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The Role of the Media "Although this is a free society, the U.S. mainstream media often serve as virtual propaganda agents of the state, peddling viewpoints the state wishes to inculcate and marginalizing any alternative perspectives. This is especially true in times of war, when the wave of patriotic frenzy encouraged by the war-makers quickly engulfs the media. Under these conditions the media's capacity for dispassionate reporting and critical analysis is suspended, and they quickly become cheer-leaders and apologists for war." (words as propaganda, by The mass-media would have a possibility to get out of this circle of being disinformed and making others disinformed. To admit that oneself is not always informed correctly, and also mention that the pictures shown are not in any case suitable to the text, as some of them are older, or even from another battle. For the media it would be easy to talk about the own disinformation in public. Doing this would provoke the government or in the case of the |
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The Right to get Disinformed Disinformation might also be welcome: While the ones criticize disinformation and try to fight against it, others do nothing against it. And others again seem to enjoy getting disinformed. How this works? It is the result of a society that does no longer want to live under the pressure of doing and hearing everything at the same time. Acceleration of life seems too fast. The only way to get out is to refuse certain things/messages/truths. Receiving disinformation can be more comfortable than getting so-called correct information. This is especially true for the readers of the yellow press. The yellow press lives on that perspective, the commodity of getting light news, mostly wrong news and lies - but those being wrapped up in nice pictures and stories about those who seem to reign the world. The aim is the escape out of reality. A surplus of information, information terror, can produce disinformation. The profusion can get exploited for disinformation. This works in that way that in the mass of information the individual has no possibility to get an overview of the different ways of thinking and to reach a stage of objective knowledge. |
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New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century) As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side. Two ways existed: a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral. b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs. Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. |
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The Gulf War By the end of our century a new method of disinformation is gaining importance: disinformation by an overflow of information. In the Gulf War, similar to the Vietnam War, journalists had little chance to report neutrally and correctly from the battlefields. Many times they staid in places far from the actual fightings - due to censorship. In many ways the so-called video-war reminded of a series of commercials. No wonder, the Gulf War was the first war to have a commercial advertisement agency to do the war-propaganda for the USA. They worked hard in preventing the government from a destiny like the one of the Vietnam War, when the war most of all was lost in the American homes because of anti-war propaganda. In an interview, And this is true for both sides: the baby milk plant: Western bombs had destroyed a chemical weapon factory - that's what they claimed. ( the life guard: In December 1990, the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur published the story of Karim Abdallah al-Jabouri, Saddam Hussein's Life Guard who had fled from Iraq right after Iraq's invasion in Kuwait. Soon afterwards he was in a French TV-show, where he told atrocity stories about the baby-incubator-story of Najirah On the 10th of October 1991 a young refugee, called Najirah, from Kuwait spoke in front of the U.S.-congress. With a lot of tears she told that she had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital, when Iraqi soldiers came in, tore the babies out of the incubators and let them die on the floor. The pictures of this declaration went around the world and were one of the reasons why the U.S.-population wanted an intervention. In 1992 the journalist R. MacArthur was able to proof that the presented witness had been the daughter of the Kuwait-ambassador in the USA and that she had not been in that hospital or in Kuwait at the mentioned time. By then the war was over and the manipulation of the population had taken place long ago. For reading about the U.S.-propaganda tools during that war, like surrender passes, balloons, fake banknotes, threats and many more visit: |
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Fiber-optic cable networks Fiber-optic cable networks may become the dominant method for high-speed Internet connections. Since the first fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1988, the demand for faster Internet connections is growing, fuelled by the growing network traffic, partly due to increasing implementation of corporate networks spanning the globe and to the use of graphics-heavy contents on the Fiber-optic cables have not much more in common with copper wires than the capacity to transmit information. As copper wires, they can be terrestrial and submarine connections, but they allow much higher transmission rates. Copper wires allow 32 telephone calls at the same time, but fiber-optic cable can carry 40,000 calls at the same time. A capacity, Copper wires will not come out of use in the foreseeable future because of technologies as For technical information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on telecommunication cables, click An entertaining report of the laying of the FLAG submarine cable, up to now the longest fiber-optic cable on earth, including detailed background information on the cable industry and its history, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired: Mother Earth Mother Board. Click Susan Dumett has written a short history of undersea cables for Pretext magazine, Evolution of a Wired World. Click A timeline history of submarine cables and a detailed list of seemingly all submarine cables of the world, operational, planned and out of service, can be found on the Web site of the For maps of fiber-optic cable networks see the website of |
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Technological measures As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related |
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Augustus Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD) was adopted by |
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George Boole b. Nov. 2, 1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England d. Dec. 8, 1864, Ballintemple, County Cork, Ireland English mathematician who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is basic to the design of digital computer circuits. One of the first Englishmen to write on logic, Boole pointed out the analogy between the algebraic symbols and those that can represent logical forms and syllogisms, showing how the symbols of quantity can be separated from those of operation. With Boole in 1847 and 1854 began the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra. It is basically two-valued in that it involves a subdivision of objects into separate classes, each with a given property. Different classes can then be treated as to the presence or absence of the same property. |
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