Dumbing Down Democracy

Richard Swift fears for a political culture where we are being treated like small children.
From New Internationalist

‘Grow up!’ We have all said it. We’ve all had it said to us. Sometimes it’s just gratuitous, but all too often it’s an accurate description of real behaviour. The psychological tendency to revert to childish impulses and reactions exists in us all.

But what happens when an entire culture and its politics systematically caters to such impulses? Sigmund Freud had a name for this. He called it ‘infantilization’, by which he meant either getting stuck in or reverting back to a childish state, in order to avoid dealing with real-life problems and dilemmas. It can take many forms – narcissism, magical thinking, belief in invisible friends or enemies, desire for the protection of a mythical father (authority) or mother (nurturer) figure. None of these reactions is healthy for a self-governing democracy rooted in the notion that citizens need to come to terms with the issues they face and make collective decisions. But they continue to prove themselves exceptionally useful to the governing political classes, diverting popular alienation away from their use of power and the enjoyment of their prerogatives.

Capitalism has always been associated with different states of mind. In its earliest phases, theorists like the German sociologist Max Weber and the British historian RH Tawney connected capitalism’s rise with the Protestant values of parsimony and salvation through endeavour. The idea was that frugality (save your funds to invest) and hard work shaped a personality fit for success both in heaven and on earth. While impediments to wealth-gathering were discouraged, private acts of philanthropy were lionized.

In our own times things have moved along – late or turbo-capitalism suffers from a crisis of ‘overproduction’: too many goods chasing too little demand. If you discount (as the market does) all those billions who have needs for basic food and shelter but lack the money to constitute legitimate ‘demand’, there is just too much stuff being produced. But it is the health of this production that keeps the economy humming along – creating jobs and profits (and, of course, waste, poverty and pollution).

Easy credit certainly encourages people to buy more stuff, but the crucial element for doing this is the advertising industry. So buy! buy! buy! is the mantra of our particular era. To make that happen, what seems to work best is to treat consumers like spoiled or anxious children. In his voluminous recent book on the subject Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Benjamin Barber connects turbo-capitalism with a cult of perpetual childishness, which is sweeping the industrial world.1 In English they are called Kidults or Adultescents; the Germans speak of Nesthocker; for Italians they are Mammones; Freeter in Japan; Zippies in India. A culture is emerging based on a prolonged lifetime of buying ever more toys (fancy cameras, jet skis, SUVs, a myriad of electronic paraphernalia) – nicely caught by that Florida bumper sticker: ‘The one who finishes with the most toys wins’.

We don’t need to be told much more about the sorry way in which advertising infantilizes us. The deformations of values and personalities that result are by now the subject of a vast, hand-wringing literature. Entire magazines, such as the clever Vancouver-based Adbusters, are dedicated to combating the deformities.

Less investigated, however, is the way the culture of infantilization is poisoning democratic political life across the industrial world and now beyond. This is not a conspiracy, but an entire industry. Pollsters, spin doctors, think-tanks, consultants, political marketers, makeover artists, writers, researchers, electoral demography experts, psychologists, backroom boys and girls and a host of other specialists cash in on the multi-million dollar business. Whenever election time rolls around, big political machines kick into high gear. God help you if you are in their path. Celebrity consultants, like Lee Atwater, Karl Rove or Dick Morris, have proved masters at pushing the right buttons. In the process they have become the folk heroes (or villains) of US political culture.

Lowest common denominator
Make no mistake – there is serious money on offer. The last US Presidential election was the first to cost over a billion dollars in total. Senate and some House seats can cost millions. The stakes are high and winning has become a finely tuned art. The idea is to ‘position’ a political candidate (watch that body language, control that photo-op) through a combination of saturation advertising and media manipulation. They combine in a pattern of emotive images designed to push the electorate’s buttons.

Forget intelligent discussion of policy options or significant political alternatives; this is about appealing to people’s lowest common denominators; their insecurities, neuroses, resentments and fragile egos. Tactics range from straightforward ‘integrity ads’ (to sell fatherly candidate X) through to negative advertising (besmirching the dubious character of candidate Y). If that doesn’t work, you can always swing a few votes through dirty tricks, such as annoying computer-generated phone calls on election day to leave the impression they were made by your opponent – a little manœuvre the Republicans used in the 2004 Presidential campaign.

