@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 Sender: Arun Mehta <•••@••.•••> Subject: Re: cj#375> education; blunders; connectedness I'd like to respond to this as well as the message cj#379> re: "Establishment a dirty fighter" in one go. In the latter, I read: >Alan Dawson said: > You can talk to thousands -- minimum, thousands -- of people at ONE > time in a "newspaper" *you* control and you find this tightly > managed and difficult. Why do you find this? I've made this point before, so forgive me if this is old hat. A German friend used to make the point in the old Iron-Curtain days, that in the East, people queued up all night to buy books, painfully distributed them via samizdat, whatever, but basically read them. In the West, on the other hand, everything's available, but nobody reads them. The government doesn't need censorship, it operates via saturation, drowning out the sensible stuff. The Economist's "The World in 1996" points out in "A Generation of Loners" by Robert D. Putnam : "People born in the 1920s belong to twice as many civic associations as their grandchildren born in the 1960s, are more than twice as trusting, vote at double the rate, and read newspapers almost three times as frequently." The difference is attributed to TV. Who needs to jail dissidents in these media-manipulation days, you just cut off their support base. Of course, the communists and the colonialists also tried media manipulation, but they were so awful at it, nobody trusted what they put out. Arun Mehta, B-69 Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi-24, India. Phone 6841172,6849103 •••@••.••• •••@••.••• •••@••.••• http://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/~pinaward/arun.htm "I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any."--Gandhi @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Richard K. Moore (•••@••.•••) Wexford, Ireland •••@••.••• | Cyberlib=http://www.internet-eireann.ie/cyberlib Materials may be reposted in their entirety for non-commercial use. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
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