The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market / Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, NY: Bloomsbury Pub., 2023

 In 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway released The Merchants of Doubt, an account of the actions of the fossil fuel industry and their agents to sow doubt in the public mind about the reality and danger of climate change.  Their book had a powerful effect on how the public understands the politics of climate policy, and it set the stage for numerous legal actions to hold the "merchants of doubt" responsible for the current and accumulating harms of climate change.  Law suits are slowing making their way through state courts around the country.  If these cases succeed, the transition toward a clean and reliable energy economy will be much accelerated.

Among the questions raised by The Merchants of Doubt was how four scientists, who were the leading figures challenging climate action, could deny the scientific consensus regarding the fact and danger of climate change.  Oreskes and Conway concluded that they were entranced by the ideology of "the free market."  How did this ideology become so powerful?  The Big Myth provides a powerful case that it was the result of a decades-long public relations effort by American business and industrial associations.

The propaganda effort began in the early decades of the 20th century when the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), founded in 1895, fought progressive era regulations to restrict child labor, establish workers' compensation relief systems, and empower unionization.  They were, of course ultimately unsuccessful, but their opposition demonstrated the necessity of government regulation to protect the interests of ordinary citizens from exploitation by business and industrial elites. 

Later, in the 1920s, the nation's privately owned electrical grids were failing to bring electricity to rural areas.  This led to a drive for "rural electrification" legislation that would create a rational electrical grid system serving urban and rural regions alike.  The effort was opposed by the National Electric Light Association (NELA), an association of electric utilities founded in 1885 and which later became the Edison Electric Institute.  NELA was successful until New Deal legislation finally established the Rural Electrification Administration and imposed regulations to expand access to electricity.  Here we see government action, as opposed to unregulated market forces, being responsible for creating the conditions for expanded economic prosperity.

The danger of regulations, unionization, and government planning alleged by NAM and NELA was, of course, said to be the slippery slope leading to socialism.  They argued that once government intrudes in one sector of life, it will inevitably intrude in every sector.  Oreskes and Conway point out that this reveals the false dilemma that lay behind the propaganda: economies must either be laissez faire or entirely controlled by a central authority.  The business propagandists never acknowledged that there are countless ways to organize an economy between these two poles.  

Despite the massive market failure that produced the Great Depression, business and industry lobbyists doubled down on their commitment to unregulated capitalism and resisted New Deal efforts to restore economic stability and security.  Out of this, NAM developed what Oreskes and Conway call the "indivisibility thesis," i.e., that political, religious, and economic freedom were "indivisible."  This meant any assault on the prerogatives of the private sector was also (or ultimately) an assault on political and religious freedom.  Later, this "tripod of freedom" was boiled down simply to the inseparability of "democracy" and "free enterprise," though Billy Graham continued to promote a connection between religious freedom and "free markets."  

Business leaders created several organizations, most notably NAM's National Industrial Information Council (NIIC).  These organizations were established to propagandize in favor of unregulated capitalism.  Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, was enlisted for support. The NIIC played a major role in the the campaign to shape public opinion through films, slide shows, newspaper advertisements, direct mail, billboards, posters, pamphlets, window displays, and other media.  In the late 1930s, NAM produced an extremely popular radio program, The American Family Robinson, which promoted "free market" fundamentalism.  In the 1940s and 1950s, NAM, with the assistance of Hollywood, was responsible for numerous films and news reels.

Also in the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder was publishing her "little house" books, particularly Little House on the Prairie.  These books contained an intentional and not-so-well-disguised severe libertarian message.  The message was in large part due to the editorial influence of Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.  Lane is considered among the three most important founders of the modern libertarian movement, along with Ayn Rand and Isabelle Paterson or "the three furies" as William F. Buckley dubbed them.

Oreskes and Conway also provide an interesting account of General Electric's television series General Electric Theatre, hosted by Ronald Reagan.  General Electric Theatre, airing weekly from 1953-1962, provided well-produced and engaging stories that promoted unregulated capitalism.  Reagan's involvement with the program is widely recognized as what transformed him from a supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal to the "anti-government" ideologue that he became.  

Much of the public relations efforts on behalf of unregulated capitalism came from business interests.  As this would easily be seen as self-serving, business leaders sought academic economists to give their ideology independent credibility.  Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman served this purpose.  The careers of each were made possible by financial support from libertarian business interests despite strong opposition from the profession.  It is noteworthy, though, that the economic views of each were far less austere than how they were promoted by their patrons.  For example, Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, was republished in a dumbed-down version in Reader's Digest in 1945, where any recognition of the important role of government in economic affairs was edited out.  A similar redaction of pro-government passages in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was done by George Stigler for the University of Chicago Press in 1957.

