The Knowledge of Culture and the Culture of Knowledge

Implications for Theory, Policy and Practice

E. Carayannis, A. Pirzadeh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349521333, 9781403942432
• eBook ISBN: 9781137383525
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The Knowledge of Culture and the Culture of Knowledge explores the construct of information and information culture and its relationship to the prevailing culture. The author provides an analysis of the relationship of media to the core constructs in the book by explaining why they have been put together to form one single idea.

1

Introduction

Culture dictates our conduct based on the value system that it promotes. Culture makes us who we are and has a direct impact on how we behave because it defines, promotes and values conducts which we are all keen to pursue. The marks of today’s prevailing culture should be viewed as an unprecedented threat faced by mankind because of the structured persuasion tools innate to the system that create limitless possibilities of realities that enable man to reject traditions and move from one vanguard to another in pursuit of something that is not real.

The current cultural trend promotes the notion of individualism and free will that is manifested into self-interest, and self-gratification. It creates a standardized set of values and beliefs activities that inherently drive the society towards desired objectives. Under these circumstances, the adverse effect of alternative behavior should not be considered a cause of malfunction in society. We argue that today prevailing culture should be viewed as taking the individual away from the collective sense of belonging to a community. On the one side this creates an anomic state of public mind and on the other side it creates fragmented communities that lead to disintegrated service of government and decision-making.

In this book, Culture of Information refers to a cultural structure composed of institutional settings and organizations that drive people to consume and produce information rather than being informed consumers and producers. Culture of Information is a mass culture produced from information dissemination via broadcasting.

Information Culture is a culture in which information and knowledge are the crucial variables of the society. Since there is no limit to accessing information, it becomes a kind of open-ended culture where advancements in technology can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people and transforms folks into individuals that are likely to live in a virtual world, and hence not to get too closely acquainted with the reality of their surroundings. Thus, wiring people through information is an effective way of regulating the social potential of brainpower. Furthermore, we argue that this Information Culture can be seen as as the multi-layered, multi-modal, multi-nodal and multi-faceted nature of the phenomenon of ‘KID Culture’ (Knowledge, Information and Data Culture, hereafter Information Culture) with a spectrum of a more ‘Enlightented Culture’ (EC) to a ‘Culture of Commercialism’ (CC). Between the EC and CC there is an array of nuances and impacts from the Information Culture, spanning a frontier of potential combinations of information, misinformation and disinformation that is enabling true learning in the first case, promoting misunderstanding, disorientation and confusion in the second and suppressing learning and progress in the third and more extreme case.

Thus, our argument in this book is two-fold. On the one hand, the difference in today’s prevailing culture is that the mass media and mainstream print can perform the function of bringing different individual meanings into agreement. On the other hand, I claim that, in the prevailing culture, mass media enabled by emerging technologies are used to construct people’s reality and function as the source of information, or rather as the disinforming conduit for the public.

In this way, it resembles a Culture of Dependency, which refers to a system of social welfare that encourages people to stay on benefits rather than in work. In a very simplistic and powerful approach to the social construction of reality, one can suggest that individual perception of reality is that which mass media both exhibit and convey through their narratives. Drawing directly from the assumptions of social construction of reality, others have also arrived at a similar conclusion. Most notably among them are: Bandura’s Social Learning Theory¹ which suggests how mass media consumers can learn desired societal actions; Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory² that demonstrates how people align their view of the world with those presented in the media; and finally, McCombs and Shaw who introduced the concept of Agenda Setting³ and present the notion of how the media dictate the importance of issues and events to the public.

Within this prevailing Information Culture, information is a medium with a message like light bulbs flashing messages that create and retain meaning: ‘The ‘object’ of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse’. Thus, such a medium can be turned into cognitive influence strategies that involve actors (e.g., the press baron⁴ Murdoch) embedded in a network of economic, political and social relationships who seek to alter the preferences, beliefs or perceptions of the public to secure a favorable outlook and collective decisions that alter (shift) opinions toward desired ends. This claim does not insinuate fictitious or conspiratorial ideation of a sort (a belief system), but rather considers the obvious, in which the interrelations of the state and corporate capitalism, and the ideological networking and processing, are given.⁵ The latter term is delineated further by the thesis put forth by William Domhoff in The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America, where he states: ‘The ideology process consists of the numerous methods through which members of the power elite attempt to shape the beliefs, attitudes and opinions of the underlying population.... Free and open discussion are claimed to be the hallmarks of the process, but past experience shows that its leaders will utilize deceit and violence in order to combat individuals and organizations which espouse attitudes and opinions that threaten the power and privileges of the ruling class.... The ideology process is necessary because public opinion does not naturally and automatically agree with the opinions of the power elite.’⁶

One major function of information culture in the prevailing new era is the disinformation campaign that solely intends to educate the public through untrue narratives and by doing so conceals facts. In this context, we argue that mass news media are main vehicles to achieve this objective to the extent that fictional and pseudo-facts (either in visual, i.e., broadcast news, or narrative, i.e., analyses, forms) are regularly presented as truthful information and facts. In doing so, they have also ingrained certain perceptions and cultural values and norms, which have significantly contributed to the current state of affairs.

