become impervious, narcissistic egomaniacal monsters when we go online. While there is some truth to this, we cannot forget the complex interaction between “netizens” that occurs over the Internet. No man is an island: despite his politically charged accusations, sooner or later, since he is connected to the world as a whole through the Internet, and precisely because of this fact, his arguments will be placed alongside those already accepted facts and weighed according to who agrees with him and who does not by a simple tally of views of his website. There is no central locus or message being promulgated: what was once one voice or a harmony of voices in traditional media becomes a raucous and fractured variation of individual voices with no overall theme or song. This might seem “messy” to some observers, but it is certainly more egalitarian. This does not, however, mean pockets of similarities cannot coalesce into an entity powerful enough to begin to frame the news.
  68. Burgess & Green point to the long-understood process of framing by traditional media and apply it to new media. “Media 'framing' and reality create each another, forming a dynamic feedback loop, so that the mainstream or incumbent media 's struggles to comprehend and make sense of the meanings and implications of YouTube not only reflect public concerns, but also help produce them (16). Even new media outlets themselves, like YouTube, are subject to framing by today's media.
  69. What about how YouTube frames events? We have thus far examined examples from opposite ends of the political spectrum: the U.S. military presenting one side of the Iraq War with their own YouTube channel and Julian Assange at wikileaks presenting another. How do these and other stories affect our perception of reality? Conventional wisdom would dictate that the more we use the Internet, the more powerful these individual actors will become. Statistics Canada reports that as of 2007, nearly two-thirds of Canadians use the Internet as a news source, a ratio that has doubled in only two years (Statistics Canada). The number is greater for U.S. users: in 2008, a reported 73% of Internet users got their news from an online source (U.S. Census). The amount of people who use the online sources as their only source of news is growing as well. Newspaper readership is down, television news consumption is weakening. However, many of the online sources people access for news are simply the websites of the traditional media outlets themselves: CNN.com, FoxNews.com, cbc.ca and theglobeandmail.com all count, statistically speaking as “online” news sources, despite still being under the umbrella of traditional media empires. Some have argued the proliferation of highly customizable news websites has led to the demise of any form of consensus or global civil society. Powers & el-Nawawy claim any cross-cultural interaction becomes more challenging as “public sphericles” begin to replace any forms of true discourse (265). These sphericles are compartmentalized, isolated echo-chambers of like-minded groups who feed off of one another in a global context. This brings into question the essential givens of globalization: will this process bring us closer together or drive us further apart? Just because we are connected to people all over the world does not necessarily translate into us becoming more varied and tolerant in our views. “Particularly when it comes to covering international conflict, this balkanized process of media globalization has the potential to make international conflicts more difficult to resolve” (266). Despite a wealth of information, people still tend to rely on one or two news agencies, simply because the news has become so politically charged (279). The Web 2.0 does offer a solution to this media insularization by simply using the sheer numbers of people who access the news to its advantage. The website digg.com allows users to “digg” or “bury” a news story on any website based on personal preferences; stories with the most “diggs” appear in a culminated list which can be accessed according to popularity based on a live feed, or what is most popular that day. This tool helps mitigate media bias and framing by allowing users to control what they wish to see but also by opening up their options on what is available. Google and Yahoo perform similar services; reddit.com and tumblr.com serve as competition for digg. Amazingly enough, all of these (Google and Yahoo not included) services are less than three years old, yet they can potentially impact how millions will perceive the news of the day. It took radio and television decades to build up such audiences.
  70. Obama's effective use of YouTube and Facebook has been heralded as a landmark case in Internet use and political participation (Milner, 14). “... the electronic mobilization of support making use of an email list of some 13,000,000 played a key role” (15). It is impossible to argue whether or not his election team's web-savvy techniques won him the presidency, but it certainly made an impact during the primaries which garnered him the party nomination over the highly favoured Hillary Clinton. Perhaps most intriguing about the Obama campaign was its carefully groomed image, ingenious in its simplicity so as to appeal to anyone. By refusing to rigidly define himself in terms of positions on policy and ideology, Obama was able to become the politician any and all voters wanted: "Change"-- something different; it could mean anything, and it meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Versatility and applicability are precisely what represent an effective American political campaign, in which the medium truly is the message.