One reoccurring theme in The Big Myth is that claims that a "free market" will better provide for economic prosperity and general social well-being are belied by the historical facts.  Instead, the unregulated capitalism has led to numerous significant market failures (especially the climate crisis), and that nearly all of the material and technological advances that make our lives safe and comfortable today have been the result of either direct government action or public-private partnerships initiated by the public sector.  Oreskes and Conway make a powerful case that the popular admiration of "free markets" is a product of special business and industrial interests working for their private gain without regard for the well-being of workers and consumers.   

The Big Myth is a massive work (565 pages, including bibliography and index).  This review provides only a slim sample of the history of the "free market" propaganda that has shaped so much of our discourse today.  It is a brilliant, extensive study that deserves anyone's attention who is interested in the controversies over the present day organization of our political and economic institutions.   

Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age / Sven Birkerts -- Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994

In 1994, the Internet was mainly a text-based medium.  "GUIs" or graphic user interfaces were relatively uncommon.  The first major web browser "Mosaic Netscape 0.9" was not released until October of that year.  Still, the prospect of the ubiquitous use of the Internet to browse linked documents was being discussed with great excitement, at least within academic circles.  Luddites were hard to find.  For that reason alone, Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies now appears to be a remarkably prescient warning of the downside of our new device-obsessed society.   At the same time, many of his observations seem quaint.  Birkerts got the main picture right, but he can hardly be faulted for mistaking the details or not seeing just how far down the road to digital hypnosis we would traveled.

The first half of the book tells the back story.  Birkerts, in an early chapter, recounts how he became attracted to books and writing, including his attempts to become a novelist and how he ultimately discovered his aptitude for writing essays.  In any case, we learn early on that Beikerts is devoted to print books, reading, and writing.  He goes on to describe the phenomenology of deep reading or reading in which we become thoroughly immersed in the text.  He provides an account of how reading can be instrumental in "self-formation," how reading and interpreting texts is related to our life activities apart from reading, and how the activities of reading and writing are not so very different.

In the second part of the book, Birkerts explores the coming new world of digital reading and as you might guess, he greets it with apprehension.  Birkerts fears that the beneficial habits and frame of mind created by deep reading will be undermined by the new electronic media.  He predicts the erosion of language.  He writes that "the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century" are becoming "flattened by the requirements of communication over distances.  That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken.  Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing....Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial.  The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse."  It's hard to deny that his prediction has come to pass.  The 140 character twitter message has joined the 30 second sound byte to dominate much of our communication.  Worse yet, the cell phone text has returned us to the age of brief telegraphic wire messages, except everyone is able to send these messages hundreds of time a day. 

Birkerts fears that with the loss of physical books will undermine our sense of the past.  No longer will the past be represented to us in surviving artifacts, but it will be stored in databases "flattening" our historical perspective.  The extent to which university students are turning their backs on physical books is, indeed, striking.  Their work relies very significantly on texts that can be viewed online.  This is, perhaps, a product of the ready availability of electronic journal literature.  Not long ago, libraries had access only to a limited number of journals and student research relied significantly on books.  Now, back issues of journals are sold to libraries in extremely cost effective packages.  Money is made mostly on expensive access to recent issues.  This is a boon to humanities research, but Birkerts's point that our historical perspective is flattened seems credible, particularly when one views a pdf of an 80 year old journal article in contrast to an original paper version of it. 

Perhaps Birkerts's most worrying prediction is of "the waning of the private self."  He detects "a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual."  He writes, "for some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise....One day we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense, among so many channels of instantaneous information, that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiations of subjective individualism."  I'm not entirely convinced that we are losing the notion of subjective individualism.  Much of our social networks are designed to create at least an image of ourselves as individuals, but at the same time we are becoming conduits for memes that waft through the electronic social space; and if Birkerts's concern about "the waining of the private self" was really a concern about the waning of privacy itself, he could not have been more prescient.

The more quaint aspects of Birkerts's work appear in this latter half, where he describes Perseus 1.0 as the "hot new thing in the classics world." Perseus 1.0 was an early an interactive multimedia database for the Classics.  The "Perseus Project" is still going, but it has been overtaken by so many new and more sophisticated databases.  Still, Birkerts's "curmudgeonly" remarks about the use of such tools in education, particularly humanities education remain worth considering and continue to be discussed among teachers and researchers.  Birkerts also has chapters on hyperlinks and audio books.  The observations about how hyperlinks change the character of writing and reading are worthwhile; however, his prediction that audio books would supplant print books is obviously mistaken.

The third part of The Gutenberg Elegies laments the demise of literature and the educated reader.  My knowledge of literature is far too shallow to comment on his points, though they seem a tad overstated.  Regarding the disappearance of the educated reader, I suspect he has a point.  In decades past, reading had far less competition.  Now, finding an avid reader is rather difficult.  This is surely a function of the time we spend looking at text messages, screen-shots, and Youtube video clips, not to mention downloadable movies, audio files, and much more.  The ubiquity of cell phones means that people seldom find themselves separated from people with whom they would like to converse and so carrying around a pocket sized paperback to fill the odd empty 20 minutes isn't something we do.

