Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA15268 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 12 Feb 2002 17:07:54 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3102A6D249@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: ply to Grant Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 16:59:13 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Filter-Info: UoS MailScan 0.1 [D 1] Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
<You could also look at it as relocating the work to a new place.
The people in that area are employed, too. We (you and I) are not just
talking about job loss here. If someone else is able to do the job more
cheaply and
> efficiently, why not give it to him/her instead? Do you want to freeze
> everyone into the jobs they now hold? That should bring the evolution of
> manufacturing and production to a screeching halt.>
>
Outsourcing means reducing costs- how are costs most easily reduced?
By the reduction of labour costs, if you can eliminate workers altogether
then even better (as in robot production lines for cars and other goods).
The problem is that corporations don't care, and they aren't designed to
care, what happens to all those people who are either a) forced out of work
completely, or b) forced to do the same job they did before, but for much
lower wages under a different company.
<I notice you seem to look at every social change in a negative
light.
> Comparing outsourcing with collateral damage by a military organization,
> for example. That's what I call hyperbolic propaganda. The times they
> are
> achangin'. Better get used to it.>
>
There's a difference between viewing social change critically, which
is an essential requirement to properly evaluate change, and viewing it
negatively (or positively for that matter). Besides, as a lecturer in media
studies, for me to argue against social change involving technology would be
a bit rich. Indeed, as my anti-media effects stance should indicate, I'm
particularly pro-technologies that, IMHO, are socially progressive and not
harmful as many people have thought (and still think) about all media forms.
I, of couse, think the media collectively are a pretty good set of
techologies.
In many ways, I'd call myself a bit of a futurist looking forward to
those changes, and this for me is the key, that are in the public interest.
The facts though suggest that corporate control of key features of
contemporary life, such as in transportation, involves the deliberate and
continual denial of technologies (cleaner running cars for example) because
such technologies would kill those corporations.
In media too, the myth of the 'free marketplace of ideas' is widely
demonstrable. Only today I've been reading bits of Richard McCord's 'The
Chain Gang' about Gannett, the US's largest newspaper chain (over 90 dailies
across the US, and which also owns Newsquest in the UK, which controls 300
local papers), and how the company aggressively attempted, sometimes
successfully, to put rival papers out of business leaving communities with a
'marketplace' of one paper.
Of course capitalism is an ideology, and ideology is one for the
memes in minds fraternity.
Vincent
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