Looking for a Chomsky quote...

[Pappa]

I'm looking for a Chomsky quote/article about advertising, but I'm having some difficulty.

He is talking about the media using consumers simply as a way of making money from advertising, specifically he refers to consumers as being farmed to produce advertising revenue (the content being the fodder).

I've done various searched and delved through his website ( http://www.chomsky.info/ ), but can't seem to locate the quote. Anyone remember reading this before?

[Trolldor]

It appears that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition is not quite equivalent to the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. To characterize a linguistic level L, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features delimits a descriptive fact. Notice, incidentally, that the descriptive power of the base component is not subject to the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction suffices to account for the strong generative capacity of the theory. Thus the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not readily tolerate a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar.

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

[Pappa]

It appears that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition is not quite equivalent to the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. To characterize a linguistic level L, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features delimits a descriptive fact. Notice, incidentally, that the descriptive power of the base component is not subject to the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction suffices to account for the strong generative capacity of the theory. Thus the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not readily tolerate a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar.

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

[Horwood Beer-Master]

It appears that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition is not quite equivalent to the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. To characterize a linguistic level L, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features delimits a descriptive fact. Notice, incidentally, that the descriptive power of the base component is not subject to the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction suffices to account for the strong generative capacity of the theory. Thus the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not readily tolerate a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar.

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

[Eriku]

This may be too little too late, but:

Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.

From "What makes mainstream media mainstream?", Z Magazine, October, 1997.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

It might not be the quote you're looking for, but I assume that's the sentiment regarding the media and big business that you were looking for? That is, if you're still looking?

[Pappa]

Cheers Eriku. It's not the exact quote I was looking for (I'm beginning to think I may have imagined the original quote), but it is exactly the idea I was thinking of.

[Trolldor]

Mine is better.

[Eriku]

Mine is better.

Yours discriminates against those who aren't immersed in linguistics... The introductory course I took certainly wasn't enough for me to decode that ;P

[Trolldor]

Did you look at the site where I got the quote from?

[Eriku]

Did you look at the site where I got the quote from?

I was tempted, but I refrained from doing so... just cause... I think the rubber ducky bit in the URL made me a bit as well ;P

Evil bot... Technical jargon in any particularised field is a headache to anybody outside of it ;P