Så jag skriver en minimalistisk blogg det är ju helt otroligt vilken rekyl den fick bara så snabbt samtidigt. Tack för alla mail och kommentarer. Även om de är av blandad kompott. Kontrasterna gräver ju fram vem vi är. Blev en lång natt med samtal in på småtimmarna om magitrix, pr och skämt. Jag såg The Prestige igen i går, den är bara tung liksom, den bär en skön känsla av magi. Pr samtalet landa nånstans om de är bra med all publicitet eller inte. Om var gränserna går. Kul. Den anarkistiska ådran fick formulera sig vackert. Jag lärde mig några gånger att ge saker tid. För tajmingen bygger just på det. (För övrigt kanske det viktigaste i D. Trumps bok ” Timing is Everything”) Det behövs för att verkligen se vad som egentligen sker. Ibland är de bättre vi gör något så det inte står still och saker bara dör ut. Lyssna, ta in, ladda om och leverera. Hur som helst komikerna fick jobba ikväll. Thörn var skön. Bra roddat av Mats & Mattias. Avslutar med några kloka rader.
If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.
He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.
When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.
Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.
Sköna drömmar! / Riku
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
