Enough has been said and printed about the subject of Weapons Of Mass Destruction in the past two years to last a lifetime. This four word phrase is now world famous and synonymous with the employment of nuclear and chemical instruments of warfare. The term itself has become a social and political weapon in and of its own self - a handy tool for speechwriters and press conferences. It is designed to intimidate and warn “rogue” nations of the world that are proving to be nations and regions of “concern” for the new International League of Power Nations formed after 1945. These weapons are now seen as the ultimate “Sword Of Damocles” in today’s political affairs of modern man. One slight “miscue” and the ultimate tragedy begins or ends as the case may be.
It is now sixty years since the world has witnessed the first and the last military use of “nuclear” power against a nation’s citizens. None have been used since those historical three days in August in 1945 when the United States Military bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most recent American “shock and awe” fire bombing of Baghdad, Iraq on the evening of March 21, 2003 creating a massive fire storm of 1500 bombs and missiles came as close as the world has seen a repeat of the frightful use of scientific military weapons being used against innocent civilians since the1945 nuclear bombings of Japan.
Important, non-explosive weapons of mass destruction, have now replaced the incomprehensible terrors of a military use of new “Hydrogen” bombs in any imaginable international conflict amongst the nations of the world.
Meanwhile, while this heavy , highly dangerous present day “weapons of mass destruction” political opera plays itself out towards its dramatic ending, an entire unnoticed obscure world of other programs of weapons of mass destruction works its way into our own private lives and homes via the cable wire which now penetrates the walls of our only sanctuary and fortress against the lies and the fabrications of the false and disreputable world of modern day political policies. This is the new and highly contagious world of Mass Media and Mega Money - weapons of social destruction.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian born, 1911-1980, “oracle” and communications “sage” saw the highly dangerous toxic and explosive effects of this volatile mixture of mass media and high octane fuel of money on modern man. Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man (1964) became McLuhan’s most widely read and influential book, explores the electronic age and its affect of both the individual and society in general.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies,
the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central
nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet
is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological
simulation of consciousness. When the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our
senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long
sought by advertisers for specific products, will be“a good thing” is a question that admits of a
wide solution.
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The
advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be
quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of
carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our
detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age, when our central nervous system
is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole
of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action.
it is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and disassociated role of the literate Westerner.
“ It is obviously true that most bomber pilots are no better and no worse than other men. The majority of them given a can of petrol and told to pour it over a child of three and ignite it, would probably disobey the order. Yet, put a decent man in an airplane a few hundred feet above a village and he will, without compunction, drop high explosives and napalm and inflict appalling pain and injury on men, women, and children. The distance between him and the people he is bombing makes them into an impersonal target, no longer human beings like himself with whom he can identify.” (Anthony Storr: Human Aggression, 1968)
Clearly, after reading Marshalll McLuhan’s erudite, prophetic, and very insightful investigations into the new “Environments” that we now live in and that shapes and controls the form of human associations and actions that now exist in the world, we should accept the notion and the idea that a new world of electronic information and images exists for our benefit and personal fulfillment. Most governments and major corporations understand and accepts these findings and conclusions and now see great advantages in their support and involvement in these new communication tools which allows them to “read” new insights into the minds and the nature of their customers and their citizens.
INSTRUMENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
All of the communications instruments that make up today’s “Information Age” have improved the general life-style of millions of people around the world, many in various stages and in various ways: information, travel, entertainment are a few. Each and every step and manifestation of these new technologies brings with them new and invigorating ideas and concepts of life for most of mankind.
But there are those in governments and media-based corporations, and those with special goals and ambitions that have large pools of money at their disposal, and are assisted with a staff of social scientists that see in these McLuhan ideas, only new , better, and less costly ways of furthering their global goals and ambitions. They are in our midst spreading their centuries old propaganda of division and hate. Now they have newer and better communications devices to complete their devious programs. They are resource complete with both personnel and financial resources. You know them well - you see , read or hear their electric voices every hour of every day. They involve their organizations in the entire range of social communications, from general elections, to the production and promotion of print and film products and networks. Their money is ever at work.
Under existing political forms, he says, the first illusion is participation. The second illusion is that there are solutions, e.g. there is no ignorance where there is no learning. There is no poverty where there is no affluence. There is no privacy where there is no public. These, and many other forms, are complementary. The white man creates the colored man, as affluence creates poverty. A convict has no privacy. He has solitude. A tribal man has no privacy. Under electric conditions there can be no privacy. The privacy invaders are the bulwark of the new knowledge industries, from the pollsters, to the insurance companies, and the credit ratings, “the eye in the sky”, the age of the snoop.
