Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
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best of British’, or that insurance companies ‘cater for each and every one of us’.
We may not be quite so alert to the persuasion, but similar sorts of image are
sought whenever companies lend support to children with disabilities, or to local
choirs, or to theatrical tours. As a leading practitioner in this sector of advertising
has confessed, the sole purpose of such persuasion is that companies will ‘be
given the benefit of the doubt and the best assumed about it on any issue’
(Muirhead, 1987, p. 86). Having moved to this level of advertising, we can readily
understand how corporate attempts to manage consumption easily merge with
corporate ambitions to manage wider aspects of the contemporary scene, up to
and including political matters.
What have been considered above are major dimensions of the corporate
presence in the information domain. It seems to me to be quite impossible to
measure precisely, but, observing the spread of advertising in its many forms, as
well as the expansion of public relations and lobbying, we can be confident in
saying that businesses’ interested information contributes enormously to the
general symbolic environment: directly in the advertisements which are projected
on our television screen, indirectly in the influence advertising brings to bear on
most media in the contemporary world; directly in the head of the CBI being
asked for the perspective of ‘industry’ by the newspaper journalist, indirectly
through ‘Enterprise Education’ materials supplied free to primary schools;
directly when a company’s personnel director is interviewed on television, indirectly
when the PR wing succours favour through ‘hospitality’. Precisely because
this information is motivated, it risks denuding the public sphere whenever it
enters into that arena and, more generally, it is a corrupting force in the wider
information domain where its economic power gives it disproportionate advantage
over less privileged groups.
That said, there are of course constraints placed on the corporate sector’s
desire to shape information to suit its purposes. These stem from the fact that
most information comes through the mass media, resulting in the problem of
business having to work through media practitioners who often have reasons
(professional news values) to be sceptical of business handouts and who can often
be drawn to coverage of business for reasons which appeal to reporters while
being distinctly unattractive to the business world.
While this cannot be discounted as a factor which leads to the emergence
of information about business that it would prefer was not revealed, a countertrend
which leads to a general decline in high-quality information has been
identified by Neil Postman (1986). Postman’s focal concern is television’s entertainment
orientation that has extended throughout contemporary culture,
bringing with it an ethos of immediacy, action, brevity, simplicity, dramatisation
and superficiality. In Postman’s view these entertainment values have permeated
news coverage, education, politics and even religion: everywhere they have
displaced valuable information with what may be called ‘infotainment’. In this
view television impoverishes the wider information environment because it
accentuates the sensational and bizarre, centring on the easily digestible at the
expense of dispassionate and closely reasoned analyses. Because of this we shall
learn little about the everyday functioning of transnational corporations, but are
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