The US model of politics based on money and personality is being exported around the world. The sheer number of political consultants is just one indicator. European spin doctors, like Alistair Campbell in Britain, Dominique Ambiel in France and Bodo Hombach in Germany, now dot the political landscape. There is even an International Association of Political Consultants, holding annual conventions (this year in Bali) to discuss what works and what doesn’t. The issue is not so much the ideological orientation of the politics as the way democracy is managed and manipulated from above by a group of experts willing to use whatever works to get the job done.

The model is being exported beyond the industrialized world. The GSC Group has done the same kind of job in Bolivia; Campaigns and Grey in the Philippines; the Penn, Schoen and Berland polling company in Venezuela. Here the model tends to get grafted on to existing political cultures: machismo in Latin America, ‘big man’ politics in Africa and parts of the Pacific, a sort of pseudo-piousness in the Islamic world.

The costs for democracy are beginning to be measured in the hard statistics of apathy. Abysmal US turnout rates at elections are legendary – not much more than a third of voters bother to turn up for congressional (non-Presidential) elections. Now the rot is spreading across the industrial world. Three-quarters of the worst turnouts in European elections in the past half-century happened after 1990. Since the 1980s, membership of political parties has dropped dramatically in almost every industrial country – by as much as 50 per cent in some cases.2 Youth voting is down: in Britain it’s 39 per cent below the average; in Canada 20 per cent.3 One response to an infantilized politics appears to be just to walk away.

Of course it can be argued that infantilization is nothing new. In his piece in this issue Ashis Nandy traces it back as far as colonialism and slavery. Certainly, whipping up the mob by a demagogue is at least as old as Ancient Rome. The notion some people have that they are more worthy than their fellows is a very old one indeed. Until the advent of the universal franchise, consent was only useful (particularly in times of war and crisis), not absolutely necessary. Infantilization might occur as a function of economic and social privilege, but the systematic colonization of the mind has only been honed over the last 150 years or so.

We have now reached what are arguably the right conditions for a ‘perfect storm’ of infantilization. The technologies of mass persuasion are in place – most prominently TV and the internet. Our democracy is sometimes referred to as facing a ‘crisis in governability’ – by which the establishment means that the system needs a firm hand on the tiller. Globalization and its enthusiasts have dislodged many of the work and community identities (to say nothing of the actual workplaces and communities) in which democratic politics have traditionally been rooted. Those left politically adrift are often in a vulnerable state, easy prey for the infantilizers. A wave of militant fundamentalisms has ushered in an era of false certainties. Yet massive problems, such as climate change, an energy crunch and the threat of terrorism loom, with few credible solutions in sight. Our kids might think it’s time to call in Batman or Wonder Woman. Are adult reactions likely to be all that different?

The notion of infantilization can serve many political masters. In its conservative variant it has been used to underpin the critique of the ‘nanny state’. A classic 1970 text of this orientation was Klein and Jonas’ Man-Child: A study of the infantilization of man.4 They take the by now oft-repeated view that programmes intended to aid the poor and combat inequality in fact instill a childlike dependence in an ‘underclass’ that prevents it from getting a hold of its own boot straps. Such notions are useful if you think the poor are that way because they lack initiative. Recent versions of similar views have been encoded into the British legal system as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) designed to micro-manage the behaviour of recalcitrant teenagers or cranky pensioners.

Such a narrow reading of infantilization does little to shine any light on the source of it and how it gets reproduced in the media and politics. There’s nothing here about the way those who use the techniques of infantilization can themselves become its victims. A good example is the way Robert Mugabe constantly plays with the historical grievances of Zimbabweans while himself apparently convinced that 1,000 per cent inflation is due to a few greedy shopkeepers. Crack some heads and all will be put right. This is a kind of ‘magical thinking’ common to many politicians, not least the late unlamented Tony Blair, so proud of his brave legacy in Iraq. Trevor Turner explores this kind of magical thinking on page 18.

