A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

corralling a billion eyeballs and selling them hogtied to
advertisers.
Like Rockefeller's Standard Oil, Viacom/CBS will be an
immense, fully vertically integrated business. They will be able to
produce, sell and distribute everything in a vast industry, from
movies to videos to book publishing to cable and broadcast radio
and TV.
Americans have always been leery of bigness, and rightfully
so. As big banks lose all sense of locality, and big government
loses all sense of accountability, so does big media lose all sense
of individuality, of having a relationship with the served.
And no, market research is not evidence of a sincere
relationship, but of espionage on one side's part to wring
advantage from the other.
When one party in a conversation is a million times bigger
than the other, and it does all the talking, that's not a conversation.
Yet big information insists in its commercials and
pronouncements that it is committed to excellence and to
speaking from the heart, that a serious ethical compact exists
between corporation and consumer.
It is one thing to be fatuous about selling soap flakes. It's
another thing to be that way when supplying a democratic society
with its lifeblood, information, as if it were soap.
The punks see through the deception. They see a presidential
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