VII
Corporate Culture and
Sanctioned Art

The kind of culture we have, and want to have says a lot about us as a society. It’s particularly interesting to see the ways that our culture is defined and changed, which influences it embraces and which it resists.

Here we touch on so many orthodoxies it is hard to know where to start. Many people have surprisingly rigid and unexamined definitions and opinions about culture and art, and become almost personally offended when a contrary view is expressed. People view their culture as something personal, and take personally any suggestion that there is anything wrong, and that they have some explaining to do.

What I see is a long term trend of a laissez-faire attitude toward culture, as a result of the increasing dominance of society by its own economic system. Here, technology has played a major role, from mechanization in mills and factories, to the automobile, to films, television, and computers. Each new technology brought immense change in the organization of society and the culture that inhabits it.

Today we live in a culture that is dominated by commercialism and its communications technologies. This has brought about a scattering of cultures around the world, most importantly American culture, which has learned to harness communications to its advantage.

Culture’s Surrender to Commercialism

To an astonishing degree the ideals of corporate commercialism have taken over the definition and control of our culture. While once confined to the realm of popular culture, this dominance has steadily overtaken cultural institutions and so called high culture as well.

What commercialism demands is that its products become our culture – what sells is good, or at least what the people want. But we consumers of commercial products don’t see the connection to culture, and thus are not prepared to forego the pleasures for some greater good.

Popularized Culture

We see this especially in the dominance of commercialism on television, radio and in films, the troika of popular culture. Few are really aware that television and radio exist solely as a means of delivering culture as marketing toolconsumers to advertisers, and thus advertising dollars to the owners. As the consumers became more sophisticated in their screening of this advertising, the commercial advertising has moved from the obvious and easily ignored sponsorship of programming to more subtle and effective means, such as heavy promotion of the content as culture.

We are now bombarded by T.V. show related T-shirts and mugs, and books by the latest sitcom star – as if they knew the secret of life.

Film studios now regularly sell direct product placements within the content. Film stars no longer have to hock products outside their craft, their characters can do it for them.

Coke was a prominent product placement in the film The Paper.

Now we see heavy co-marketing of the content itself. Merchandizing of products related to a film is now more lucrative than the film itself. The goal is not to provide us with a plastic figure of our current favourite action or animated figure, it is to cross-market hamburgers and other film paraphernalia. The tie to culture brings the appeal, influencing culture becomes the effect.

Commercial sponsorship also dictates high rates of return on investment. Money is lavished on the latest blockbuster in hopes of mega returns. Works of less massive appeal are left unpublished or unproduced thanks to the rule of opportunity costsopportunity cost. Even when produced, through lack of promotion these movies, books and records are destined to have little impact. Numbers of screens, book tours, and radio station debuts are what bring attention in a mass culture. The rule is more and more that if it doesn’t make a ton of money it isn’t worth doing. And if it does, then clone it again and again. It’s quantity not qualityquantity not quality that counts. That this attitude would have precluded many of what are now considered the great works of art and literature seems to be given little thought.

Access to the popular culture is controlled based on expected commercial viability. The safe strategy is for small markets to import proven foreign products. In response, Canadian content regulations have allowed a home grown production industry to flourish in the face of overwhelming financial pressure to consume imported hits. Yet this system is under attack for less than perfect definitions of Canadian content.

Bryan Adams – a product of the Canadian content system if there ever was one – believes that we should scrap the regulations and let the market decide.

The music business, the outlet of popular culture perhaps least prone to being thwarted by this crass commercialism, has itself seen the growth of Alternative music. An alternative, that is, to the now thoroughly commercialized Rock and Roll, Classic Rock, and Pop music.

It’s Not Whether You Win or Loose.
It’s How You Make Money

The dominance of commercial sponsorship of most artistic, sporting and cultural events is almost complete. Indeed, in many of the sponsored events, it is difficult to tell by the name what the event is about, but you what are the
Bell Canadian Open,
Rothmans International,
du Maurier Ltd. Canadian Open?
certainly can identify the sponsor. But sports is not a game, its a business, and it’s run with profit, not the spectator uppermost in mind.

For years Harold Ballard’s Maple Leafs were regular losers and still sell-out crowds would attend. No need to improve then.

Professional sports franchises are just that, franchises. They are an outlet of a larger league the purpose of which is to make money, and lots of it. If a team doesn’t perform in one location, then move it somewhere else, being sure to use this as a threat to extract maximum concessions by the host city.

