But are they really?
We seem to be going the way of our former cold war enemies. The playwright, Heiner Mueller, once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West."
While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines. But it's a kind of emasculated public discourse, a parody, literally theater.
Simon Cowell, former host of American Idol once remarked to Larry King when asked about the prohibition of "American Idol" like shows in China. Says Cowell: "Well, because it's a democracy, isn't it? You know, I mean, it's the public voting."
The Entertainment Superpower: Information as a Weapon in a Theater of War
In the information economy the means of production are inside your head. The question is, who owns yours?
America is the entertainment superpower, and by entertainment I mean media, and I mean information. US broadcasters benefit from their economies of scale. According to economists Deidre McClosky and Arjo Klamer, persuasion, advertising, counseling, and consulting account for twenty-five percent of US gross domestic product. (Source: McCloskey, Deidre, and Arjo Klamer. "One quarter of GDP is persuasion." American Economic Review) In fact, the US media and entertainment sectors are the only American sectors that boast a surplus balance of trade with nearly every nation in the world. (Source: International Intellectual Property Alliance )
In Learning to Leverage New Media: The Israeli Defense Forces in Recent Conflicts US Army Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV; Dennis M. Murphy, professor of information operations and information in warfare at the U.S. Army War College; and Anton Mennin, media strategist at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, write that media and information are now a 'warfighting function' - a euphemism for weapon - in a theater of war:
Surrendering the information environment to the adversary is not a practical option. [T]he military must seriously consider where information and the new media lie in relationship to conventional warfighting functions. One thing seems sure: we must elevate information in doctrinal importance, and adequately fund and staff organizations dealing with information...
...During conflict, the same dynamism plays havoc with traditional notions of the media's role in informing, shaping, and swaying public opinion. In 2003, Frank Webster argued in War and the Media that 'the public are no longer mobilized to fight wars as combatants, they are mobilized as spectators - and the character of this mobilization is of the utmost consequence...the familiar industrial model of warfare was giving way to an informational model. The struggle for public opinion retained central importance, but the sheer pervasiveness and responsiveness of new media recast the terms and content of the struggle. There were at least two clear implications. The first was that the military has a commensurately more complex task in winning the information war. The second was that there remains little choice but to engage new media as part of the larger media explosion. Failure to do so would leave a vacuum - the adversary's version of reality would become the dominant perception. (Source: Learning to Leverage New Media: The Israeli Defense Forces in Recent Conflicts )
US Central Command has purchased software that creates false online profiles from the California-based Ntrepid for $2.76 million. Centcom spokesperson, Commander Bill Speaks, said "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US." (Source:Guardian ). According to the Washington times, the software could be used for countering disinformation campaigns, military deception, computer network operations or hacking. (Source:Mashable ). See also Operation Metal Gear .
Technological Cross Fertilization between Military, Entertainment, and Defense
US military surveillance, targeting, and weapons systems, use technology developed primarily for motion pictures and entertainment software - or the consumer electronics market.
The US government employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military surveillance. According to an interview that I conducted with the senior vice president of worldwide sales at Panavision in 2006, federal contracts with the US government are the fastest growing segment of Panavision's business.
More provocative is how Hollywood and video games drive the development of high-speed, high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own.
Entertainment software has led to faster introduction and deployment of processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. But, "IBM places value on chips made for entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group: "These chips help drive technology in other areas."
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