Although having pretensions to being a ‘science’, psychoanalysis – like Marxism – is at its best when identifying tendencies rather than giving precise definitions and predictions. Any exploration of infantilization is by its nature imprecise and subjective. One of the dangers of such a critique is that it will be used against children. Too often kids are made to grow up too quickly, yet in an infantilized kind of way: young girls replete with lipstick and sexualized fashion, young boys made into ‘little celebrities’ on the athletic field.

We need to be clear about this – it is absolutely appropriate for an infant to act like an infant and a child to enjoy childish things. Children should have a secure space to behave in these ways. There is even a case to be made that adults should never lose the sense of playfulness and wonder at the world that comes with childhood. But the purposeful dumbing down of politics to cater to a series of petulant and self-centred impulses is of little service to either adult or child. It currently stands in danger of ‘hollowing out’ what democracy we do have – leaving an empty shell inhabited by political hacks and hucksters; all, to be sure, with spotless reputations and the proper ‘professional’ credentials. For the human species, the price for refusing to grow up could prove high indeed.



State of Emergency

From Adbusters

It was the climax of American journalism. Two young reporters at The Washington Post followed a story about a hotel break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 and uncovered a scandal of corruption and cover-up that led all the way to the White House. Fighting through a maze of lies and deceit, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein forced President Richard Nixon to stand accountable for his crimes and resign. The media had the head of the most powerful figure in the world on a stick.

When the experts are pressed about the future of media, they all offer the same inexplicable answer: “I don’t know.” Despite all the money, talent and resources available, no one actually knows how to save the media. The Watergate scandal represented a golden age for journalism. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America,” Seymour Hersh broke the story on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and a generation of reporters had proved their mettle by bringing home the brutal realities of wars from around the world. By acting as the watchdogs to power, Woodward and Bernstein helped enshrine the media as an institution of integrity. It wouldn’t last long. The media’s success quickly made it bloated and cocky and in the 1980s it began to act less like a public trust and more like a business – selling its independence to promote the views of its advertisers. Before being fired from The Sunday Times in 1984, famed British war photographer Don McCullin lamented, “The paper has completely changed: it’s not a newspaper, it’s a consumer magazine, really no different from a mail-order catalog.” By the time the major media powers, from Fox News to The New York Times, threw their support behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the media had become an institution of distortion.

But just as the media were reneging on their biggest responsibility, with almost biblical timing, the digital revolution attacked. Faced with a mass migration of advertisers and consumers to the internet, the old media suddenly found itself struggling for survival in the electronic age. For the past five years, newspapers and broadcast stations have announced layoffs and staff cutbacks on an almost weekly basis. Newsrooms have been gutted and the last remaining vestiges of investigative journalism are disappearing. After defining democratic debate for more than a century, the old media will be lucky to make it out of this decade.

But without any alternative ready to fill the vacuum, democratic discourse is sitting in a no-man’s land. The old media is quickly withdrawing from it role as a watchdog, but the new media is far from ready to step in and replace it. If nothing materializes soon, we might have a time without the existence of an institution that keeps governments or corporations in check. The future of the media and democracy now hangs in the balance.

“The bottom is coming out of the cup,” says Robert W. McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of Free Press, a non-partisan organization dedicated to media reform. “It’s a social and political crisis. In the United States, our whole constitution is founded on the idea that there will be a viable press system so people have the necessary information to govern their lives. Without that press system, it makes a whole mockery of the constitutional system because people in power will know things that the population won’t.”

Most disturbingly, no one has the slightest clue what the new media model will look like. There’s talk of citizen journalism, hyper-local reporting, public and private hybrids and multimedia monsters, but when the experts are pressed about the future of media, they all offer the same inexplicable answer: “I don’t know.” Despite all the money, talent and resources available, no one actually knows how to save the media. Although the media industry remains faithfully optimistic that some sort of solution will be come down from cyberspace and save journalism, they can’t actually say how it will happen.