All in all, The Gutenberg Elegies is becoming (or has become) a classic, early work in the expanding debate over the social and personal consequences of our new digital culture.  Any one interested in this debate would do well to read it.

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media / Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld, illustrator -- N.Y.: Norton, 2012

Since 1993, the University of Maryland has annually selected a "First Year Book," which is made freely available to the campus community. Faculty members are encouraged to include a discussion of the book into their syllabi. Given all the books from which to choose, one would expect that the First Year Book would be something quite special, and it usually is. This year's book is The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone. It is a "graphic nonfiction" work, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. This alone is certainly not a reason to dismiss the work. There are many graphic nonfiction works that are well worth reading; see particularly many excellent monographs in the "For Beginners" series published by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. What makes these books worthwhile is the ability to provide more than a superficial treatment of their subjects in a readable and entertaining style. Cleverly chosen or executed illustrations can be a significant asset. Unfortunately, The Influencing Machine provides neither depth nor entertainment.

The work is certainly readable, but this has less to do with the writing style than with the superficiality of the ideas it expresses. It is a fast paced tour across the surface of the history of journalism, free expression, government control, and the influence of audiences on media content. Gladstone seems to have assimilated too many of the self-validating assumptions current among mainstream journalists regarding the above issues. Most of all, she concludes that the media and its contents are a product of the demands of news consumers. "We get the media we deserve" is her final word. For a more insightful analysis of the U.S. media, one would do well to read the works of Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, or Herbert Schiller to name just a few more thoughtful authors.

Gladstone says virtually nothing about the systemic biases that appear in the privately controlled U.S. media, except to note that "the American media are not afraid of the government. They are afraid of their audiences and advertisers. The media do not control you. They pander to you." While there may be a modicum of truth here, Gladstone provides no serious examination of the political economy of the media. In Gladstone's view, media consumers appear all to be equal. This would imply that the consequences for media content would be democratic and would reflect the impulses of ordinary people (for good or ill); however, media consumers are not all equal. Different potential audiences have different purchasing power. This means that the media content will be skewed to attract an audience with the greatest aggregate wealth, and in this formula, the rich have a much greater say over what appears in the media than the poor. We don't get the media we deserve, we get the media that money prefers. This is reinforced especially in the national media by the cost of advertising. Only large corporations are able to purchase advertising on national broadcasts, and so media content reflects the interests of (1) large media corporations, (2) well-to-do audiences, and (3) large corporations seeking to advertise their products.

There are a number of other features of the U.S. media as significant as its political economy. They make no appearance in The Influencing Machine. What does appear is a superficial and choppy presentation of mostly trite observations and journalistic mythologies. One would hope that the artistry in the work would be a saving grace, but it is mostly unimpressive.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era / Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks -- Los Angeles: Litwin Books, 2012

In Prophets of the Fourth Estate, Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks have given us a window on the relationships among money, politics, and the press during the Progressive Era in the U.S. or perhaps their window is really a mirror for our own times. Certainly, the book is first and foremost an excellent account of criticisms of the press in the Progressive Era, but the parallels to today are unmistakable.

The first chapter is a brief history of the politics of the Progressive Era. While it is true that important reforms were won by progressive political forces, regressive forces were not without accomplishments. The Progressive Era in politics was also roughly co-terminus with the regressive Lochner Era in American legal history during which the power of corporations became firmly entrenched for decades. Furthermore, the elections of William McKinley and the rise of the big money politics of Mark Hanna permanently transformed politics. Overall, the era saw a bitter political struggle between more or less equally powerful political factions that broke apart during the four-candidate presidential election of 1912. One aspect was largely progressive, though: the prominence of muckraking journalism, especially between 1903 and 1912. Reynolds and Hicks recall the work of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Upton Sinclair, but also provides us with a more in depth account of the earlier work of Jacob Riis.

The primary focus of the work, however, is on the effect that advertising and other "controlling interests" have on newspapers, the lecture circuit, and their role in forming public opinion. The final chapter directly addresses propaganda and the rise of the public relations industry. Their analysis is based on a careful study of both secondary and primary material. Indeed, the most noteworthy feature of the book is the republication of media criticisms published during the Progressive Era. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides us with the full text of articles by Charles Edward Russell, Robert L. Duffus, Morefield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Donald Wilhelm, and Roscoe C. E. Brown.

The relevance of these articles to late 20th century media criticism is astonishing. One might think that the objects of the Progressive Era critics were Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Talk Radio, the major city daily newspapers and most of our popular news magazines. This is both a strength and a weakness of the work, though. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides valuable insight into a one hundred year period of the press in the U.S. How relevant the analysis is to "new media" is questionable. The basic principles that it exposes are likely, however, to be relevant to a new, contemporary analysis.

