Information liberation. Challenging the corruptions of information power

others are afraid. But the lesson from the experience of whistleblowers is that most of them are severely penalised and lead to no change in the problem. A collective challenge is far more powerful. Building a campaign that can involve lots of people is the only way that major systems of information power, such as mass media and intellectual property, will ever be transformed.

Change both individuals and social structures

Individual change is vital to social change. So part of the process is engaging with friends, neighbours, colleagues, clients and others in order to raise ideas and try out behaviours. Support groups and campaigns can be effective in bringing about individual change. A campaign to challenge defamation law or promote community- oriented research is a tremendous way to learn about the issues, sort out ideas and learn how the system works.

Included in individual change is one’s own self. It is one thing to bring about change in others and another to bring about change in one’s own beliefs and behaviours.

Individual change is important, but so is change in social structures, which includes families, governments, capitalism, racism and patriarchy, among others. Within these big and pervasive social structures, significant changes are possible, such as in laws, bureaucratic mandates and products. Social structures are not fixed. Instead, they are just ways of talking about regularities in actions and ideas. They can be changed, but it’s not easy.

Individuals affect the dynamics of social structures, which in turn affect the way individuals operate. So it’s important to have a process of changing both.

* * *

These four suggested ideas for bringing about information liberation are not the final word. There are always exceptions, such as occasions to use the mass media or rely on experts. Furthermore, there are frictions between the ideas. Working for change on the inside of a large media organisation is valuable, but it is not exactly living the alternative. That’s to be expected. Total self-consistency would leave little room for creative approaches.

My final recommendation is to have fun along the way. Trying to bring about a better world can be depressing, with constant reminders about the massive amount of corruption, injustice and violence that exists. Yet part of the goal of a better society is one in which there is more joy and laughter. Living the alternative means having fun along the way, whether that means exposing the absurdities of defamation law or bureaucracies or designing humorous stunts. There are certainly plenty of opportunities in the process of information liberation.

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Footnotes to chapter 1

1

Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracies, translated by Eden & Cedar Paul (New York: Dover, 1959; Hearst’s International Library, 1915).

2

Pitirim A. Sorokin and Walter A. Lunden, Power and Morality: Who Shall Guard the Guardians? (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1959). See also David R. Simon and D. Stanley Eitzen, Elite Deviance (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1982).

3

David Kipnis, The Powerholders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 2nd edition); David Kipnis, Technology and Power (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).

Footnotes to chapter 2

1

Lichtenberg, Judith. 1987. “Foundations and limits of freedom of the press,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall, pp. 329-355.

2

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Carol, 1990).

3

George Comstock, Television in America (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), pp. 50-56, reports that about equal numbers of viewers believe that US television is biased towards either liberal or conservative viewpoints.

4

See especially the now classic treatment by Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, 4th edition). Two hard-hitting attacks on corporate domination of information and culture, focussing on the US, are Herbert I. Schiller, Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Gerald Sussman, Communication, Technology, and Politics in the Information Age (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997). In terms of how the dominant influences on the media operate, one can choose between a propaganda model as given by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988) — based on the five filters of ownership, advertising, sourcing from powerful organisations, attacks on unwelcome programmes, and anticommunism — or a model involving organisational imperatives and journalistic practices as given by W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion (New York: Longman, 1988, 2nd edition) and