If the media wants to find a solution, it’s going to have to start doing a better job of reporting on the problem. Pick up any newspaper or turn on any evening news and you’ll rarely see the media actually address the crisis. But the evidence is apparent in the watered-down political coverage, the increase in advertorial features and the heavy reliance on wire services. The lack of real reporting is meant to compensate for the fact that major media companies have gutted their newsrooms beyond recognition and no longer have the budget for expensive investigative reporting. However, the downsizing only confirms the view that the media has lost its relevance and only causes more people to tune out. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the number of Americans accessing the news is down ten percent from 1994. Even more tellingly, 27 percent of people under 30 get no news at all. We’re seeing the emergence of a generation that will never get its news from newspapers, television or radio again. The old media is dying.

Like a drunken surgeon, the media has responded by cutting off its most important limb: journalists. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, 3,000 jobs were cut at daily newspapers between 2000 and 2005. Another 1,000 cuts came in 2006, and according to Media Life magazine, more than 900 newsroom jobs were lost at American newspapers between last April and August alone. Network news, radio and magazines haven’t fared much better and have seen staff reductions of roughly 10 percent over the same time period. Thousands more jobs will likely disappear in the next three years. No media outlet of any size or shape is safe today: the BBC recently laid off 450 people in its news department, while the century-old Kentucky Post announced it will simply shut down on New Year’s Eve.

While any downsizing hurts journalism, it’s the slash-and-burn at newspapers that’s causing the most alarm. Although television and radio have a much broader reach, print journalists still do the bulk of the newsgathering. Dean Baquet, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times who was fired for refusing to make drastic job cuts, told PBS’s Frontline, “If we [newspapers] disappeared tomorrow, most of the people who call us dinosaurs would disappear, too. All the bloggers who exist to comment on us, the Googles and Yahoo!s . . . who rely on what we write about in California and the nation and Washington, they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t exist.” Any hope the media has in the future will depend on newspapers finding a formula to make journalism affordable.

“Newspapers are crossing a dark valley in hopes that there’s another mountain on the other side,” says Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. “In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, newspapers made good profits and big chains saw them as a good investment. Now there’s competition everywhere you look and the web has sucked up much of the classified advertising. It’s created a rough period and everyone’s looking hard for the economic model that will sustain the kind of journalism the world needs. Democracy requires quality journalism. Necessity is the mother of invention, and journalists are creative people. So I think we’ll find a way.”

But newspapers have been scrambling to find this Holy Grail for the past decade with little success. Owned by public corporations that sit on the stock market, they have seen their value fall more than 30 percent over the past two years alone. Technology has allowed for a dramatic increase in competition that has fractured the public’s news-gathering habits and kept any media from having the kind of dominance that newspapers once enjoyed. According to the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans read a newspaper on an average day in 1965. Today, it’s just 40 percent.

Print media is not alone on this sinking ship. All other forms of the media have also seen their viewers and readers flee over the past decade. Ten years ago, 60 percent of Americans watched the CBS, NBC or ABC evening news. Today it’s just 28 percent. Since 1998, the number of radio listeners has dropped from 49 percent to 36 percent. Meanwhile, almost a third of Americans now get at least some of their news from the internet. For the first time, the old media cannot control the flow of information. Even the major media players can see the writing on the wall.

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The [New York] Times in five years,” Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher told Israel’s Haaretz in early 2007. “And you know what? I don’t care.”

While the internet is widely seen as the source of problems for the of newspapers and news broadcasts, much of the media’s undoing is its own fault. Although it’s been slow to adapt to the digital age – mainly because it couldn’t find a way to make a profit from the new technologies – the current crisis is more about the media losing touch with its values.

A week after Time Inc. cut 650 jobs from Time magazine in 2006, it managed to scrounge up $4 million for exclusive photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts’ newborn child. Journalists such as The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass infamously fabricated dozens of articles for their publications and helped destroy the legacy Woodward and Bernstein cemented three decades ago. But perhaps the worst betrayal was when commentators Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher were caught accepting thousands of dollars to promote the Bush administration’s policies. The media has been transformed from a check on power to a power that needs to be checked.

