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Herbert Schiller to speak on

"The American Information Position in the Post Gulf War Period"

April 2, 10 Evans Hall, UC-Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m.

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Dr. Herbert Schiller, author of several books on communication,
the information society and the media, will speak in Berkeley on
April 2 on "The American Information Position in the Post Gulf War
Period." Dr. Schiller's talk is sponsored by Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility (Berkeley Chapter), the
Bay Area Progressive Library and Information Workers, the
DataCenter, and the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California - Berkeley.

Dr. Schiller is Professor Emeritus of Communications at the
University of California - San Diego. He has written and spoken
extensively on the growing monopolization of information and the
media, and its threat to democracy.

"We are witnessing an ever greater concentration of the mass media
and in the activities related to culture," Dr. Schiller said in a
recent interview. "It's increasingly difficult for independent
voices to be heard. The best example is the Gulf war, which has
been a monumental totalization of one point of view. At the time
when the most important decisions were being made, no independent
voices were heard. It's not that there weren't any such voices,
but rather that they didn't find channels to be heard."

Dr. Schiller has also warned of the dangerous shift from
information as a public resource to information as a private
commodity. In a recent article, Dr. Schiller wrote "As the idea of
information as a good for sale, a commodity, advances, the idea of
information as a social good, the cornerstone of democratic life
recedes." We face, he argues, "a society in which commercial goals
are achieved efficiently with electronic technology, but in the
process, free access to information as a social commitment goes by
the wayside. Only data that has commercial value will be collected
and retrieved. Democratic participation in government, founded on
the right to know and the availability of information, will
wither."

Dr. Schiller is the author of several books, including _Culture,
Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Pubic Expression_ (Oxford, 1989),
_Information and the Crisis Economy_ (Oxford, 1986), and _Who
Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500_ (Ablex, 1983).

The talk is open to the public, and is free.