The Minnesota North Stars were moved to Dallas because of lack of support. Later, the owners of both the Edmonton Oilers and Winnipeg Jets threatened to move their teams to Minnesota if concessions from their cities weren’t forthcoming.

Nowadays, teams are being treated as extensions of marketing campaigns for products, rather than the other way around.

The Anaheim Mighty Ducks will make more money as a movie sequel and product endorsements than it will as a hockey team.

We were told the name of the Toronto NBA team, the Raptors, was chosen not for any affiliation to the city, but purely for marketing reasons.

Americans and Canadians just couldn’t admit that their beloved sports were not there to entertain but to make money. The business of the baseball and hockey strikes were the final confirmation that these aren’t primarily sports but businesses. In exchange for acting as human trading cards, players demanded a larger piece of the huge financial pie. The fans reacted as if their sport has been tainted, and withheld their full support. But they’ll be back.

But the greatest sell-out of sports, by far, has taken place in the Olympics movement (or is that the Always™Coca-Cola™ Olympics™). The ideal of amateur athletes competing to be the best in the world has now vanished. Amateurism has been almost completely discarded as a criteria, and sponsorship of athletes is only controlled because the IOC itself wants to reap the rewards.14 The belief that the athletes should, quite naturally, cash in on their success is a classic theory of capitalism. The amateur ideal is out the window.

We’re All For Sale

The commercial appetite is not satisfied with the takeover of our public lives via our culture. Our private lives are up for grabs too. Every product we purchase, every event we attend, the records of our driving and our health, can all be correlated and used in focused attempts to sell us more.

Consider what happens when you purchase something using a credit card. Your transaction is registered with the credit card company, and may also be registered by the store, even by the supplier. This information about you is sold to others who have a financial interest in knowing people’s habits and preferences. This can unleash a flood of related junk mail and telephone solicitation. It can be correlated with all your other electronic transactions, not just the financial ones. The same is true of mailing lists, which are regularly traded and sold. This commercialization of personal information will really take off on the information highway, as advertizers instantly latch on to every tidbit we reveal about our lives. Appearances aside, nothing on the internet will be free – your loss of privacy will be the cost.

The commercial reasoning behind all this is that businesses have collected this potentially valuable personal information and thus it must be fully exploited. Your privacy is of no concern, there’s money to be made. Unless we do something, this trend will only continue and intensify. business, not the state is Big BrotherBig Brother may end up being business rather than the state.

The Descent of High Culture

The commercial way of thinking has taken hold in many areas previously antagonistic to traditional capitalistic thinking. The idea that cultural, artistic, and educational organizations can and should be run like businesses has taken hold, based on the business logic of what sells is good, and only what makes money is important.

If an extravaganza can be staged that simultaneously brings in money and attends to the artistic requirements, so much the better. Then the full forces of commercialism can be unleashed safe in the knowledge that the main event is artistically worthy. Unfortunately under these circumstances, the event threatens to drown in its own hype.

The Barnes exhibit tour is a good example of the frenzy of commercialism that can surround a cultural event.

It’s now even unfashionable to have taken an artistic grant, it being proof of commercial inviability. The idea that culture should only be pursued and expressed when financially lucrative is beginning to take hold.

Several prominent Canadian writers felt it necessary to proclaim that they had never taken a government grant.

But high art won’t give up that easily. Seeing only two possible routes, outright commercialism and status quo snobbism, public art galleries have for the most part chosen to remain relatively inaccessible. They can’t see that becoming more open to educating the public doesn’t have to lead straight to theme park status.

This is the Public’s Art?

Art galleries curators have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss public criticism, to label it the all art is not good artuninformed opinion of the members of low-culture. They usually give very little explanation of why art is selected and grouped for presentation, when that should be the perfect opportunity to educate and explain. Challenged to explain, they make pathetic attempts at showing the importance of the work. Perhaps this art is really meant for the exclusive appreciation of the artistic élite, but then why are we paying for it?

There are two interpretations of art that compete in a public gallery. One concentrates on the art historical importanceart historical importance, as defined by the technical and cultural significance the piece held at the time of creation, and the influence it exhibits upon later works. The other is the beauty is in the eye of the beholder school, in which the public is forced to lump much of modern art. Thus the uninitiated are dismissed out of hand.

After years of refusing to supply surtitles for their operas, the Met in New York finally and at great expense installed airplane seat-like screens for the patrons.

Art and architecture are often developed for the élite for technical reasons. When for instance, an architect is “more interested in the building as an image than as a three dimensional experience”15, this tells us a lot about who is the intended audience.

