Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [189]
31. Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 19.
32. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990), p. xiv.
33. Moisi is deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations; cited in Roger Cohen, “The French, Disneyed and Jurassick, Fear Erosion,” The New York Times, November 21, 1993, p. E 2. Moisi links Jihad and McWorld (without calling them that), noting that “one minute it’s dinosaurs [Jurassic Park], the next North African immigrants, but it’s the same basic anxiety.”
34. The object is to send great quantities of data, pictures, and sounds to every home on an interactive basis. The old “new” technology required fiber optics that carry thousands of signals and permit broadcasting centers to send information to everyone. Integrated Services Digital Network’s new switching technology permits a particular home to get only those data it requires (just the way each home receives only the calls placed to it by phone rather than every phone conversation in America). It is this switching capacity that makes the new mergers between phone and cable broadcasting companies so potentially profitable. To rewire American homes with fiber optics would cost upwards of $400 billion; by using the ISDN system, existing wires can be employed at a fraction of the cost.
35. Formerly owned by Whittle Communications, and now in the hands of K-III, a firm specializing in education and publishing for profit whose chairman H. Kravis is also a key player in public broadcasting.
36. Colgate-Palmolive has test-marketed a teen perfume called Maniac, while Randy Pernini of Miami has created a designer fragrance for “discriminating” (not) boys between three and ten. See Chapter 4, note 34, above.
Chapter 8. Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld
1. I speak here as someone who has been engaged in a number of major educational projects for television—for example, with Patrick Watson, the ten-part series The Struggle for Democracy (the book accompanying the series is from Little, Brown and Company, 1988). As we achieved television success, we risked educational failure.
2. Robert Lynch, a McGraw-Hill director, quoted by Meg Cox, “Electronic Campus,” The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 1993, p. A 5.
3. The Authors Guild, Electronic Publishing Rights: A Publishing Statement, October 18, 1993.
4. User’s Guide for Great Literature, Personal Library Series, Bureau Development, Inc., 1992. English-language originals are cut but otherwise untouched, but translations from foreign classics are ancient and the principle of selection obviously has more to do with what was available free than with scholarly or editorial judgment.
5. Cox, “Electronic Campus.”
6. Stern’s Private Parts passed the million mark in sales in its first several weeks in print.
7. See John Lahr’s telling essay on celebrity, “The Voodoo of Glamour” (with Richard Avedon), The New Yorker, March 21, 1994, pp. 113-122.
8. Ornstein is cited in an article by Jennifer Senior, “Hollywood on the Potomac,” placed ever so appropriately in the “Style” section of the Sunday New York Times, December 12, 1993, Section 9, p. 1.
9. English publishers buy far more books from the Americans than American publishers buy from the English. Ditto more or less every other country in the world. Japanese writers are emulating hot (cool) Americans writers like Jay McInerny, which compels them to incorporate McWorld into the fabric of their characters’ nominally Japanese lives. Haruki Murakami’s protagonists in The Elephant Vanishes smoke Marlboros and get high to Bruce Springsteen or Woody Allen while playing out story lines in high-tension rendezvouses at McDonald’s—I mean the actual Honshu burger franchise, not just the metaphoric world it embodies. Murakami quotes American films like The Wizard of Oz as if they were pillow books of Japanese civilization on the doorstep