Asking questions about the popular sphere, media and democracy.

Lawrence W.

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Asking questions about the popular sphere, media and democracy.

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An important question, right now, according to a recent Globe and Mail article, as well as chatter heard recently while riding the grid-lock streets listening to a taxi driver's radio, is if daily newspapers collapse, is this a sign that democracy is in trouble? Perusing the numerous blogs of self-made Internet personalities, I wonder, what is news, and how do we respond to it? There are all kinds of information bombarding us during our waking and sleeping hours: much of it we seem to know whether we ever open up a newspaper or not. Conversational banter, television watching, internet surfing, magazine page sifting, academic journals read because we are taking university degrees --- all of these contexts help us to know what is going on in the world. There is a major economic downturn; Obama is the first African-American U.S. president; people are struggling to keep their heads above water; many companies are closing

<ol class="ollevel1">
<li>Editorial notes<ol class="ollevel2">
<li>The colapse of daily newspapers: A sign that democracy is in trouble</li>
<li>Historical importance of newspapers or print journalism</li>
</ol></li>
<li>Examining the issues<ol class="ollevel2">
<li>The bool Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky </li>
<li>Seeking our information ‘on-line' </li>
<li>The wide range of media sources available in Toronto</li>
<li>The wealth of print journalism </li>
</ol></li>
<li>Is the Internet modelling itself increasingly after the kind of television 24-hour cable news stations</li>
<li>The concerns or issues about limiting the corporate take-over of the internet</li>
<li>Conclusion</li>
<li>Works cited</li>
</ol>

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[...] Blogs and new kinds of media sites like the Huffington site, are either run by elites who have invested in the Internet and have cooperative relationships with advertisers, like newspapers have done, or are mini sites within larger web conglomerates, like Flickr, a repository for photographers to join and have their own page, where individuals produce their own pages within the site. Other possible examples are U-tube or social networking sites, like Facebook. Extensions of newspaper/opinion web products like Salon.com, or Popmatters.com, both of which increasingly have all kinds of material on them: news stories, personal commentaries by readers, cultural essays, reflection/editorials on news stories in the media, fashion pages, interviews, etc. [...]

[...] Thinking of the wide range of media sources available in Toronto, one begins to realize that even if daily newspapers were to fold (and the reason seems to be that they fold when they do not have a strong, advertising base that links to on-line advertising sources of revenue), there will still be a multitude of possible media outlets for information gathering, transmission and discussion. Besides the daily newspapers in Toronto, there are also some free daily newspapers like Metro that everyone seems to read on their way to work in the morning. [...]

[...] But what is key to note is that as long as there is human creativity, thinking and speculative viewpoints, as long as we are debating power issues, rights, determinations and ideas of agency, at the local and international level, be it issues related to women, the working class, to ethnic or racial minorities, to the struggle to stop exploitation in all its many forms, there will be democratic forces. In the public sphere people will find ways to get their ideas out, to reach one another, and to struggle for change. [...]

[...] Herman and Noam Chomsky write of the conspiracy of big business, of the mass media conglomerates, particularly in North American society, which limit debate and frame the news we read in certain ways that only provide us an illusion of democratic trust. Media companies, they note, are transnational corporate giants with many different kinds of holdings, similar to chemical companies or other corporate entities with a world wide presence. In the 1980s they identified “twenty-four companies large, profit seeking corporations, owned and controlled by quite wealthy people” as the corporations responsible for providing us with the news we read. [...]

[...] John MacFarlane in The Walrus magazines notes that public intellectuals are those who as social critic rather than merely a social observer.” (McFarlane: 13) Blog writers can be both critics and observers, but we might be more interested to track down a daily or weekly blog written by Noam Chomsky than we are going to be interested in one written by the guy at the back of the physics lab who likes to sound off about everything. Do newspapers provide us with social criticism of a public form? Is this what makes them important to us, to society, or is this an ideological illusion, for the most part? Conclusion A lot of words are bandied about these days: technological determinism, the medium is the message, post-modernism, blogs, cybernetics, trans- national corporate capitalism and globalization, new world order, democracy. [...]

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