  71. An American president can be made through the agile use of social networks. A military can present one worldview and a watchdog can counter it. These are but a few of the many ways in which the Internet will continue to affect our world. Our final area of inquiry will be just that: our world. What is the Internet doing to us, as people? At the beginning of this paper, I argued the Internet signified a fundamental shift in humanity. This puts the impact of the medium on par with the printed word, the phonetic alphabet, speech, and even conscious thought itself. Each successive medium has represented a modification in the human experience. These act independent of one another, as we grasp onto one, we let go of another (McLuhan, 1964, 56). Thought itself was suspect for Nietzsche: “Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations, always darker, emptier, and simpler than these” (Nietzsche). By rigidly defining our emotions into language, we lose something in the process, as it is with all translations. McLuhan argues in Understanding Media, amongst other mediums, that the creation of a phonetic alphabet has changed the balance of our senses from the aural world of oral tradition to the visual world of the syllable manifested as text (60). “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them” (174). The emergence of text based culture began the demise of oral tradition, represented best by Socrates, who, “... stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and literate culture. But he wrote nothing” (McLuhan, 1962, 23). It is no coincidence Socrates was also the first to propose truth as justice, existing outside the sphere of human understanding. This once again represents a translation from one medium to the next, and losing something in the process. In the case of Socrates, the phonetic alphabet cost us our ability to question logic and the validity of a universal truth. Innis goes as far as to quote Schopenhauer: “To put away one's thoughts in order to take up a book is the sin against the Holy Ghost” (192). The notion being posited by these two thinkers is one in which the printed word, with its endlessly repeatable rhythm of uniformity leads to a loss of creativity and nihilism (McLuhan, 1964, 174; Innis 191). Indeed, is this not where we find ourselves today, on the cusp of the death of the newspaper?
  72. How will the rise of this new, global medium change our perceptions of space and time? McLuhan is noted for coining the term “global village” because he believed the instantaneous exchange of information would destroy national and cultural barriers by means of pure, uninhibited interaction with one another. The atomization from which we suffer disappears and we once again recognize every individual in the world as members of our community, of our family, as ourselves. “Electric wiring and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again” (172). Clearly this has not happened: instead we feel more isolated the more we use these new mediums. Cell phones and Facebook purport to bring us closer to friends over great distances, but usually at the cost of those in our immediate proximity. “Indeed, central to the human situation in the twentieth-century is the profound paradox of modern technology as simultaneously a prison-house and a pleasure-palace. We live now with the great secret, and the equally great anxiety, that the technological experience is both Orwellian and hopelessly utopian” (Kroker, 125). Innis concurs: “In contrast with the civilization dominated by Greek culture with its maxim 'nothing in excess,' modern civilization dominated by machine industry is concerned always with specialization which might be described as always in excess” (139). On the Internet, it seems if we can imagine it, we can obtain it. This increasingly affects our real lives: “We find it harder to accept the immutable limitations imposed by identity, talent, personality. We start to behave in public as if we were acting in private, and we begin to fill out private world with gargantuan public appetites. In other words, we find it hard to bear simply being human” (Siegel, 18).
  73. The worst possible outcome is a confluence of the separate aspects discussed in this paper: the post-modern loss of universal truth, cultural nihilism, a cult of narcissism perpetuated by an influx of corporate capital infiltrating and procuring effective control of the Internet by the dissolution of net neutrality. There is evidence of each and every one of these events in our world today, but it would be difficult to believe they could all occur in concert with one another. To suppose this would be to discount Foucault's power relations or Gramscian cultural hegemony theory. For value and meaning, the battle is fought on the battlefield of public discourse. Any amount of totalitarian control or fascist domination will always be met with some form of opposition or another. The story of 1984 cannot be told without a Winston Smith just as our world does not possess any meaning without our contact, consent and communication. McLuhan's “global village” has yet to become a reality because our understanding of the power of the Internet is primitive and large swaths of our lives are still dominated by the corporate hegemonies of old. As we grow, so will our relationship with the Internet. The more time we spend online, the more we will behave as we do online. Over time, as these processes become more efficient, the line between reality and the web will become more and more blurred. An ontological question emerges: does that line even exist? Is it not the frames we encounter that shape our reality? When are we truly free of manipulation? Fundamentally, we are all slaves to power, but we have the ability to dictate the terms and quality of our collective imprisonment, beginning with the undiminished capacity to question our current circumstances and our unlimited penchant to imagine.
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