The senior administrators in DIES, the agency sponsoring my work, were decent types, but rather limited. Their notion of communications was the sermon, preferably sermons on sanitation, respect for authority, etc. To them, radio & film were simply efficient ways to convey information to the uninformed. They spoke of themselves as practical men, by which they meant they believed in experience. Talk of invisible media effects was dismissed. In the meantime they filled the airwaves with information.

A closed society might be defined as a society enjoying a tight correlation between information & behavior: the information needed for proper behavior is at hand, and no other.

An open society would then be one where information is available for various forms of behavior: the individual selects his information & thereby determines his behavior.

What, then, do we call a society that provides incredible masses of information, little of which can be translated into behavior? The "spurious society"? A genuine culture, wrote Edward Sapir, is the "expression of a ... consistent attitude toward life, an attitude which sees the significance of any one element of civilization in its relation to all others. It is, ideally speaking, a culture in which nothing is spiritually meaningless."

Radio in New Guinea is totally meaningless to many who hear it for the simple reason it reaches them in languages they don't understand. Even when it is understood, much of it is inapplicable to their lives. And even where information is applicable, how much, in fact, can be applied? Are there really that many job opportunities to justify releasing that much information into the environment?

Western man has developed very complex means of dealing with the great masses of information that move freely through his environment. Western scientists, for example, developed the technique of suspended judgment, by which no information is suppressed, but none acted on rashly. Most New Guineans have no such means.