Manufacturing Consent

Some ideas while I'm watching a Noam Chomksy documentary called Manufacturing Consent. I'll update this when I get a chance.

I read that as many as 30,000 Iraqi civillians have died since we went into Iraq. "As many as" means that the number is probably on the high end so lets say it's half that, 15,000. Five times as many people (not including US soldiers) as in 9/11. That's some interesting food for thought.

Chomsky's theory is that media is controlled by advertising dollars and therefore the corporations that advertise. The government/elite then use the media to leverage the flaws in Democracy to retain their power (they call it "stability"). Here's my theory: Wouldn't the emergence of the Internet and then blogging as a source of news for the masses be a threat to the establishment? And if that was the case wouldn't a corporation try to buy Blogger.com? (Google just did) And if the content can only be manipulated by independent users wouldn't the advertising model be imposed on individual users similar to the way it works with traditional media? (Blogger is now partnering with Adsense).I don't believe that I'd be lucky enough to come up with an original idea linking Chomsky's theory to new media but I just noticed some text from the Blogger.com homepage that really freaked me out...

AdSense Invite
Did you know that you can turn your blog into a source of revenue with Google's AdSense program?
Would you like to sign up? Yes, please.

A quote "Previously there were AdSense ads embedded in all of Google's free Blogger sites, but the bloggers didn't get any of the financial action." So what made blogger all of a sudden decide to pay users? "Blogger.com wants to make its customers rich" Why? What happened to Capitalism? Who owns google? Google recently had privacy protests due to their email scanning system.

Another quote "Another piece on Google's bizarre no-hate-ads policy, but this one suggests it is applied with a conservative bias. The author had a political commentary website which included an article which called the President "secretive, paranoid and vengeance-filled". His site was taken down." I'm not the first with this idea apparently...

From http://www.perrspectives.com/articles/art_gagorder01.htm
"Far more important to American society, Google's pervasiveness has given it a unique and privileged role as the information gatekeeper of the 21st century. “To Google” someone or something has become synonymous with using the Internet to find information, images or news. The New York Times has detailed the emergence of Google as an alternative to the traditional library for research. As individuals, businesses and publishers leverage its search, email and advertising tools to reach readers, sell products and assemble communities, Google is on the verge of becoming the Internet arbiter of the First Amendment.

As I learned this week, however, Google may be playing a darker, more sinister role in American society: corporate censor. On June 15, the Google Adwords team informed me that it had discontinued all advertisements placed by Perrspectives.com due to “unacceptable content” on the site that includes “language that advocates against an individual, group or organization.” As we’ll see below, this may or may not be blatant bias against liberal viewpoints. There can be no doubt, though, that the current Google editorial guidelines, evenly applied, would bar almost any newspaper, magazine, opinion journal, political party, advocacy campaign or even religious organization from advertising on its site. And that puts Google dangerously at odds with core American values of free speech and assembly."

Another idea. Google results are based on an algorithm. Talk about the perfect method of shaping people's world views.