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Information

Margaret Mead once noted that if a researcher wants to study a western society, he or she should first turn on the television and watch the commercials. Per chance, your author was watching the local television news and, saw the epitome of American society in a brief thirty second commercial interlude.

A woman walks into her bathroom and her face becomes contorted, letting out a short scream. The camera cuts to a view of the bathtub and its surrounding walls; they are black with mildew and mold. The narrator's voice begins to ask why ought one spend hours scrubbing a bathroom when a quick telephone call to the company representing the television advertisement would would come in and cover up the old bathtub and walls with a custom made mold of their bathtub, while the woman enjoys a normal day's work!

Western society, particularly technology is increasingly being used as cures to problems that ``progress'' itself makes. Western medicine is quite analogous to the commercial above: fix the problem, do not worry about preventing it. This following section will concentrate on the mixed messages sent to the global community from western mass media, as in the commercial noted above. It will also cover the problems associated with a hyper-commercialised information-as-commodity world.



Subsections
next up previous
Next: Commercialisation Up: Discourse on Information, Technology Previous: The Electronic Smokestack
Emilio Recio 2001-03-18