The art élite insists that the public is a collection of Philistines who refuse to acknowledge the importance of modern art such as Voice of IreVoice of Fire. Granted these works may be historically and technically important in the professional domain, yet the public in large part insists that this art is not good, or even interesting.

Unfortunately for the typical member of the art élite, the human eye is the medium of understanding and appreciating art. The nature of human vision is that images captured by the eye are interpreted by the brain, and the brain attempts to recognize images as representations of objects that are know to the brain. The eye does not see a face or a chair, the brain constructs the understanding of these images. The brain is always attempting to construct objects from these images, and can be fooled in its interpretation.

Perhaps this is why abstract art like Voice of Fire is perceived by most of those outside the art élite as uninteresting and meaningless. They see three vertical stripes, that their brains cannot construct into any object of interest to their minds. They are seeing the painting outside the context of historical importance used by the professionals, who make no real attempt at providing the public with this context and explanation.

Communication Corruption

Our culture is defined by the current dominating media, and as such is subject to buffeting from the changes in values that flow from each medium. Television has transformed our society as profoundly as the press transformed Gutenberg’s, yet we see little role for us in defining what communications environment we should foster or resist.

The introduction of the press brought about a diminishment of oral discourse and especially oral history. Spoken arguments became suspect and lost validity as carriers of truth. The written word was proof, was history. We should easily be able to see that television has had, and computers will have equally profound effects on our ideas of truth and our sense of history. Our very definition of citizenship is shaped by the style and content of communications, yet we do almost nothing to analyze and affect them.

The written word has suffered at the hands of television, as images captured our attention. Now as the battle is poised between television and the Information super-hypewayinformation superhighway, we don’t have any idea what effects these will have on our modes of learning and discourse. Television as we know it is threatened by the lure of new excitements offered by multimedia, networking, and interactivity, although the promise may yet prove hollow due to the frequency of the toll booth.

The Television Society

Today’s public discourse is constrained by the artificiality and superficiality of television programming which is driven by its dependence on commercial sponsorship. It takes too long to read and it’s not as entertaining. Besides, if it hasn’t been on T.V. it can’t be that important.

Television news lingers on the sensational and lurid, the trivial and the odd. Advertising favours a fast paced and visual presentation of events, thus we get pictures of a train wreck or flood in a far off land rather than details of an unphotogenic trade negotiation. The scoop is more important financially than an analysis of events. Exclusive interviews, rather than in-depth reporting, attract advertisers.

Political battles are now fought through television momentstelevision moments, the debate being constrained to a snappy phrase and a good photo opportunity. Entertaining campaigns do not include pronouncements and discussion of important policy. Entertainment and the unusual are what get on TV.

Television is really about entertainment, and American entertainment is too expensive. The movie of the weemovie of the weakk is no longer about any important social issues, it is now simply a rehash of the latest scandal. Ironically, entertainment has become an echo of the corrupted definition of news — a definition based on entertainment. Reality-based drama shows now compete with the news for viewer interest. This full circle has also surrounded live entertainment, practically submerging all signs of live theatre not based on the spectacle model.

Television has also come to define the modes of education and discourse. What started as a trickle in the ’60s and ’70s has transformed into the environment. Education is no longer about teaching people to think, but rather it’s about teaching them to be happy. Entertaining television, and especially children’s educational television, has constrained the modes of teaching. It’s not fashionable to enjoy thinking and learning for its own sake, it must be supported by a layer of entertainment and superficial self-esteem. Concentration levels have declined in a generation that has been brought up on ever more fast paced images. The music video is a perfect symbol of television’s power to define the modes of creativity.

To be attractive to this generation of consumers, computerized information has taken on the guise of multimedia, the successor to television. And like television, the visualness of the information threatens to become more important than its content. seeing is believingSeeing is believing needs to be checked with as much vigour as the proscription don’t believe everything you read.

The information superhighway is also becoming a prisoner to this entertainment belief. The access points will all be geared to drawing people in with fun and games. Multimedia is the watchword, and cartoon characters will act as our hosts and guides.

The Demise of Writing,
The Dawn of Multimedia?

Predictions of the demise of the written word abound. Will writing suffer the same fate as oral discourse? The economics of electronic publishing will doom large scale printing just as the appeal of the printed word replaced the oral culture. The mistake we make is to equate printing with writing. But does this mean we should give in to the tendency to equate information with multimedia, or knowledge with information? What television didn’t obliterate will multimedia finish off?

