Most Americans take for granted that they live in an open society with a free marketplace of ideas, in which a variety of forms of expression and opinion flourish and can be heard. But as Herbert Schiller makes clear in Culture, Inc., the corporate arm has reached into every corner of daily life, and from the shopping mall to the art gallery, big-business influence has brought about important changes in American cultural life. Over the last fifty years the private corporate sector in America has steadily widened its economic, political, and cultural role both in the United States and abroad, and Schiller finds the effects alarming. Corporate control of such arenas of culture as museums, theaters, performing arts centers and public broadcasting stations, he argues, has resulted in a broad manipulation of consciousness as well as an insidious form of censorship. Artists with views antithetical to big business, for instance, find they are unable to show in corporate-sponsored museums and galleries. And what does reach the public eye is non-provocative, watered down so as to be palatable to the largest number of potential consumers. "Blockbuster" museum exhibits present art objects abstracted from their social and historical contexts, and, he maintains, serve primarily as commmercial promotions for the corporations whose banners and logos adorn the exhibit halls. But the cultural landscape is only one area of concern. Schiller points out that the suburban sites of social interaction-- malls and shopping centers-- commonly thought of as public spaces, are actually privately owned. Explicity designed for consumerism and inhospitable as true public meeting places, they act as little more than selling machines. Another conquered frontier, he points out, is the enormously expanded informational system of the last ten years, now owned and directed by a corporate handful. Not only is there massive concentration in the media sector, but information once dispensed and controlled by the government is now farmed out to private concerns, who turn once inexpensive information into a profitable commodity. Schiller also finds the dynamic of information commercialization at work in the nation's universities, where big-business support of research has led to a siphoning off of the findings for their own profit. A disturbing but enlightening picture of corporate America, Culture Inc. exposes the agenda and methods of the corporate cultural takeover, reveals the growing threat to free access to information both at home and abroad, and explains how the few keep managing to benefit from the many. This eye-opening book is for anyone concerned with preserving variety and choice.

Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression

Business & Money

Schiller, Herbert I.

Biography & History

Oxford University Press

Most Americans take for granted that they live in an open society with a free market of ideas. But as Herbert Schiller reveals in Culture, Inc., the corporate arm has reached into every corner of daily life, and from the shopping mall to the art gallery, big-business influence has brought about some frightening changes in American culture. Examining the effects of fifty years worth of corporate growth on American culture, Schiller argues that corporate control over such arenas of culture as museums, theaters, performing arts centers, and public broadcasting stations has resulted in a broad manipulation of consciousness as well as an insidious form of censorship. A disturbing but enlightening picture of corporate America, Culture, Inc. exposes the agenda and methods of the corporate cultural takeover, reveals the growing threat to free access to information at home and abroad, shows how independent channels of expression have been greatly restricted, and explains how the few keep managing to benefit from the many.

In this challenging and controversial work, Herbert Schiller contends that the current proliferation of informational activities and the increasingly sophisticated information technology they demand are the result of efforts to control the economic, political, and cultural strains produced by a general crisis in the world market system. He further argues that though these efforts may succeed in the short-run, they lay the groundwork for more intense crises in the not-too-distant future.

Information and the Crisis Economy

Economics

New plan for Disarmament and international relations.

Super-State: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex

Literature & Fiction

Joseph D. Phillips

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

Paperbound book on communication, media, politics, information, sociology, power, imperialism.

Communication and Cultural Domination, by Herbert I. Schiller

M.E.Sharpe

The mind managers

Beacon Press

How the master puppeteers of politics, advertising, and mass communications pull the strings of public opinion.

The Mind Managers

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Beacon Pr

Hope and Folly was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Created in a burst of idealism after World War II, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) existed for forty years in a state of troubled yet often successful collaboration with one of its founders and benefactors, the United States. In 1980, UNESCO adopted the report of a commission that surveyed and criticized the dominance, in world media, of the United States, Japan, and a handful of European countries. The report also provided the conceptual underpinnings for what was later called the New World Information and Communication Order, a general direction adopted by UNESCO to encourage increased Third World participation in world media. This direction - it never became an official program - ultimately led to the United States's withdrawal from UNESCO in 1984.Hope and Folly is an interpretive chronicle of U.S./ UNESCO relations. Although the information debated has garnered wide attention in Europe and the Third World, there is no comparable study in the English language, and none that focuses specifically on the United States and the broad historical context of the debate. In the first three parts, William Preston covers the changing U.S./ UNESCO relationship from the early cold war years through the period of anti-UNESCO backlash, as well as the politics of the withdrawal. Edward Herman's section is an interpretive critique of American media coverage of the withdrawal, and Herbert Schiller's is a conceptual analysis of conflicts within the United States's information policies during its last years in UNESCO. The book's appendices include an analysis of Ed Bradley's notorious "60 Minutes" broadcast on UNESCO.

Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO, 1945-1985 (Volume 3) (Media and Society)

Herman, Edward S.

Preston Jr., William

Religion & Spirituality

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Communication and cultural domination

International Arts and Sciences Press

Revival: Communication and Cultural Domination (1976) (Routledge Revivals)

Routledge

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