ABSTRACT
The new information order is messing with governments', political parties', and corporations' longstanding domination of mass communications, honed and refined in the last century to control and mediate the printed word and traditional broadcast media. In the past year, the U.S. State Department critiqued the Chinese government for its censorship of web engines, arguing that freedom of (Google) access to information was a democratic right. Yet several months later, they declared the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables a threat to national and geopolitical security. More recently, the new media have been used as a means for the dissent and revolution in the Middle East, with several governments attempting to shut down instant messaging and social networking, while maintaining longstanding control over traditional print and video reporting. This is, no doubt, occupying the time of U.S. government employees in Langley, Virginia—it has led to a growth in the work of censors and monitors in Singapore, Egypt, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. At the same time, their counterparts at media and technology corporations Google, Newscorp, Microsoft, Thomson-Reuters, Twitter, and Facebook are conceptualizing and developing strategies and tech-nologies for maintaining the profiles of their brands, their influence, profits, and market share in response to dynamic new contexts of use and regulation.