The finest analysis of the press in the 20th century is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In it they describe a propaganda model that is a natural creation of the private ownership of media and the commodification of information. Herman and Chomsky point out that the imperatives of the market require media corporations to present information or programing (including news) that is not dysfunctional to their profitability. To do this, publishing executives must accept a moral and economic world view that will not compromise the interests of stockholders. They must hire editors who will do the same, who in turn hire reporters of a like mind. Whatever information that results from these institutions can be thoroughly critical of any organization or sector of society except those upon which the media corporation is dependent.

Advertisers are particularly important. For a media corporation to succeed, it must attract advertising dollars. Consequently, presenting programing that will be attractive to businesses with a lot of money is critical. Finally, a well-heeled audience is the bedrock of the entire system. The product of media corporations are not newspaper copy or programing, it is the audience which they sell to advertisers. A large audience is important, but more important is the amount of disposable income that the audience commands. A large but impoverished audience can be less valuable to an advertiser than a smaller but much richer audience. Every element of the system works toward skewing the media's message toward what is compatible with consumer capitalism. Prophets of the Fourth Estate makes it clear that most of this was very well understood by a number of journalists in the Progressive Era. This may be the most significant difference between the late twentieth century and the Progressive Era: decades of institutional pressure have selected for journalist who are largely unaware of their conformity to the dictates of power.

Extending the analysis into the 21st century is, however, problematic. New media have created avenues through which critical voices can speak. Just as Facebook and Twitter have facilitated communication from and among democratic movements in the Middle East, they have helped coordinate actions of the Occupy movement and exposed brutal police responses. It has become commonplace to suggest that new media is and will become a leveling technology that will democratize political discourse. This may well be true, but it remains to be seen.

Two factors suggest that new media will be less destabilizing than is thought. First, while social media permits communication from and to countless people, the channels through which they communicate are increasingly narrow. The vast majority of messages sent over the internet are carried by Verizon, AT&T, and cable companies that have little competition, and of course Google dominates internet searches. The movement to guarantee "Net neutrality" is critical to keeping these corporations from obstructing free expression, but as internet communication will always be controlled by major corporations, it is likely that corporate America will be able to legislate "exceptions" to unrestricted speech, probably in the name of national security, cybersecurity, or the "war on terror," systematically eliminating threats to corporate power.

Second, while the internet may permit the proliferation of voices and an increase in the sheer amount of information available to the public, the time that the public has to assimilate this information will not expand. "Data smog" and on line distractions are an increasingly significant obstacle to gaining a deep understanding of the political world and the role of corporations in our lives and government. Under these conditions, organizations will need significant resources to mount effective communication campaigns, be they corporate or anti-corporate, giving clear advantage to plutocratic messages.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate is an extremely valuable analysis of the press of the 20th century. Whether we can glean from the last century the principles that allowed corporations to control the press and apply them to the 21st century is an open question.

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) / Siva Vaidhyanathan -- Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011

Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia prefaces his book The Googlization of Everything with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that perfectly captures his darker attitudes toward Google: "It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders." Vaidhyanathan is particularly concerned that Google's explosive success is placing too much power over (or perhaps responsibility for) the world's treasure-store of knowledge in the hands of one private company. His concerns are not without merit.

Vaidhyanathan is quick to admit that Google's success is based on the clear benefits that it has given the world. More than any other search engine, Google has "organized and made universally accessible the world's knowledge" and it has done so in a manner that has been comfortable and appealing to most internet users. It has also behaved more or less consistently with its informal motto: "Don't be evil." Having given Google its due, Vaidhyanathan describes practices that Google has adopted that raise important questions.

In general, Google's success depends on the "PageRank system" that they employ in displaying search results. Search results generally appear in descending order based on the number of pages that link to a page that is captured by Google's Web crawlers. This seemingly surrenders any editorial decision-making that Google might otherwise employ in displaying results and makes use of the decisions by a myriad anonymous Web designers to evaluate the merits of Web pages. There are, however, instances in which some filtering is employed by Google, most obviously is Google's willingness to consider blocking a site if they receive complaints about it.

More worrisome consequences of Google's practices stem from their standard practices. While the PageRank system will generally provide an effective quality screen, it also privileges mainstream sites. Popularity among Web designers will lead to a site appearing on Google's first page of results, which in turn will reinforce the popularity of the site. It is not easy for a new or unusual site to break onto the first page of results.

Vaidhyanathan also takes Google to task for their collaboration with the Chinese government in censoring search results. At first Google argued that providing censored information was better for democracy movements than providing no information at all; however, when Google's servers were hacked (presumably by the Chinese government) and information about Chinese dissidents and critics of the government were compromised, Google "pulled out of China." The pull out was less impressive than it appeared, though. Google simply offered its Mandarin-language search service through Hong Kong, and since all traffic between Hong Kong and China is censored by China, China continues to receive Google services, but they are censored by China and not Google directly.