Some may believe that these issues are all part of philosophical debates in which facts in the discourse of one group or era are accepted as valid, but in other times and conversations are not so received. Or as Mills puts it, ‘That which was long meditated upon is now brushed aside as illogical’.⁷ Others may perhaps think of them as part of our political and economic evolutionary path in a sense that the rules of governance and control have changed as we move into a post-industrial society, a shift, if you like, from the second to the third way in the words of Toffler. In both cases, however, my contention is utterly different in the sense that these developments are viewed as part of the grand scheme of things that are not conspiratorial but intend to legitimize the dire consequences of the prevailing global economic system and hence delegitimize, redirect and trivialize rapidly rising discontents and dissents. This is not an unfamiliar or peculiar observation but rather a well-known function that has been recognized both as a matter of practice and in relevant literature.

In the content of the present book, the first relevant works set forth early in the twentieth century by the influential American journalist Walter Lippmann, who had the audacity to point out the elephant in the room, in which most people either had no interest, or they pursued the tacit political etiquette and simply ignored the matter. Lippmann claimed that the manufacture of consent was both necessary and favorable, predominantly because of, in his view, ‘the common interest’. Lippmann postulated that the common good ought to be managed by a small, specialized class, which by definition resembles the notion of management by the politburo of a Communist party. Lippmann further recommended that the role of the electorate, or in his words ‘bewildered herd’, be restricted to that of ‘the voice of interested spectators of action’.

Later, in 1947, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, published an article titled ‘The Engineering of Consent’ in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and put forward a similar argument, declaring that the interests of democracy are particularly well served by the utlization of communication channels and tried practices during WWII in the engineering of consent. Bernays boldly observed, ‘Leaders may be the spokesmen for many different points of view. They may direct the activities of major organized groups such as industry, labor, or units of government. They may compete with one another in battles for public good will; or they may, representing divisions within the larger units, compete amongst themselves. Such leaders, with the aid of technicians in the field who have specialized in utilizing the channels of communication, have been able to accomplish purposefully and scientifically what we have termed the engineering of consent. This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach – that is action that is based only on comprehensive knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs. Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal. We expect our elected government officals to try to engineer our consent – through the network of communications open to them – for the measures they propose.’⁸ He then concluded his work with the following: ‘When the public is convinced of the soundness of an idea, it will proceed to action. People translate an idea into action suggested by the idea itself, whether it is ideological, political, or social. They may adopt a philosophy that stresses racial and religious tolerance; they may vote a New Deal into office; or they may organize a consumers’ buying strike. But such results do not just happen. In a democracy, they can be accomplished principally by the engineering of consent.’⁹

Further, Bernays accurately laid out the design of cultural planning under which, we argue, we now live when he claimed, ‘if we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will, without them knowing it.’¹⁰ In this regard, the notion of engineering of consent is the mere manifestation of an organizing manipulation in which ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our idea suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.’¹¹ If we pause for a moment and consider generously the classic public understanding of democratic theory, one would easily recognize the true nature of Bernays’ observation in the spirit in which Rousseau once cried, ‘Opinion, Queen of the World, is the subject to the power of kings; they are themselves its first slaves.’

Supported by Freud’s theories on the perception of the human mind,¹² the notion that the mass media dominate public and cognitive discourse was endorsed by many to the extent that after World War II social scientists labeled this view ’the hypodermic model – using the metaphor of a hypodermic needle injecting its ideas into the blood stream of a trusting public.’¹³ McQuail and Windal shared this sentiment when they referred to today’s world as an information society with increased inclinations towards supply and consumption of information.¹⁴ This notion of the information society together with the social construction of reality leads to the conclusion that if one does attain disseminated information, he or she does not know reality. This is quite reflective of Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s media system dependency theory, which, in this case, suggests how individuals are dependent on the media to capture reality.¹⁵ Most recently, Lydia Liu viewed consumers of information as mere reflections of Freudian robots in the ‘postphonetic system’ where languages no longer signify the medium of communication, but rather encode a measurable quantity of information according to a mathematical theory of communication.¹⁶ In this light, content and meaning are irrelevant parts of communication in the prevaling culture, as we will show later.

These developments bring back Orwell’s notion of doublethink (or newspeak) in a sense that what has been disseminated as informative narratives is nothing more than a twisting, turning, darkened tunnel from which there is no light to help guide your way.¹⁷ Comparisons have also been made between Orwell’s descriptions and the concept of doublespeak (based on Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language) in which ‘unscrupulous politicians, advertisers, religionists, and other employers of doublespeak of whatever stripe continue to abuse language for manipulative purposes.’¹⁸ In this connection, Edward Herman has highlighted some examples of doublespeak and doublethink in the present day culture. In his book, Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman observed, ‘It was part of the genius of President Ronald Reagan that he was able to internalize and truly believe anything that served his purpose. Others master the art of apparent sincerity in telling lies. But disputes over sincerity are essentially a red herring. Sincerity is an unmeasurable quality, and lies quickly become internalized truths when they are convenient and consistent with common belief. What is really important in the construction of a world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.’¹⁹ In recent years, the exercise of these abilities by the media made it acceptable to invade a sovereign nation of Iraq twice, subsidizing the losses incurred through speculations by conglomerate financial institutions and investment banks at astronomical cost, and imposing the harshest austerity programs in Europe in recent memory.²⁰ Indeed, the mass media, labeled by Alvin Toffler as image-makers,²¹ have enjoyed unprecedented domination over the prevailing culture in the sense that they set agendas by d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Boxes
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Today’s Prevailing Culture
• 3 Information Culture
• 4 Culture of Mass Society
• 5 Prevailing Culture and Narratives for Constructing Reality: Case Study of Economic Crisis
• Conclusions
• Notes and References
• Index