Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
he was convinced that the Western media aid this domination by supplying
supportive ideas and images (Schiller, 1992, p. 2).
To Schiller a requisite of giving voice to the poorer nations’ struggles to
improve their lot is to challenge ‘information imperialism’. At the moment the
world’s information environment overwhelmingly emanates from the Western
nations, especially the United States (McPhail, 1987). News, movies, music, education
and book publishing are criticised as a ‘one-way street’ (Varis, 1986;
Nordenstreng and Varis, 1974). Even non-radical analysts accept that there is a
‘media dependency’ (Smith, 1980) on the West, and there are also a good many
non-Marxian thinkers who are concerned about this situation and its possible
consequences. In France, for instance, there is a long tradition which protests
about the threat to cultural integrity from a preponderance of American-made
media produce (cf. Servan-Schreiber, 1968). And this is not exceptional since, as
Dyson and Humphries (1990) observe, there are ‘many Western European broadcasters
and policy-makers [who have] feared the loss of European cultural identity
by “wall-to-wall Dallas”’ (p. 19).
To Herbert Schiller all this constitutes ‘cultural imperialism’, an informational
means of sustaining Western dominance in especially economic and political
affairs (Tomlinson, 1991). He advocates a challenge to this ‘imperialism’ on all
fronts – hence the call for a ‘new world information order’ (NWIO) which has
had a marked effect in UNESCO (Nordenstreng, 1984) and which led to the
United States’ withdrawal from that organisation when it leaned towards support
for such a policy (Preston et al., 1989). Looking back from 1989 on the debates
within UNESCO, Schiller reviewed the history of the movement for a new world
information order and in doing so made clear his own perspective on the
present information environment. The NWIO, he said, was
an effort . . . to gain some control over the information directed at their
[Third World] countries and to regain control of their national cultures. They
wanted to define their own questions and present for themselves a different
image of their lives. All of that has been totally distorted in the West. The
demand for a new international information order was presented in the
West exclusively as an effort by third world dictators to enslave their peoples
by suppressing all free-flowing Western ‘enlightenment’. Clearly there were
some authoritarians at work in some of these countries, but to place the
entire movement in that category is just a blatant distortion. At the moment
this call for a new information order is very much in eclipse. But we do have
a new order all the same – the transnational information order.
(Schiller, 1989b)
Clearly, this Marxian account gives much weight to the influence of the spread
of corporate capitalism on the informational environment, both domestically and,
inexorably, internationally. However, it should be emphasised that we are not
simply identifying here a pressure from without which bears down on the information
domain. Quite the contrary, the maturation of corporate capitalism has
been a process of which the information industry has been an integral and active
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