Continued use of the written word offers important benefits over multimedia. Good writing requires an enormous distillation of thought, an attention to coherence, pacing and flow, and above all compelling ideas. In fiction, it also involves the reader’s imagination, perhaps our greatest human trait Although compared to early cinema and television we are now visually sophisticated, we are still just captivated by the spectacle. The American movie and television economic model produces either blockbusters or superficial portraits of society, because that’s what makes the big money.

Movie critics Siskel and Ebert regularly complain that what movies need is good writing reflected in authentic dialog.

The potential for even more couch patatoismlaziness is looming. The economics favour games and mindless entertainment, and the insatiable demand of potentially infinite channels doesn’t favour quality writing. It’s hard to read without engaging your mind. Television has the quality of providing mindless entertainment.

Its normal to veg-out in front of the tube, a feat practically impossible with reading. Interestingly, television’s older cousin the movies, offers an experience much closer to reading or the theatre than television. Going to the cinema requires deliberate planning including the decision to pay, an interest in the topic and a focused and sustained attention. Our culture also encourages thought and comment after the fact about the content.

channel surfingChannel surfing on the other hand encourages inattention and lack of focus. And there’s often nothing in the content worthy of discussion or thought. The impending mega channel universe, with the likelihood of pay-per-view may inadvertently reverse the decline into mindless viewing. Direct payment does promote attention, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to assure quality. We’ll be consciously watching bad programs.

Multimedia, so far, is too much like television. The ability to tack together a movie clip, some animation, and audio with banal or badly chosen text is too tempting for the new multimedia producers to pass up. Just because there’s a video clip doesn’t mean the content is important, interesting, or even correct.

Internet To The Rescue?

The global Internet is the latest wave in the multimedia craze. surfing the netSurfing the net is a description of how people have come to use global computer networks. It describes a process of mostly skimming the surface of information, finding tidbits of interest but gaining little understanding of anything of substance. Oh sure, there is the possibility of delving deeply into a topic of interest, if you can find the information. But years of television training has not lead to an appetite for deep and sustained examination. Flitting about would better describe the process.

There is much hype about the glories of the Internet, how it will enable anyone to become a What do you want to say today?publisher. Aren’t we then going to be overwhelmed by poor quality, even erroneous or deliberately false information? Already the unmoderated news groups are mostly filled with speculation, false, redundant or irrelevant information and vehement opinion. Wading through all this chaff takes considerable time and skill. The interesting thing about the Internet forum is that the quality generally doesn’t improve over time. As new users access the system, with a steady dose of new college and soon younger students, the quality gets diluted. The wheat to chaff ratio is very low.

There is obvious benefit to on-line access to traditional information sources that would normally require tedious searching, and a similar benefit could be seen for the new forums of information. But unless our education system is prepared, we will not produce citizens who are ready to engage in such a learning endeavour or to contribute in a meaningful way.

The process of editing and publishing in writing is there to maintain standards of taste, quality and accuracy, and give an indication of the expected bias. What then when most of what’s available on-line is self-published? How will we find the quality material? The current flap over pornography and hate propaganda on the Internet is an indication that the public in only now paying attention to this new medium.

Censorship and You

Censorship is always a controversial subject. Most people are either strictly opposed to any censorship, or are in favour in certain grievous cases but would really rather not support it. The typical reasons for censorship are a desire for protection from bad influences like pornography, violence, and degradation, influences that are said to corrupt morals. Those that furiously oppose any censorship subscribe to the domino theory of government control leading inevitably to 1984.

Traditional Censorship

Our society gets very touchy when you talk about how our culture is defined and whether we should try to control or even direct its definition. The dominant belief appears to be that we should willingly accept whatever it is we get when we apply a laissez-faire attitude with respect to culture. Anything else is immediately and self-righteously labelled as censorship. Any mention of trying to control the content of the media is condemned as a slide down the slippery slope toward mind control by the wicked state. Next stop book burning and thought police.

Aside from the idea that in a democracy the state is supposed to be us, and that education is certainly the most effective form of mind control imposed by the state, isn’t it naïve to believe that we’ll get a good culture if we just let it all hang out. I can hear the critics, tsk tsking now; “ ‘good culture’, who does he think he is!” We’re not even willing to engage in a discussion about whether our culture is good or not.

Debates about pornography, for example, always seem to end up as discussions about censorship. Even those that agree that pornography can be damaging to society argue that any attempts to impose legal sanction are doomed to vague and broad language that will lead to state abuse. So we do nothing.

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers television show was condemned by the private broadcaster’s standards council because it induced violent behaviour in kids.