Vaidyanathan also provides an very interesting exploration of the privacy issues that Google's practices raises. Two levels of concern can be identified here: first, Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individual internet users that conceivably could be used against the user. More broadly, though, Google's store of data about users could easily be used by whomever owns the information to understand the demographics of internet users in a manner that could be politically significant. It is already showing itself to be economically significant.

Perhaps Vaidyhanathan's most salient concern is Google's growing dominance in the digitization of our written (and graphic) cultural heritage and here he indicts our research libraries as complicit in a massive, historic act of privatization of a public good. The Google Books project has resulted in the digitization of nearly all of the out of copyright books at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Disregarding copyright concerns, Google has also digitized massive numbers of "orphan" works, i.e., books that are not out of copyright, but for which the copyright holder is unknown. This turns normal publishing practices on their head: instead of requiring permission before publication, Google sought to publish until permission was denied by individual copyright holders. While it is true that a massive digitizing project of the sort that Google seeks to undertake would be impossible any other way, their actions are a direct challenge to long-settle copyright law. These actions resulted in a now-famous law suit, that has pitted publishers and authors against Google. The parties to the dispute have been trying to come to a legally acceptable out of court settlement, but have thus far been unable to do so.

Vaidhyanathan appears less concerned about the integrity of the traditional copyright regime than he is about what he calls "public failure," or the failure of public institutions to take responsibility of preserving and making freely accessible the world's cultural heritage and this is certainly the most significant concern that Google's activities have raised. While it is true that Google has not prevented others from creating competing digital archives, the head start that they have gained makes competition highly unlikely. This means that the access to the world's cultural heritage is likely to be -- at least for the foreseeable future -- in the hands of a single private company, unless, of course, public institutions take up the challenge of digitizing the resources for which they ostensibly are responsible and this is Vaidhyanathan's call to action. He proposes a "Human Knowledge Project" on the order of the Human Genome project, where governments around the world allocate the resources necessary to create a cultural digital repository that will ensure that our patrimony remains a public good accessible to all.

The Googlization of Everything is not always the most well organized book. Despite improvements from a pre-publication version, the book continues to read too much like a series of related blog postings; however, by the final chapter, the overall concerns do become clear and seem well argued, though one would be hard pressed to point to how and exactly where the argument was made.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains / Nicholas Carr -- NY: W.W. Norton, 2010

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains is a thoughtful examination of how digital communication technology might inexorably be changing fundamental human mental capacities. His argument begins by noting that our brains are not like computer hardware with a fixed, physical configuration that changes only insofar as it naturally degrades. Instead, brain circuitry is part of a living, changing organism, that is reconfigured by use and disuse. This phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity,” is well established in the scientific literature.

Following Marshall MacLuhan’s thesis in Understanding Media, Carr argues that the medium that transmits information more profoundly affects our lived experience than the information content that it transmits. As cases in point, Car presents the changes that took place with the advent of typographical spaces between words, the printing press, and finally, the “electric media,” culminating in the internet.

Prior to the printing press, reading and writing was done by a tiny minority of people working as professional scribes. These people became practiced at the careful examination of texts that were written in scriptura continua, i.e., text written without spaces between words. Reading scriptura continua meant that reading was tantamount to solving a puzzle, accomplished by sounding aloud the letters to slowly form the coded message. Consequently, readers became practiced at the careful examination of individual characters and the translation of these symbols into sounds. The assimilation of the meaning was slow and interrupted.

With the advent of spaces between words, words could be quickly recognized as wholes, allowing a text to be read easily, quickly, and silently. According to Carr’s thesis, the shift from reading scriptura continua to reading text with spaces would have caused a significant reconfiguration of the brains of readers, activating and expanding new neurocircuits. It would have reduced certain basic mental capacities while it improved others. As reading became less difficult, readers experienced a state of mind Carr calls “deep reading,” in which readers could become completely engrossed in the content of the text. Reading became a meditative act. This also changed writing in that authors could assume that readers were “attentive” and “deeply engaged both intellectually and emotionally,” thus allowing more complex literary forms.

As the printing press expanded the universe of readers, more and more people developed the mental capacities for deep concentration and sustained attention. Deep reading fostered deeper thinking and the development of more complex mental schemas that foster long-term memory and understanding. With changes to brain circuitry, these capacities could be employed not only when reading, but during other activities.

Of course, all of this changed with the advent of what McLuhan called the “electric media,” which is becoming mature in the internet. This is Carr’s main concern. Unlike the deep reading fostered by books, the internet is fostering short, superficial bursts of reading and viewing. Its designers are seeking to constantly interrupt us and lure us to a new Web site where new content and advertisements can seize our attention briefly before moving us on to the next Web site. We find ourselves scanning information for interesting fragments and multi-tasking because we are lured out of one task before it is complete to begin another. We are not reading in the traditional sense, we are “power browsing.”

