TY  - BOOK
AU  - Schiller,Herbert I.
TI  - Information inequality: the deepening social crisis in America 
SN  - 0415907640
AV  - HC110.I55 S35 1996
U1  - 303.48330973 
PY  - 1996///
CY  - New York
PB  - Routledge
KW  - Information technology
KW  - United States
KW  - Information superhighway
KW  - Distributive justice
KW  - Equality
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; 1; Policing the Culture --; 2; For Sale: Schools, Libraries, Information, Elections --; 3; Data Deprivation --; 4; Special Effects: Media High Tech for Capturing Viewers --; 5; The Information Superhighway: Latest Blind Alley? --; 6; Globalizing the Electronic Highway: Creating an Ungovernable World --; 7; American Pop Culture Sweeps the World --; 8; The "Failure" of Socialism and the Next Radical Moment --; Index
N2  - "Herbert Schiller, for decades one of America's leading critics of the communications industry, here offers a pungent salvo in the battle over information. In Information Inequality he explains how privatization and the corporate economy directly affect our most highly prized democratic institutions: our schools and libraries, our media, and our political culture. Airwave frequencies are being auctioned off. Newspapers and electronic media increasingly are collapsing into vast global structures. "In the United States of the 1990's," Schiller writes, "the notion of community has become mostly nostalgic. Every facet of living is being, or has been, transformed into a separate, paid-for transaction." The corporate economy's pursuit of still greater private returns is systematically eliminating those institutions and structures that sustain the public interest and the common good. A master media-watcher, Schiller presents a crisp and far-reaching indictment of the "data deprivation" corporate; interests are inflicting on the social fabric. From the realm of advertisisng to the so-called 'empowering' networks of cyberspace, technologies continue to be developed in ways that exacerbate social inequality. Schiller concludes with a cautionary analysis of the world economy: thoguh socialism's failures may lull the Western market into a sense of security, our social needs are more severe, more pressing than ever before. A "next radical moment" will hinge on the question of freedom of information, on the need for equal "information access" for all."--Publisher description
ER  -