The ensuing debate raged around notions of censorship as a substitute for parental responsibility. That our whole society pushes toward the acceptance of these influences says a lot about our priorities.

The Real Censorship

Freedom of expression, which is so vehemently defended against even the hint of public censorship, is regularly censored by capitalism without a peep of opposition or perhaps even recognition. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and publishers are regularly constrained by what sells, both directly and through the intermediary of advertisers.

Radio stations were given new freedom from public regulation and promptly became slaves to commercial regulation. The idea that this strengthened freedom is laughable. Radio and to a lesser extent television stations have begun, through perceived commercial necessity, to serve only the dominant market (that is, Baby Boomers) that advertisers crave. In line with typical commercial thinking, these businesses are only willing to serve the largest market, leaving others in the lurch.

Classic Rock stations have come to predominate, essentially smothering new music. Television programs shifted their focus to young families, in line with their target market.

The commercial media only cover what will be non-controversial and popular, unless the controversy can be used to sell. They are constrained by what their advertisers are willing to be associated with. Organized minority and fringe lobby groups can effectively ban discussion of their sensitive topics by targeting the advertisers with boycotts and public denunciation, essentially requiring they drop their support of the offending programs.

Advertising support is regularly withdrawn from U.S. television drama episodes that feature gays or abortion. Even the portrayal of independent women, like on Cagney and Lacey, suffers from lack of advertising support.

The public media labour under the constraint of policies that require fairness and balanced coveragewhat is balanced coverage? and must refrain from political involvement. If balance is lacking in the actual event, the other side (notice there are always exactly two sides) must be manufactured or promoted and served up as if it carried as much weight.

The Valour and the Horror was essentially banned by the CBC after the outcry by the Senate (of all places!) and some WWII veterans.

Even when topics of controversy are aired in the media, they are treated with such brevity that only the conventional views can appear with credibility. The risky other side is rendered either ridiculous or mute by a format that demands concise pronouncement of complicated opinion.

These simple constraints effectively ensure media exposure will only be given to mainstream, orthodox thinking. Unless of course art and ‘free speech’ combine to produce commercially controversial art that sells. This safe anti-orthodoxy is certainly acceptable.

The Cultural Chernobyl 16

Cross pollination of cultures is not new, but in the age of instant communications and saturated media coverage, the media dominant culture begins to act like a world culture.

The dominance of American culture, like the Chernobyl nuclear accident, has both obvious local devastation and lasting harmful fallout around the world. Like fallout, the harm is often not detected until too late. And the half-life of the effects is long indeed.

The responsibility for this is on both sides. The Americans can’t see any effects their culture may have on others as negative, the recipient countries don’t offer adequate alternatives.

Most Americans have never been exposed to another dominant culture and thus don’t realize what effect their culture has on others. And this process is self-reinforcing. As American culture is transported overseas the world begins to look and act more American. The small fraction of Americans who do then travel, see the world as quite like theirs.

Americans, like other peoples tend to think that their culture is the best in the world. However Americans are alone in thinking that other people, if only they had the chance, would really like to be American, and that it is their duty to give them that chance. That others would choose to be different is incomprehensible.

That’s Entertainment

This culture, dominated by reverence for wealth and celebrity, is promoted relentlessly by Hollywood and on television. Their whole entertainment industry is focused on making money, not on making culture. To these people, culture is primarily a business, and a very lucrative one indeed. The definition of this culture is whatever sells. Concerns about the effects this cultural industry have on society are dismissed in the same way that American business views any constraint on commerce.

This view of culture as entertainmententertainment products, as a business, is perhaps uniquely American. It leads to all kinds of problems dealing with people who don’t understand this fundamental connection. And nowhere is this basic miscomprehension more easily seen than when American cultural products are exported.

The Uruguay round negotiations of GATT were almost scuttled by the U.S. inability to recognize that their entertainment products were viewed by other countries as a cultural Trojan horsecultural Trojan Horse. The Americans want others to buy into their culture, which will give the U.S. an advantage in trade. They are now actively promoting the exposure of American products in their entertainment exports. To buy American culture is the first step on the path to subscribing to American economic and political ideals.

That protection and promotion of culture, indeed cultural survival, is viewed by American negotiators as simply a restraint of trade issue, demonstrates the fundamental gulf in cultural thinking. The Americans don’t even play by their own rule of what sells is what the people want. They have cleverly trained their people into disliking any entertainment products not from their own mould. Cultural imports are simply not in demand.

