WK 6

08/10/07 16:43
Reading Guide WK 6
CMNS 110 (Fall 2007, Surrey)


Be sure to have a look at useful way to organize the data: See Wikimindmap for propaganda.
NOTE: when using this site, make sure you choose ENG from the drop-down menu unless, of course, you read German which is the default on this site.


What we’ve learned about crowds and their implications for the distribution and practices of power, and how these are related to media uses (e.g. Innis might note that the phenomenon of crowds is an aspect of the oral tradition & its domestication into publics an aspect of the impact of literacy), we can turn to very important question of their “management” by means of ideas and “engineered consent.” Two questions ground the discussion: First: What is propaganda and how is to be distinguished from other forms of consciously persuasive and interested mandated communication?

By mandated communication we merely mean what nearly all communication “professionals” and practitioners do – that is, make their daily bread by doing, making, producing, communication products, process and programs on behalf of someone for someone else. This category can include PR, advertising, journalism, marketing, mediation, and all the attendant arts, sciences and technical skills – cameras, photographers, writers, editing, lighting, graphics, interactive media etc. Now, the problem is this: If all of that is propaganda then we find ourselves very close to sometimes delicious and sometimes horrific fantasies involving conspiracies and mass hypnosis. This may be misleading, inadequate and finally a dishonest way to look at things. Depends on empirical evidence and what we think of the purpose of propaganda is – the effect is does or is supposed to have on the audience.

The second question has to do with whether or not people are gullible idiots who can be simply managed by TV and advertising, or whether people are more like intelligent hunters and gatherers who know the flora and fauna of the media ecology the inhabit and selectively pick, choose, or happily ignore the blandishments and seductions of the circuses while they focus on the bread, their friends, families and projects?

Perhaps at their deepest level these questions return us “full circle” or, more in keeping with McLuhan “recursive” model, to early point in the spiral of technological development, to questions we met for the first time in the material on rhetoric – what is persuasion? When and how is it legitimate? How can we know if it has an effect? Is persuasion always manipulation? Is it always an ethical question, and if so which ethics are implied? Of not, then how can it be said to be legitimately outside ethical concerns? For if it nothing else, propaganda is meant to be persuasion.

2.
These two questions – media and audiences and their variations: expression and effect; knowledge, techniques/resources, and power – will keep coming up again and again from now on, but often dressed up in different historical periods, costumes, contexts and agendas. Does this mean that reading Plato’s Gorgias, Republic, and Phaedrus, along with Aristotle’s Rhetorics is adequate for a study of communication, and the rest chaff? “No,” and a very highly qualified “yes.”

“No” because in Athens of their time there were no print or electronic mass media, literacy was becoming widespread but by no means universal, it was a society where only adult males participated in civic and public life, there were many slaves owned individually by nearly all strata of society, and you could walk around the entire city in one day. In other words, we live in a completely different world and in an utterly different communication eco-system. We can communicate across vast distances, we are increasingly dwellers in large urban centres, we have weapons of global-gauge destruction, in fact we can destroy at scales almost infinitely greater than we can ever create, and our technologies are taking us into a secondary orality, and new tribalism, and perhaps Mars. Different contexts mean different effects – that’s Innis and McLuhan again, with McLuhan’s “we change our tools and then our tools change us,” as well as “invention is the mother of necessity” militating against the view that wisdom of the past endures.

Yes, on the other hand, because our weapons and achievements are puny compared to what one good volcano, ice age, earthquake or tsunami can do to them, and all our pretensions and posturing. Yes, because we are still creatures as much irrational as rational, capable and wanting to fall in love, obsessed with a drive to perfection (that’d be Burke again), competitive with and imitative of one another, and very much subject to the human condition or predicament. And this predicament, said the ancient Greeks, is tragic. We strain against time and circumstances, we compete with each other, risk, dare, strive, labour, only to have it all “turn to dust.” This insistent embodiment, our pitifully short lives, our humanity, is what connects us to the ancients, to the long line of ancestors we all have, and to each other. Perhaps in Aristotle’s time, just as writing dawned, and with it the basic configurations of the reasoning and abstract intellect, the questions he asked were more primordial, originary, closer to the way we interact within our primary groups, communities, and with each other.

