The Limits of Diversity

It seems on the face of it to be inherently a good thing: More ideas are better ideas. As translated into media policy, this becomes the principle of« diversity." Media content diversity is still a good thing, but in operationalizatioil matters become more complex. Questions about just what it is that is "diverse" and how the extent of diversity can be measured are the subjects of the rest of the chapters of this volume and are not further addressed here. There is a deep contradiction in arguments for content diversity grounded in the concept of the "marketplace of ideas" by authors who otherwise insist that neoclassical economic analyses of media effects are insufficient. This essay addresses a third type of problem: the fetishization of diversity as a policy principle underestimates its limits. The word "fetish" is used here deliberately. The concept was born in anthropological efforts to describe the role of spiritually animated inanimate objects in "primitive" religions. As early as 183 7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, used the word fetish to describe certain widespread attitudes toward governance. The meaning of the word for Emerson is "something irrationally reverenced" (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). Sigmund Freud (1928), presumably not thinking about governance, used the word to refer to things that act as a substitute for what is not there. William Pietz (1985, 1988), whose analyses of the concept of the fetish across disciplines and time are considered the most comprehensive and masterful of such explorations available, points out that one enduring theme in conceptualizations of the fetish that endures is the way in which it subverts the ideal of the autonomously determined self.