Culture Is More Than Economics

What are the effects of American culture on other societies, particularly Canada’s? The main effect seems to be that other cultures have to compete on the playing field of popular entertainment. And that playing field is now global. But is it necessary to have globalization as the driving factor in culture as well as economics? does World Class mean indistinguishable?World class is a label that has become a badge of distinction – if you don’t export your culture then it isn’t worth having. If your culture doesn't sell, it’s worth nothing.

A large market can easily pay for its own production and promotion internally, and then dump their product on the rest of the world. To compete in production value, countries with smaller markets join together in awkward co-productions, often producing lavish but laughable results which reflect an artificial, often bizarre hybrid culture.

The Destiny Ridge and Due South television series illustrate what happens when trying to imitate American values. Authenticity of plot and locale are jettisoned in favour of stereotype, action and drama.

Is it a failure that you don’t sell your culture abroad? This is the thinking of a global culture mind set. Any country that has a relatively small market suffers this problem. It’s not a sign of cultural failure but rather economic failure. Unfortunately, the economic rules will not change, so cultural regulations must be invented. Canadian content regulations, like other domestic content schemes, are meant to ensure exposure to cultural works that would otherwise never have been produced or submerged by imports. They are also designed to give economic benefit to native cultural expression.

The fight to save our cultural industries from American ownership is an attempt to save our culture from being overwhelmed by cheap American entertainment imports. Because we Canadians have bought the whole American package, not just the music, books, magazines, films, and television, but also the business styles and economics that define how these are produced and sold. If it works once, clone it and feed it to us again, and again, and again. Hype becomes a substitute for content, celebrity brings the pot of gold.

Celebrity is also becoming the goal in fields outside entertainment. Business and political stories revolve more and more around the star quality of the protagonists rather than their deeds.

Conrad Black is known outside financial circles not for his business acumen, but for his tendency to harangue his opponents and to sue them when they say anything negative about him.

By concentrating on the celebrity aspects of politics, business and culture, we remain oblivious to the substantive effects these are having on us. Since most of us don’t understand the effects, or if we do, find them bizarrely out of touch with human reality, it’s easier to focus on the antics.

Thanks in large part to the overwhelming effects of television, our culture is being measured on the grounds of economic activity. This is true of our politics and education as much as it is of our entertainment. The emphasis in politics is the economy and facilitating economic growth in a competitive environment. Education is now about producing the workers needed to compete in the new global economy. Our society seems unconcerned about this transformation.

It Doesn’t Just Happen

Our society acts as if the kind of culture we have doesn’t matter to us, that we should just accept whatever happens. We live our lives playing the roles of audience and consumer, contented with being the passive party. We are particularly bad at defining our culture, and sometimes deduce that we can’t have much that makes us different, or special, or worth keeping. So, by and large, we don’t defend what we have.

We learn our culture first from our family. It is augmented by our neighbours and our schools. It is transformed by our media like it or not, and we let this happen. It’s no use throwing up our hands in despair, we are the authors of our own cultural fate. Pointing to the unstoppable technology as the cultural culprit is no response, it’s a facile attempt at escaping responsibility. This technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is not self producing, it is not in control, we are. We just don’t think we are, and thus do nothing. Technological progress has brought us many things, they are invented and introduced for reasons that have little to do with societal well-being. Yet we do almost nothing, including simply examining the impact of such technologies on our culture and our society.

Our economic system is closely engaged with technology, and bears an equal responsibility regarding our cultural development. These twin influences work together to mould our culture in ways that serve their styles, their assumptions, their definitions. Culture has become an extension of economics, it is moulded into a form that best serves in the creation of markets of entertainment consumers. In the process the impetus for civic discourse has suffered, from the commercialization of most forms of art and entertainment, to the trivializing of news and public affairs.

We need to learn to stand up for our culture, to uphold what we find dear, and to critique what seems lacking. This can only be done in an environment that encourages serious and sustained examination, even thought, something our current communications media do not.

It is in this cultural and intellectual climate that we now find ourselves engaged in a struggle to define proper modes of discourse and thought.


14 Oops, I mean it’s everywhere you want to be.

15 Rosalind Krauss -Art Historian in reference to the Portland Building by Gauss. The television program Art of the Western World : In Our Own Time - 1989

16 It was the French Minister of Culture, I believe, who coined this striking phrase, with regard to the construction of the Euro-Disney theme park near Paris.

>> VIII Political Correctness
Questions We Won’t Ask


<< VI The Deification of Science
Science and Technology Aren’t Good


© 1995, 1997 Mark Nairn Hume