In the more politically temperate areas of the East, it's the market strategies that take on a more prominent role. Independent journalism in places like Slovakia has moved on from its initial political problems to economic ones as advertising revenues suffer under a new sobriety lacking in sensation and partisanship. Bill Gates' trip to Hungary to personally promote liberalism and shake down software pirates doesn't help, says Tamas Bodoky, a columnist for Magyar Narancs in Budapest. While Microsoft, in cooperation with the police and governmental officials stage purge-like public events in which poor and repentant software sinners are paraded, and while billboards call out for snitchers to take advantage of anonymous telephone hotlines, the entire legal system itself runs on pirated material. What counts in the end is clearing the way for exclusive contracts with national dealers so that the more reasonably priced goods offered by local dealers are driven out of the marketplace and the economic barriers for public and private freedom of information rise once more.
Electronic media play a particularly unique role during times of crisis and war.
The sysops of ZaMir , Eric Bachmann and Wam Kat, reported on how they mobilized cast off computers, modems and software, went to Sarajevo, searched for and found a telephone line and showed the people there what could be done in terms of de-escalating the conflict by countering the hateful propaganda of their own government. When the once thoroughly conventional Hollywood producer, Michael Linder , began to focus on humanitarian elucidation with the underground journalist Jim Bartlett from Santa Fe, feeding the Internet with information that challenged the government and CNN as well as human-touch stories that bore a suspicious TV quality, advertising revenues were expected to follow. So the previously perfectly sober Fienkelkraut suddenly found the true soul of Europe in Zagreb and there was no holding back the sentimentally aesthetic zeal for the image of the Croatian as victim. Jean Baudrillard, usually no less ambiguous, diagnosed a typical case of the misuse of war for the selfish purposes of revitalizing the aging master thinkers. Had the culturalists consulted the snubbed Internet from afar, they'd have arrived at considerably more truthful conclusions.