Goliath swallows Leviathan

...All the contributors-the book began as a lecture series at New York University in 1996-are established media mavens, and their conclusions about the cultural effect of mergermania are, generally, glum...

...Never mind that Clio, the Muse of history, doesn't really pay much mind to our highly arbitrary cal-endrical reckonings...

...The saner essays here make the important point that the moguls of the megacon-glomerates-the Medici popes of the New Age-have no more idea where things are going than the rest of us do- and are just as, if not more, jittery about it...

...not the end of Revelation but the end of Pope's Dunciad, where universal dullness covers all...

...That's the key sentence of this collection...

...News is the only constitutionally protected product in America," writes essayist Barnouw...

...Thirty years ago, Marshall McLuhan told us that the growth of electronic media would eventually make the world a "global village": smarmy and homey-unless the village is named Salem...

...But no picture-properly painted- is unrelievedly bleak...

...Not that Conglomerates is "about" the millennium in any explicit way: In fact I'm not sure the word even appears in its pages...

...Who monopolized Time Life and Fortune...

...The bad news is that experience is, increasingly, something sold to you: and sold in an ever-smaller store of wares...

...But if there really is a potentially massive transformation of life pressing on us here at the turn of the century, it's got to be the current explosion, proliferation, and interrelation of information technologies, from the printed book through the compact disc and the TV sitcom to the Internet, that seem to be changing our conception of "reality" (as Nabokov says, the only word that should always be enclosed in quotes) altogether...

...None of the fine media critics in Conglomerates plays with these now-permanent metaphors for the infotech universe...

...The millennial Big Thing, that is, may turn out to be the apocalypse of the bland: not the global village, but the global mall...

...of Apple by Microsoft-which happened after this book was put together-does not bode altogether cheerful...

...and, at another (not higher) level, the recent elaborate academic debate about whether or not we are living through "The End of History...

...The very existence of this book qualifies, though it does not belie, its main thrust.ts main thrust...

...asked William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch (1958...

...General Electric owns NBC, CBS belongs to Westing-house, Warner owns Time-everybody, in short, is in bed with everybody...

...News matters, though today, it is treated as just another commodity...

...And twenty years later we had-or you did, if you own a personal computer-the "worldwide web," where everybody can talk to everybody: splendid, except that a web can be, if produced by an artisan, creative, but if by a spider, a trap...

...We want her to, and I'm not sure whether completely resisting that visionary tug is the sign of a resolute mind or a dull one...

...It's also the context in which to read the fascinating, feisty collection of essays, Conglomerates and the Media, by Erik Barnouw and others (The New Press, $23, 208 pp...

...so what kind of global village-what Gates's heavenis this one leading to...

...They're smarter, and focused on the troubling question of what happens to "reality" when "reality" is both defined by its transmission by the media and determined by an ever-smaller number of massive, transnational culture trusts...

...The good news is that after ABC and Newsweek tell you Disney's latest film is fun, you'll see it, enjoy it, and when you take the kids to Burger King you'll get a "Pocahontas" Pepsi cup-free...

...Sounds conspiratorial and apocalyptic, doesn't it...

...Synergy" means this: Disney now owns ABC and ABC owns a number of major publishing companies and the Washington Post and the Post corporation runs Newsweek, but is itself-somewhere up or down the line-linked with bigger publishing trusts and fast-food empires, and so on into the Mandelbrot Set of infinitely finer-tuned self-recapitulations...

...Corporate apparatchiks love the word "synergy," for the profitable blending of infotech delivery systems...

...No surprise: The absolute and global commodification of information can't help but trivialize information as pure commodity...

...even Adam Smith, Barnouw reminds us, warned against a "government of merchants...

...Nor is ABC the only case...

...No one who has watched the swift decline of TV news will quarrel: for example, the Today show, since Bryant Gumbel's departure, has largely degenerated into a happytalk puppet show, which doesn't even bother anymore to run a news summary at the top of its last half-hour...

...That tug helps explain the sad ecstasy of the Hale-Boppers of the Heaven's Gate cult...

...And is that transformation of consciousness-the mediazation of the planet-a good thing or bad...

...And it's all true: not a Burroughs or Pynchon fantasy but traceable in Variety and the Wall Street Journal alike...

...And then Bill Gates announced the apocalyptic coming of the information superhighway: but the point of getting on a highway is that you know where it's going...

...Periods of great conformity produce high-octane reactions: Neronian Rome gave us Rome's greatest satirists, the Eisenhower fifties gave us Elvis and Burroughs, and the present slough has given us, besides much else, Conglomerates and the Media, written by a bunch of smart, antiestablishment folk and published by a press that is most definitely not con-glomeratized...

...Ditto Hollywood, where the motivation for the next overhyped blockbuster is patently not so much to make a good film as to use the film to pimp for the spinoff theme-park rides and tchotchkes on sale at Wal-Mart and Jack in the Box-not to mention the comic books, novelizations, und so weiter...

...Clio keeps reminding us that she disdains melodrama as much as she does calendars...

...Conglomerates is a collection of eight essays about the implications of this media-multiplexing in such areas as TV news, newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, and telecommunications...

...So far the Internet seems exempt from the mergermania, although the recent bailout (and swallowing...