In its annual report on American journalism, The State of the News Media 2007, the Project for Excellence in Journalism states the public perception of journalists has been on a steadily decline since the 1980s. “Journalists see themselves, as Humphrey Bogart put it in the movie Deadline USA, as performing ‘a service for public good,’” the report states. “The public doubts that romantic self-image and thinks journalists are either deluding themselves or lying.” This media crisis has not been caused so much by a technological changes, but by a moral breakdown.

“The gatekeepers have let the barbarians inside,” says Neil Henry, a former Washington Post correspondent and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. “When you allow so many instances of failure, whether it’s cases of fabrication like Jayson Blair, or the failure of reporting in the lead up to the Iraq War – where so many journalists were too close to power to ask the tough questions – or whether it’s selling the naming rights to television stations and allowing advertisers to control news content, these incursions have been growing.”

This deterioration of the Fourth Estate has created a void, one which the new media has been all too willing to try to fill. While the corporate media falls by the wayside, a wave of bloggers and citizen journalists has emerged over the last ten years to pick up the slack. In the past three years, bloggers have exposed a member of the White House press corps as a male prostitute and Republican party plant, found that local governments in Colorado deliberately created traffic to push drivers onto toll roads and, most famously, discovered that the documents used in a CBS 60 Minutes segment to show how President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard were forgeries.

With major media institutions cutting back on reporters around the world, citizen journalist sites like NowPublic.org are often the only source the public has to find out what’s happening on the ground. Citizen journalists have been able to give vivid first-hand accounts of life in Iraq, the battle to stay alive in New Orleans and government suppression of protests in Burma. Armed with the power to make their own media, citizen journalists have shifted the balance of power and allowed the public to control the flow of information for the first time.

“Citizen media is leading to lots of changes in media of all kinds,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media and co-author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People. “The audience just doesn’t have to consume, but is part of the conversation and it’s had enormous effects already in this whole shift. But while there’s been a lot of stuff happening, it’s still not clear where we’re going to end up.”

Gillmor has been one of the leading proponents of citizen journalism, but his expression of caution is notable. Citizen journalism received a great deal of hype as the new challenger to the corporate press, but has suffered some early defeats. Gillmor’s Bayosphere, a citizen media site “of, by and for the Bay Area,” shut down within a year – he sold the site to Backfence.com, which also folded. Other citizen journalism sites have suffered from a lack of organization, interest, professionalism and, most of all, a lack of finances.

Even the most ardent proponents of citizen journalism admit it’s not supposed to replace the old media, merely supplement it. While the digital revolution may have leveled the playing field, regular citizens still lack the resources and skills to spend months doing hard research, interviews, fact checking, and navigate through the halls of power. If the new media is struggling online, how much hope is there for the old media?

Perhaps the only certainty in this new age is that the old model is dead. What might be the most depressing fact of the current crisis is that newspapers are continuing to make incredible profits. According to the International Newspaper Financial Executives, the average major newspaper makes a 15.6 percent pre-tax profit. The Tribune Company, which own the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has a 21.4 percent pre-tax profit margin. In contrast, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, operates at a 5.4 percent profit margin. Although the media is suffering from major revenue loses, the gutting of the public watchdog is happening because media corporations are insisting on maintaining the same extreme margins.

With Wall Street obviously unable to uphold its responsibilities of a public trust as important as the media, the idea of non-profit organizations acting as the new media stewards is increasingly gaining steam. Mother Jones, Harper’s and National Public Radio are all non-profits and produce some of the best journalism in the world, partly because a social agenda is built into organization’s mandate. Even newspapers have begun to adopt the model with success, such as Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. While they’re still confronted with the same problem of attracting an audience in the digital age, because non-profits funnel revenue back into their projects, they offer the media at least one formula for stability.

“The media can be done as a non-profit and it’s something that makes me salivate when I think about it,” says Charles Lewis, a former producer of 60 Minutes and president of the non-profit Fund for Independence in Journalism. “The concept is simple. There are a lot of immensely talented individuals who have nowhere to ply their wares journalistically and you have an educated and informed public in the US, Canada and around the world that want good journalism. What’s required is marrying those two up. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply a matter of cash and sustainability.”

