Chapter 11

Contract. Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Sir Ernest Barker, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Bernard Rubin & Associates. Big Business and the Mass Media. Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1977.

Craig E. Aronoff, Editor. Business and the Media. Santa Monica CA: Goodyear Publishing Corp., 1979.

David Finn. The Business-Media Relationship: Countering Misconceptions and Distrust. New York: Amacom, 1981.

Observations made by media scholars give at least a quantitative testimony to many facets of the business of media. Ed Shiller, in Managing the Media (Toronto: Bedford House Publishing Corp., 1989) states "The media are everywhere and they are interested in everything" (p. 13).

A. Kent MacDougall (Ninety Seconds to Tell It All. Big Business and the News Media, Homewood IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981) observed that "To communicate with the American public, companies must first communicate with the media" (p. 43). Interestingly enough, they reach huge audiences by using the rent free public airwaves. Consequently, as the author shows, the news media shine by any measure of profitability. According to Forbes magazine's annual study of profits, broadcasting and publishing companies led all industry groups in return on stockholder's equity and capital in recent years. Specialized publications also keep track of the profitability of the media.

Study of Media and Markets, a service of Simmons Market Research Bureau, Inc., makes available standard marketing information. Communications Industry Forecasts, brought out by Veronis, Suhler & Asso. of New York, gives a detailed financial status of the entire communication industry (radio, television, magazines, entertainment media, recorded music, advertising, promotion).

J.H. Cassing and S.L. Husted, Editors. Capital, Technology, and Labor in the New Global Economy. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988.

Raymond Vernon. Exploring the Global Economy: Emerging Issues in Trade and Investment. Cambridge: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Stephen Gill. The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems, and Policies. New York: Harvester, 1988.

Gene Grossman. Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Facts for Action (periodical). Boston: Oxfam America, from 1982.

John Clark. For Richer or Poorer: An Oxfam Report on Western Connections with World Hunger. Oxford: Oxfam, 1986.

J.G. Donders, Editor. Bread Broken: An Action Report on the Food Crisis in Africa. Eldoret, Kenya: Gaba Publications, AMECEA Pastoral Institute, 1984.

In his study Eighteenth Brumaire, (1852), Karl Marx described bureaucracy as a "semi-autonomous power standing partly above class-divided society, exploiting all its members alike."

Harvey Wheeler. Democracy in a Revolutionary Era. Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1970.

Wheeler defineds bureaucracy as "a vast organism with an assortment of specialized, departmentalized tentacles for coping with the different kinds of reality it may encounter" (pp. 99-100).

Max Weber. Essay in Sociology. Edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Oxford University Press, 1946.

In this classical theory of bureaucracy, the author saw its roots in the cultural traditions of Western rationalism. As such, it is characterized by impersonal relations, hierarchy, and specialization.

R. Chackerian, G. Abcarian. Bureaucratic Power in Society. Chicago: Nelson Hall, Inc., 1984.

B.C. Smith. Bureaucracy and Political Power. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, Ltd., 1988.

The author argues that "Bureaucracy is a political phenomenon" (p. ix), not a mere administrative occurrence.

Eva Etzioni-Halevy. Bureaucracy and Democracy. A Political Dilemma. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

George C. Roche. America by the Throat: The Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy. Old Greenwich CT: Devin Adair, 1983.

Eugene Lewis. American Politics in a Bureaucratic Age: Citizens, Constituents, Clients, and Victims. Cambridge MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1977.

Michael Hanben and Ronda Hanben. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. A Netbook. http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106, June, 1996

Michael J. A. Howe, The Strange Feats of Idiots Savants, in Fragments of Genius, London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

"'Idiots savants' is the term that has most frequently been used to designate mentally handicapped individuals who are capable of outstanding achievements at particular tasks" (p. 5). He also mentions alternative labels: talented imbecile, parament, talented ament, retarded savant, schizophrenic savant, autistic savant. Among the examples he gives: A 14-year old Chinese who could give the exact page for any Chinese character in a 400-page dictionary; a 23-year old woman hardly able to speak (her mental age was assessed at 2 years, 9 months), with no musical instruction, who could play on the piano a piece of music that a person around her might hum or play; a subject who knew all distances between towns in the USA and could list all hotels and number of rooms available; a person who knew Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address but could not, after weeks of classes on the subject, say who Lincoln was or what the speech means.

In The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1920), Henry Adams presented a logarithmic curve of the acceleration of history. In 1909, Adams noted that between 1800 and 1900, the speed of events increased 1,000 times.

Gerard Piel. The Acceleration of History. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1972.

Nicolas Rashevsky. Looking at History through Mathematics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.

End of The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin (C) Mihai Nadin 1997