填空题

Without exaggeration, all products and services -- explicitly "cultural" or not -- may be described as "spectacle-commodities". Indeed, a certain "cultural" luster now serves as the indispensable packaging for every commodity, as a general gloss on the rationality and intelligence of the capitalist system as a whole, and as the chief product of that system.
1. ______
Wars, riots, law enforcement, criminal justice, elections, political scandals, investigative journalism, expert opinion of all stripes, predictions and forecasts, and news, traffic and weather reports (to name just a few) are produced, distributed and consumed as entertainment products. Even commercial advertisements for products are produced to be consumed as entertainment, as integrated "info-tainment".
The spectacular integration that produces "info-tainment" presupposes that both entertainment and information are capable of and are now being created with the needs of the marketplace "in mind". Information -- without regard for its subject matter -- must be as easily conceived and comprehended as a bar of soap or any other commodity, and it must contain or lead to nothing harmful to the logic or regime of the commodity. Data must be narrowly re-cast as "information" and strictly defined as a source of value and a form of merchandise before it can be integrated into "info-tainment".
2. ______
Data can only circulate productively after it has been "raised up" (or abstracted) to the level of the objective and the universal. When the process of abstraction works according to the "logic" of the commodity -- that is, when the process isolates what it produces from its context, its past, its original intentions, and its consequences -- the end result can only be irrational.
3. ______
But because "raised up" data remains knowledge about particulars, it is also essentially totalitarian: information as commodity is the imposition of a fragmentary vision on the totality of social practice. Therefore, there is nothing "objective" or "universal" about information at all, except for its relationship to power, which is absolute.
4. ______
An example: the rhyme of the neologism "edutainment" (presumably a shortening of the phrase educational entertainment) with "infotainment" suggests that integrated edutainment is "education for the Information Age" and that "infotainment" can’t be so bad because it can mutate into something called "edutainment". Literally speaking, edutainment is unthinkable without infotainment, which is its role model. Industry has long regarded the school systems (the main repositories and sources of popular knowledge) as an important potential entrance point into the minds of children and, thus, into the minds and pocketbooks of parents.
But advertising has wisely been forbidden in textbooks and on school grounds, thus depriving the marketing specialists of the beach-head needed for their invasion, so to speak. And so they have had to produce "informative" videotapes specially designed for use in the classroom, produced by the likes of the Cartoon Channel, the Discovery Channel, CNN in the Classroom, and Turner Broadcasting Systems. The degree of the commodity’s colonisations of edutainment generally can be gauged by the title of TBS’s very popular edutainment tape, Just Yabba-Dabba-Doo It.t, which plays on both Fred Flintstone’s cry of falsified happiness and the command-slogan of the Nike Corporation (itself a recuperation of the Yippies’ slogan "Do it!"). Such integrated works may indeed be the "effective teaching tools" that their sellers proclaim them to be, but it seems clear that what they teach is how to be a good "citizen-consumer" of the reigning spectacle.
5. ______
These are an ominous developments -- "commercialization" and "privatization" are taking place in an increasing number of important municipal entities and functions, such as sanitation, security, correctional institutions and park maintenance -- but especially because of the conditions in which all of the other libraries, archives and museums are now forced to operate.
A The interest of a neologism like "infotainment" (which is applied to a lot more these days than just half-hour-long commercials) is that, like a spectacle-commodity, it is as easily conceived and comprehended as a bar of soap: its meaning -- such as it is -- is immediately clear to a broad range of people. Though essentially it is an empty phrase, "infotainment" grows more valuable as an object of exchange the more the term can be filled with references to other easily-comprehended spectacles.
B For this to have happened, all of culture must first have been stabilized, homogenized and integrated into something called "entertainment". Once it may have been upsetting to contemplate the idea that "guerilla war struggle is the new entertainment". Today, the all-embracing spectacle of televised entertainment (mass culture) includes even (and ever) more exotic forms of social practice.
C And yet there is a certain "logic" to the systematic irrationality of all information: if theory can define information as "a measure of the probability of a message being selected from the set of all possible messages", then the probability of information containing a "commercial message" is, in a capitalist society, very high indeed.
D Faced with severe budgetary restrictions and declining in-person usage, public and private knowledge centers have had, some more willingly than others, to begin the long process of digitizing and commercializing access to their entire holdings and to promote the corporations that so graciously allowed them to do so at such a good price.
E There are always plenty of fresh examples to hammer home the point that there is no other choice but to be a good "citizen-consumer". In the context of the global imposition of edutainment as the (only) pedagogic method, no more compelling a lesson could be imagined than the current campaign in New York State to shrink drastically tax-derived funding for the State University of New York system and then to commercialize and profit from decentralized access to all of the individual components and everything that they each contain -- the "in-house" libraries, museums, and archives -- in the names of "learning productivity", an obvious rhyme with "worker productivity" and "distance- learning".
F But, unlike culture, which is "the locus of the search for lost unity", data is concrete knowledge about particular facts or circumstances. Won in the course of the straggles of everyday life, data is local and subjective by definition. As such, it poses a problem for the marketplace, which can only circulate "objectively" valuable goods that have "universal" appeal.