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We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage public silence and concentrations of unlimited power, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Exploring examples of clever government surveillance, market censorship, spin tactics and back-channel public relations, John Keane seeks to understand and explain these trends, and how best to deal with them. Tackling some tough but big and fateful questions, Keane argues that 'media decadence' is deeply harmful for public life.

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John Keane, a leading scholar of political theory, tracks the recent development of a big idea with fresh potency - global civil society. In this timely book, Keane explores the contradictory forces currently nurturing or threatening its growth, and he shows how talk of global civil society implies a political vision of a less violent world, founded on legally sanctioned power-sharing arrangements among different and intermingling forms of socio-economic life. Keane's reflections are pitted against the widespread feeling that the world is both too complex and too violent to deserve serious reflection. His account borrows from various scholarly disciplines, including political science and international relations, to challenge the silence and confusion within much of contemporary literature on globalisation and global governance. Against fears of terrorism, rising tides of xenophobia, and loose talk of 'anti-globalisation', the defence of global civil society mounted here implies the need for new democratic ways of living.

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In Experiment 1, 36 subjects were exposed to a stimulus equivalence procedure during which they were trained to match the two nonsense syllables VEK and ZID to the emotive words CANCER and HOLIDAYS, respectively, and to match the product labels BRAND X and BRAND Y to the nonsense syllables. The subjects were then tested for equivalence responding (e.g., CANCER --. BRAND X, and HOLIDAYS ~ BRAND V). Finally subjects were presented with two samples of the same cola-based drink, one labeled BRAND X and the other labeled BRAND Y. Subjects were required to rate the colas for pleasantness. A significant difference in terms of the ratings of the pleasantness of the colas was found for the group who passed the equivalence test. The group of subjects who failed the equivalence test showed no significant difference in their ratings of the colas. Experiment 2 demonstrated that exposure to the equivalence test was not a prerequisite for the transfer of preference functions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that it is possible to reverse subjects' preferences for the two colas by reversing the trained conditional discriminations. Furthermore, unlike the previous two experiments, Experiment 3 assessed the preference functions for the emotive words before and after the conditional discrimination training and transfer testing.Conditioned attractions have been the focus of attention in research into advertising and marketing that seeks to examine how respondent or classical conditioning can be used to influence people to prefer and purchase commercial products (Gorn, 1982;Bierley, McSweeney, & Vannieuwkerk, 1985). In the study reported by Gorn (1982), for example, it was found that more students chose the color of a pen that had been associated with "liked" music rather than "disliked" music, thereby demonstrating that respondent conditioning can influence preferences. Furthermore, Bierley et al. (1985) found that preference ratings for stimuliWe thank Jon Williams and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive criticisms of an earlier version of the current article. Requests for reprints should be addressed to

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