(letter dated April 14,1969 from Marshall McLuhan to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada)
THE MEDIA AND THEIR MESSAGES
The USA is the world’s foremost economic and military power. It also is now the world’s main source of new global electronic media technology, offering the world a new international network of powerful governmental and private media organizations with their programming of domestic and international programs of American culture, political, economic and social concepts and ideas - a major new export commodity.
The average American spends approximately eight hours a day with print and electronic media - at home, at work, and while traveling in a car. This includes four hours of television, three hours with radio, and one-half hour each with a newspaper and recorded music. Surveys show that 98% of Americans have television sets, 82% of which watch “prime time” and cable programming, 84% listen to radio, and 80% read a daily newspaper. Nearly 50% of the population have access to computer Internet programming.
Most of the nation’s primary sources of news and information are in the communications business to make money. Media and communications organizations have an annual income of 242 billion dollars - one of America’s largest business groups. Advertisers spend over 215 billion dollars annually to bring their products to the attention of the public. The various components of the media provides employment for hundreds of thousands of technicians, writers, artists, performers, and intellectuals that shape attitudes and beliefs by their media presence.
The print and electronic media in the United States, offering a wide variety of entertainment and news options and opinions to the American public are a pervasive element in American society.
The nation’s daily televised world of happy, youthful, attractive, smiling, active, prosperous people, who do not work, is a false, misleading, and illusionary picture of daily American life. This not what Americans experience in their own very real lives of labour, pain and tears which they see from their own private windows on the world around them. Only the five o’clock local television news programs is the real world of news of the murder and mayhem in the cities they live in. This half hour or so is filled to capacity with local stories of deaths, crimes, mixed with the political and economic news that pertain to their own state or city. Weather and sports are added as “lighter” news events to fill their local television agenda.
With the advent of television in the late 1940s the new electronic medium made quick inroads into the world of newspaper publishing. Newspaper publishing had made several individuals very rich men by their creation and ownership of newspaper chain organizations that published and financed many of the major newspaper companies then servicing America’s largest cities. Today’s top five daily newspapers by circulation in the United States are the Wall Street Journal, U.S.A. Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. The U.S.A. Today is edited and composed in Arlington, Virginia, and transmitted via satellite to several printing plants around the country and two printing plants in Europe and Asia. The International Herald Tribune is an American owned global newspaper, printed via satellite in 11 cities around the world and sold in 164 countries.
The advent of television also sounded the demise of large magazine organizations such as The Saturday Evening Post in 1969, Look in 1971, and Life in 1972.Today, Time, TV Guide, and Newsweek survive along with several thousand “special interest” magazines.
Starting in the 1950s, radios became standard equipment in automobiles and started a whole new group of listeners: American commuters driving to and from their workplace. Today “talk radio” with its telephone call-in feature has captured most of the country’s radio audience. The call-in format is now heard on an ever growing number of radio stations. Music and hourly news updates remains the main radio fare both daytime and evening listening. Sports is also a major subject for a number of cities having major league sport franchises. Besides the 10,000 commercial radio stations in the United States, more than 1400 are run by universities and publicly funded institutions.The United States Government has a host of daily “Radio Free” radio and internet website information broadcasts to all sectors of the world.
Television, in the past fifty years, has become the most popular and influential medium in the United States and the world - this electrified medium now exercises enormous influence on the public opinion and way of life of most of its international audience. In the beginning three privately owned networks offered free TV programming financed by selling air time to commercial companies that wished to publicize their products at certain times during their broadcast day. N.B.C., C.B.S., and A.B.C. then controlled the television market. By 1994 almost 60 percent of households has subscribed to cable television and non-network broadcasting.This new market gave birth to the twenty-four hour music and movie networks, which in turn created the Cable Network News program, CNN, a twenty-four hour a day news program based in Atlanta Georgia. In the last few years a new entry has challenged all of the past TV history and introduced its brand of universal “sky“ satellite TV broadcasting which now encircles the entire globe. The News Corporation has a stable of 14 Film Companies, 6 Sky Satellite operations, 11 Cable companies, 4 magazines, 3 newspapers, and 3 book publishers.
Movie films made in the United States are shown in more than 150 countries worldwide and American television programs are broadcast in over 125 international markets. The U.S. film industry provides the majority of prerecorded cassettes and discs seen in millions of homes throughout the world. This vast complex audiovisual industry is responsible for the total world exposure of American made films made and distributed by American companies such as The Walt Disney Company, Sony Picture Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios, and Warner Brothers Entertainment are the major production engines of a large number of American made movies made annually for domestic and international distribution.The number and contents of these American films have secured a prime position in world movie markets ever since the end of the war i