Proponents of this new form of information acquisition suggest that the wealth of information now available to us will allow us to make more and various connections between intellectual content and generate novel ideas, but Carr argues that while power browsing may be exhilarating, and may seem to be connecting us quickly to just the information we seek, the gains are ephemeral. Citing research on working memory and long-term memory, he notes that power browsing does not allow us the time to fix the information presented to our working memory in long-term memory. It is out of long-term memory that we construct our conceptual schema that allows us a deep understanding of the world. As a result, power browsing not only diminishes our capacity for sustained concentration, it undermines the sort of intelligence that has been promoted by the literary mind.

Carr's thesis is provocative, but he is at pains not to overstate it. Throughout The Shallows, Carr reminds us that the internet is not only impoverishing specific intellectual powers, it is improving others. For example, experienced Web surfers are able to quickly identify on a Web page the item or fragment of information that they seek. This ability to pick out what is critical in a cluttered visual field is a "bottom-up" brain mechanism that transfers to other contexts just as the "top-down" ability for sustained concentration translates across contexts. Nonetheless, Carr’s sympathies are clearly with deep reading.

Certainly, proponents of the internet will down play what is lost with the decline of deep reading and play up what is gained with the ascent of power browsing, but Carr’s warning is hard to ignore. Neuroplasticity makes our changing reading habits much more significant than one might originally think, and I expect that many people who already have developed the habit of deep reading will recognize the cognitive changes that Carr observes coming from working with electronic media, particularly the internet. Perhaps it is because the assessment of the value of this change is coming from a deep reader, but it certainly seems that something very valuable is being replaced with something terribly, terribly shallow.

It is also interesting to consider Carr's claims in the context of Jaron Lanier's recent book, You Are Not a Gadget (reviewed in this blog). Lanier warns that the internet is increasingly dehumanizing us by reducing us to fragmented content contributors to a vast network of computers. He warns that our very personhood is being reduced to what can be indexed in social networking metadata and presented by Web search engines. "You are not a gadget" is Lanier's rallying cry to resist this dehumanization. Unfortunately, if Carr is right about the restructuring of our brains, one might argue that the internet is, indeed, slowly, but inexorably, turning us into gadgets.

Merchants of Doubt / Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway -- N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, 2010

If I were to nominate a "Book of the Year," it would certainly be Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Their history of "how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming" is timely and important.

Meticulously researched, Merchants of Doubt traces the formation and development of a contrarian cabal of scientists. Funded by commercial interest groups, these scientists implemented a concerted strategy to discredit scientific research that might lead to the regulation of industry. In some instances, the effort led to the defamation of the scientists behind the research.

Four names stand out in the origins of the effort: Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, and Fred Singer. All were physicists who had worked on important defense projects during the Cold War and all were ardent anti-communists. Two of their early efforts to affect the public debate surrounding scientific conclusions were the defense of the tobacco industry and the defense of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

In the 1960s, Seitz led the effort (paid for by the tobacco industry) to sew doubt on the connection between tobacco and cancer, despite the industry's full knowledge that smoking caused cancer. This was done through the "Council for Tobacco Research," formerly the "Tobacco Industry Research Council," which had been renamed to avoid its obvious connection to the tobacco industry. Seitz was following the footsteps of C.C. Little whose work for the tobacco industry also attempted to sew doubt about the dangers of smoking. There is "no proof" served as the public relations mantra of the industry and it was lent credibility by a small number of scientists on their payroll. Eventually, they could delay public acceptance of the science no longer. Tobacco was regulated and the industry was convicted of racketeering.

Robert Jastrow lead the effort to promote the perception that a space-based anti-ballistic missile system would not only be possible, but would ensure the safety of the public, adopting the premise that a nuclear war was winnable. This effort pitted him against Carl Sagan whose research with four other scientists suggested that even a limited nuclear exchange would plunge the world into a "nuclear winter." Later research suggested that the consequences would not be a severe as Sagan et al. thought, but they would be sufficient to destroy global food production. So contrary to Jastrow's claims, a nuclear war could not be won. Nonetheless, Jastrow pressed his claims by creating the George C. Marshall Institute, with Fred Seitz as the founding chair. In the end, not only has it been accepted that a limited nuclear war would have dire consequences for the planet's ecosystem and vital global economy, but that the possibility of a workable space-based nuclear defense shield is a fantasy.

As the debate over the Strategic Defense Initiative wound down, one participant in the debate, William Nierenberg, co-founder of the Marshall Institute, was appointed by President Reagan to chair the Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, charged with reviewing the results of U.S.-Canadian research on acid rain. His panel included Fred Singer who was suggested to him by the White House. Nierenberg's panel recommended significant reductions in sulfur emissions to control acid rain; however, after showing the draft to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Nierenberg returned the report to the committee with changes that significantly reduced the level of confidence in the danger of sulfur emissions.

More amazingly, Fred Singer, charged with writing the final chapter, could not draft anything that the other eight members of the committee could accept. Still, Singer's chapter became an appendix that completely rejected the force of the Panel's report. To top it off, at the behest of the OSTP, Neirenberg attached -- without the consent of the committee -- an executive summary which belied the report's conclusions. These changes confused the public reception of the panel's conclusions, resulting in significant misunderstandings of the science of acid rain.