Decades before Woodward and Bernstein, the media’s sustainability came from placating the power brokers. In Upton Sinclair’s 1919 classic muckraking exposé of the media, Brass Check (a reference to how prostitutes were paid at the time), the journalist condemns the American media for turning the profession into a cheap, bawdy trash. Almost a century later, the media has begun to backtrack to its most shameful past. However, the difference today is that the public is no longer forced to consume the corporate media if it wants news and can look for new souces of information online.

Death-calls for the media are not new and were just as widespread during the advent of television news in the 1960s. But the competition between broadcast and print ended up helping journalism mature and produced one of the greatest eras in its history. While there are still more questions than answers about surviving online, the digital revolution certainly has the potential to do the same and could give journalism more power than anything Woodward or Bernstein could have ever imagined.

As McChesney points out in his recent book, Communication Revolution, we’ve reached a “critical juncture” and the media could go in many different possible directions. The new era could give the major corporations that already have a firm stranglehold over the media even more power, or journalism could dissipate altogether and lose all relevance to our lives. Either scenario would silence democratic discourse.

In order to avoid the worst-case scenario and take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it’s important that the future of the media be placed in the proper hands. If it’s distributed equally amongst corporations, non-profits, journalists and the public, then a true balance of power can be achieved and the media can return to once again being an institution of integrity and a watchdog to power.



Labour Laws and Protections
A not-so-illustrious history results in one question: how far have we come?

By Lynn Cunningham
From "This" Magazine

1872
As part of a widespread ninehour- workday movement, printers strike Toronto papers. To almost everyone’s surprise, it turns out that union activities are illegal, and union leaders are jailed for sedition. The Tory government quickly passes new laws, the printers are freed and the shorter workday instituted. Almost a century later, another strike by Toronto printers doesn’t go so well. In 1964 they go out to protest increasing automation. When they vote to return to work the following year, they are locked out. Their picket lines finally come down in 1972, long after their jobs have rolled off the presses.

1912
Saskatchewan passes An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities. Were the MLAs thinking of banning women from dangerous mill work? No, the act forbids women from working in a “restaurant, laundry or other place of business or amusement owned, kept or managed by any Chinaman.” The law is upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, and a slightly revised version remains on the books until 1969.

1923
Free public schools are the norm and compulsory attendance is the law for children in most provinces until they are 12 to 14, depending on where they live. There’s some correlation between school-leaving age and restrictions on the age of minor miners. Nova Scotia, for instance, allows 12-years-olds to both leave school and work underground.

1935
In an attempt to offset the devastating effects of the Depression, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett proposes a New Deal that legislates such things as maximum work-week laws and unemployment insurance. Too late: Bennett is thrown out of work himself and most of his laws are successfully challenged.

1982
The Workmen’s Compensation Board, established by the Ontario government in 1914, is finally changed to the Workers’ Compensation Board in 1982. By this time, women make up 41 percent of the workforce.

1999
Minimum wages across the country range from $5.50 (New Brunswick, Newfoundland) to $7.15 (B.C.), usually with lower rates for those under 18 (but not, as was in the case in the 1920s, for “defectives”). While poverty advocates and social reformers link low incomes to “food banks, homelessness [and] loan sharks,” the Fraser Institute’s Marc Law produces “Minimum Wage Equals Minimum Opportunity”— doubtless for an hourly rate slightly higher than the cost of a latte.

2000
Naomi Klein’s No Logo is published, detailing all manner of social ills, including the widespread manufacture of many of the West’s fave consumer goods in third-world sweatshop conditions reminiscent of those in the early 20th century.

2007
The New York Times reports on the early 21st-century sweatshops: nail salons. Fierce competition among shops means lowball rates, and hence crummy tips. Workers are forced to work 60-hour weeks without overtime pay or lunch breaks, and suffer from skin and breathing problems from the polishes and other beauty products they use.

Copyright © 2008 Red Maple Foundation ISSN 1491-2678