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We hear that the daily press is a dead man walking. Meanwhile, Levenson and his hungry advocates are seeking to strangle the press further with lordly self-regulation and added threats. What is quite extraordinary is that it was the much maligned press (often rightly maligned) that brought the whole phone-hacking scandal into the public domain.
While we focus our hate-mouse on the press industry, the aggressive cyber industry rides roughshod. The sheer power and increasingly ideological authority of the internet owners has transformed the communication business. The dominant power held by US corporations constitutes a fierce cyber-hegemony over a vital resource.
I would suggest that the near monopoly power of cyberspace technologies gives Washington as much global cultural power as their combined defence industry and military. This cyber power comes embedded with ideological assumptions in a near global dominance.
So what do we find in cyberspace? Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Intel, Logitech, Mac, MacAfee, Memorex, Microsoft, Netflix, Netscape, Oracle, PayPal, San Disk, Skype, Stumble-upon, Symantec, TiVo, Yahoo, Youtube et al.
I have little understanding of the economic wealth tied up in that list of powerful players, but the sheer enormity of the potential to shape and manipulate not just global communications but global consciousness is almost overwhelming. The power to collect, collate and store the ideas expressed by millions of individuals and to use that information for political, economic, military and financial intelligence is frightening.
It needs a Chomsky to attempt to pursue the implications of this threat to global popular democracy. SR and its readers might help.
Thom Cross
Archaeology is archaeology. It is a pure, untainted and somewhat naively innocent profession that transcends both local and international borders and boundaries.
Archaeology is a calculated hole in the ground comprised of little more than ancient rubbish from which our past invariably gains both meaning and historic significance. From such pits and the detritus therein we gain an increasing understanding of who we were, what we were about and how we have ultimately transitioned to who we are now, irrespective of where in the world we might live.
Scots place great emphasis upon their unique identity and heritage with unabashed pride, yet seemingly are quite happy to allow those responsible for protecting such potentially irreplaceable pages of immediate prehistory to allow it to be bulldozed into oblivion at Dunragit (14 February).
Bob Rosamond
The news released through the weekly independent online news and information source, the Aberdeen Voice, that the current editor of the Aberdeen Press & Journal, Damian Bates, wed the vice-president of Trump International Golf Links Scotland, Sarah Malone, may not come as a shock to some but what will be a source of surprise is that this would appear to have been ignored by both the Press & Journal and its sister paper the Aberdeen Evening Express. You would have thought that the marriage of one of their editors to a high profile Trump Organisation spokeswoman would have merited an editorial paragraph or two. At the time of writing I have seen no editorial on this matter in either publication.
Robert Smith
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