After leaving the Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, Fred Singer, supported by the Marshall Institute, began promoting a counter narrative to the science establishing the depletion of ozone by CFCs. He was joined in this by Fred Seitz and Patrick Michael, an agricultural climatologist who would later participate in casting doubt on the effects of green house gasses on the climate. The counter narrative to ozone depletion once again stressed the uncertainty of the science, despite the fact that the relationship had been firmly established among the experts in the field.

Beginning in 1998, Fred Seitz and, shortly after, Fred Singer took up the cause of discrediting the dangers of second hand smoke on behalf of the tobacco industry. In this effort, the tobacco industry's public relations firm APCO Associates formed The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition led by lobbyist Steven Milloy to help sway public opinion against the conclusions of the EPA which was warning of the dangers of second hand smoke. Milloy and TASSC coined the tag line "junk science" to smear whatever scientific conclusions (or scientists) were the target of their anti-environmentalist campaigns. This tag line is currently being used by Milloy to attack climate science.

By now the basic pattern of attack was well established: find any reason -- even assert demonstrable falsehoods -- to cast doubt on the scientific conclusions that might possibly call for commercial regulations, and make use of non-peer reviewed mass media channels to confuse public opinion.

By 1979, climate science was arriving at the conclusion that green house gasses are a significant threat to the planet's climate. Of all environmental threats, green house gases, particular CO2, strikes at the core of the world's industrial economy. So it is no surprise that the merchants of doubt would quickly turn there guns on climate science and its scientists. The first responses came from economists Tom Shelling and William Nordhaus, but other familiar actors soon joined the fray, particularly William Nierenberg.

In 1988, James Hansen's testimony to Congress asserting empirical evidence of climate change, raised the stakes, and the Marshall Institute responded, enlisting Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg. Singer joined the attack by publishing an article he purported to be co-authored by Roger Revelle, an eminent scientist who had warned the world of the threat of global warming. Singer's article suggested that Revelle had changed his mind about the certainty of global warming, but Revelle's family and closest friends denied that he had changed his mind. Singer appears to have taken advantage of an ailing (indeed dying) octogenarian to advance Singer's own political agenda. Also joining the global warming deniers was Patrick Michaels who previously had risked depleting the ozone by defending CFCs.

Perhaps the most amazing attack of the doubt merchants is a recent attack on Rachel Carson's indictment of DDT in her book Silent Spring. In this instance, the campaign appears to be generated by a number of libertarian think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Hoover Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Oreskes and Conway suggest that attacking Rachel Carson and the long settled debate about the dangers of DDT is a deeply strategic move. They write that if the deniers could effectively suggest that "Carson was wrong, then the shift in orientation [that Silent Spring inaugurated]might have been wrong, too. The contemporary environmental movement could be shown to have been based on a fallacy, and the need for government intervention in the marketplace would be refuted." Whether this is the deniers' intent or not, the campaign against Carson at very least shows the extent to which the merchants of doubt are willing to go to attack environmental science.

With the amazing advance of science and technology, our ability to affect the planet has been significantly increased. Understanding the consequences of those effects is critical to our survival, whether they are various carcinogens, ozone depletion, acid rain, or global warming. Oreskes and Conway have made an unimpeachable case that the ideological agenda of libertarian think tanks and lobbyists and their hired scientists is to discredit whatever scientific research supports regulation. This is a grave threat to the planet and to the quality of our life on it. Oreskes and Conway's expose of these machinations should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand current environmental debates.

Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming / James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore -- Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009

Two discussions are taking place regarding climate change: one among scientists and another among policy makers. The former is well-advanced and making progress daily. The latter seems mostly mired in conflict and confusion. James Hoggan's book Climate Cover-Up sheds light on why there is such a lack of progress in the policy discussion -- why there has been little progress toward adopting sensible public policies regarding climate change. With the perspective of a public relations professional with decades of experience, Hoggan identifies and describes several sophisticated public relations campaigns designed to block needed mitigation policies and stall the policy debate.

The great majority of climate scientists accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This should come as no surprise, since the mandate of the IPCC is to review and report on the conclusions drawn by the great majority of climate scientists. It is, of course, possible that the IPCC misunderstands -- and so is misreporting -- the state of knowledge among climate scientists, but the breadth and detail of the IPCC's review of the literature makes this unlikely.

Certainly, there is no comparable study that suggests something different from the IPCC's reports. Indeed, the only other literature review of this kind, conducted by Naomi Oreskes and published in Science (2004), confirms the IPCC's summation of the views of climate scientists. Broadly speaking, the scientific conclusions are that the planet is warming quickly, that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are the primary cause of this warming, and that we will face serious problems if we do not significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that we are pouring into the atmosphere.

