The New Feudalism
I have come to realize that our society has become increasingly feudalistic. More and more content is owned by fewer and fewer corporations. The best example would be the big five of AOL/Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, Clear Channel, and Disney. These corporations own most of the cable channels, many local channels around the country and most of the radio stations. When we the consumers want to get information it can usually be traced back to one of these companies. I recently found out that most of the billboards in the area I live are owned by Clear Channel or Viacom. Why is that? If some one wants to put an ad on a billboard, most likely the ad will have to adhere to Clear Channel or Viacom’s standards.
A personal gripe of mine concerns NBC Universal which used to be two separate companies and now is owned by General Electric, if that makes any sense. My point is that NBC Universal bought the SciFi Channel. The SciFi Channel was an awesome channel just a few years ago before they were bought. The channel had many shows that most people are unaware of, like Farscape and Lexx and they showed classic sci-fi movies like Forbidden Planet (that is where I first saw it). There programming was very good, until they were bought by NBC/U. Yesterday the SciFi Channel showed Law and Order: SVU. WHAT!? The reason of course was that Law and Order is shown on NBC and instead of coming up with original programming they showed Law and Order reruns. I would no longer watch SciFi if it wasn’t for Battlestar Galactica.
These are just a few examples of what we, the consumers, have to put up with when there is very little competition and we are given only what is allowed by those who have the content. Thank god for the Internet. The Internet allows us to express ourselves quickly and efficiently. It also allows us to get to the filtered content that the corporations will not allow access to.