In the face of this, governments around the world have done little. Some have made promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the promises of the most important emitters (the U.S. and China) are not legally binding ones. China's motives are easily understood: industrial development holds the promise of reducing the dire poverty of its citizens, but a more nuanced explanation is needed to account for the reluctance of the U.S. This is where Hoggan's Climate Cover-Up makes a valuable contribution. Hoggan explores the various public relations campaigns designed to confuse the issue and convince the lay public that doubt remains within the scientific community. With public confusion as a backdrop, lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry have been able to block needed governmental actions.

Hoggan's book is packed with revealing accounts of how lawyers, public relations professionals, writers, and libertarian think tank fellows have enlarged minor points of uncertainty, distorted the statements of scientists, and at times, propagated outright falsehoods about the climate. Their goal has not been to refute the scientific research, but to delay the day when the public widely accepts these conclusions and demands governmental action.

One early PR campaign was launched by the Western Fuels Association, a creation of the coal industry, using half a million dollars "to reposition global warming as theory (not fact)." This was done by testing and using advertising slogans selected for their persuasive effectiveness, not their scientific accuracy.

Another significant PR campaign had its origins in the Public Relations firm APCO Worldwide. Philip Morris hired APCO in the early 1990s to discredit the science connecting cigarettes to cancer. To do this APCO Worldwide created a foundation called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). Its stated purpose was to sew doubt among the public that cigarettes cause cancer. To disguise the connection between TASSC and Philip Morris, APCO diversified TASSC by finding other industries that would support TASSC. These included the fossil fuel industry.

But as the effort to protect Philip Morris from medical science became hopeless, APCO began using TASSC to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry against the emerging conclusions about global warming. The strategy was identical to their effort to save the cigarette industry: convince the public that there is no scientific agreement about climate change and/or that carbon emissions are not responsible for climate change.

A key technique of both the Western Fuels and the APCO campaigns was to amass the names of scientists who they said rejected the conclusions of the IPCC. Hoggan shows how these scientists often were either unqualified to critique the IPCC's reports or were not scientists at all. Frequently, the scientists appearing on these lists were unaware that they had been listed, and when told, they were indignant that their names are being used to advance views that they do not hold.

Hoggan's experience in the public relations industry enables him to reveal the techniques and tactics of many of the most prominent people and groups behind these and other PR campaigns designed to discredit the IPCC and key climate scientists. In Climate Cover-Up Hoggan clearly establishes the connections between the fossil fuels industry and think tanks that support what can only be called a disinformation campaign.

Most critical to the effort is the nexus of mostly libertarian think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Frasier Institute, the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, and the Hoover Institution; but foremost among these is the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

These organization do not employ climate scientists. Instead, they publish and re-publish the public relations materials, thereby creating an "echo chamber" that magnifies and reinforces the confusing message. Their writers serve as "expert sources" for conservative media, like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and Canada's National Post and Calgary Herald, along with other smaller market media, and sometimes in more liberal national media.

The careful exploitation of media is critical. The APCO campaign specifically targeted smaller market media outlets, on the assumption that their message would be more readily received and disseminated. While the markets are small, they are numerous, and collectively, they are large enough to sew sufficient doubt in the public mind to delay mitigation policies. Hoggan is particularly disdainful of the credulousness and/or complicity of media outlets, when the evidence for climate change and the poor credentials of the skeptics are so readily available.

Another tactic is to file law suits against anyone criticizing the actions of the spokespersons of the public relations campaign, regardless of the merits of the suit. In such cases, defendants are often unable to afford to defend themselves and agree to retract their criticisms. In this way, the plaintiff can effectively silence their critics without actually refuting the criticism. Hoggan describes three such cases, but cautions the reader that he can not be certain of the motives of the plaintiffs.

None of this is very surprising. It would be surprising, instead, if powerful industries with a large stake in climate change mitigation policies would stand back and allow public policy to be fashioned in a manner that harmed their interests, particularly when they have in-house public relations departments paid to address just such threats to their profitability. That climate science is demonstrating the links between carbon emissions and our rapidly warming climate only means that the fossil fuel industries must confuse the issue as long as possible to protect their interests, just as the tobacco industry did years ago. It's up to us to see through this and to insist upon public policies that will protect us from the economic, social, political, and environmental catastrophes that are unfolding.

Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media / Robert McChesney

In Communication Revolution, McChesney argues that we are at a "critical juncture" in the history of communication, i.e., a time in which the conditions for the shape and development of a new global communication regime are being determined. McChesney encourages his fellow professors and students in the field of communication to abandon their isolation in academic scholarship and actively interweave the pressing issues of communication policy planning into their research. In particular, he encourages academics to become aware of and involved in the new movement for media reform that he detects building since 2003.Overall, the work is persuasive. It also provides the reader with a wealth of bibliographic citations for anyone interested in the political economy of communication. Sadly, the citations are buried in the endnotes and not organized in a convenient bibliography.