So, yes, rhetoric and the thought of Ancient Greece, Hellenism, & Rome remain relevant, but must be considered in the context of our mass, globalized, hyper-mediated, time-urgent age. Propaganda, public relations, impression management, “group think” and “spirals of silence,” as well as indoctrination were all known in the Ancient world. Additionally, early forms of mass communication can be seen in the archeological remains of that world. We still look upon the coliseum in Rome, the Greek ruins in Sicily and all about the Mediterranean up into Crimea on the Black Sea with wonder – these buildings, like the Egyptian pyramids have bound time (there’s Innis, again) and remained for thousands of years as a testament – reproduced in millions of images and books – to the civilizations that produced them. Between the 8th and 5th centuries BCE, Athens, and all of Greece, became the No. 1 manufacturer for the most desirable pottery in the Mediterranean basin. Their pottery was decorated with lively, often humorous, sometimes pretty “salty” (you couldn’t put’em on TV before 10:00 PM, or the CRTC would be down your back) images done with great finesse and elegance. These pots were s kind of mass medium, as the makers had no idea who would receive or buy the material, and because the stories told on the pottery were well known, and acquired for the illustrations, indeed a portion of what has come down to us in Greek myth has been transmitted through exactly this pottery. The ancient Greeks also used murals and public art, statues and ornament to publicly state their beliefs, and revel in their achievements. Additionally, the laws of any city ruled by a democracy were posted and regularly revised as public inscriptions on lead or stone and displayed in the marketplace (agora) for all to see. And it was in Rome some centuries later that the first newspapers or gazettes came into existence – moving from public postings to papyrus for distribution across the provinces – the Acta Diurna.

All that said, communities were small, distance great, populations not large, and cities widespread. A mass society did not exist as yet. And neither Caesar nor Alexander could reach all parts of their empires in a split second. Took a couple pf thousand years to get here. Propaganda, in the modern sense had to wait until first the printing press (1450) and then the Reformation (1550s), and then – by that name – for the Counter Reformation (first quarter of the 1600s). Then, it took until the 20th Century for the term to acquire the scope, reach, and substance of what we think of today under this term.

The pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclites, once said “War is the father of all things,” and that would apply to both propaganda i9n the modern sense and the critical discourses that grew around it. In this case the war was WWI, AKA, The Great War. As the Wikipedia entry makes quite clear, propaganda of one sort or another has been in use for a very long time. The contemporary approach of thinking of it as a science and a key tool in modern forms of governance in mass societies originates in the Great War and carries through well into the present.

3.
So, we’ve said that the two questions are what is propaganda and what is its effective relation to audiences? The readings for week 6, and there’s lots, will guide us through some preliminary and early answers to these questions.

When reading the entries (a) propaganda, (b) indoctrination and (c) PR, ask yourself: How are these three forms of communication alike and how are they different? How would you distinguish them? See if Watson & Hill can help with this. In all these readings, pay special attention to techniques discussed, the “how to” dimension as well as the “for whom and to what end” of the equation. Note the importance of posters and images: McLuhan once said, “pictures unite, words divide.” One reason for this – you can’t ask pictures questions they’ll answer. We’ll get into this difference as the course goes on – important one for PR, and especially brand-name mass advertising.

Discussions of Ivy Lee (1877 – 1934), Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974), Edward Bernays (1891 –1995), The Committee on Public Information, AKA the CPI and the Creel Committee (1917-18), John Grierson (1898 – 1972), Harold Lasswell (1902 — 1978) all provide human faces for the discussion. Lee and Bernays are the “founding fathers” of modern PR and their careers tell us a lot about what PR is, how it works, why it’s initiated, and the effects it can have. The Creel Committee did much to prepare American for their entry in the Great War. John Grierson – considered one of the “fathers of” documentary film – also founded the National Film Board of Canada as a propaganda service of the Canadian Government during WW II. Bernays and Grierson, as well as Walter Lippmann, were believers that mass societies could only be managed by means of propaganda – something LeBon would have endorsed. Lippmann and Dewey crossed swords in print over a related issue – which one? How was this debate related to questions about propaganda?

Carl Hovland (1912-1961) was one of the first social scientists to undertake experimental methods (that is experiments under controlled conditions) to learn what effect mass mediated communication was having on its audiences. His main concern was over the effectiveness of army indoctrination material. Hovland’s studies began pioneered further studies in the experimental vein that added significantly to the emerging empiricism pioneered by the Chicago School. Concepts such as Sleeper Effect, Groupthink, Exposure Effect, all emerge from either his work, or that of associates and those who learned from him. These terms are important because they describe effects and implications of mass mediated propaganda, indoctrination, PR and advertising on individuals and groups. The entry on Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916 -) introduces us to the first woman researcher in our field, though we’ll meet more, and some that predate Noelle-Neumann. Her contribution is to describe what happens in a society where propaganda takes over all public discourse, though the “spiral of silence” can be seen at work in many a small group of friends where some says something racially or socially offensive and those who know better say nothing to correct the slur.

French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul (1912 – 1994), is also important in an inquiry into propaganda as a social force, because he expands the parameters of how we use the word. Additionally he adds technology to the mix – in this he resembles some of McLuhan’s ideas, but takes things in a slightly different direction. Finally we turn to the work of Noam Chomsky who argues that the modern mass media are instruments for the “manufacture of consent” (Who used this phrase first? Does Chomsky use it the same way?) Chomsky’s view of the mass media is fairly bleak – a tone we’ll see more of as we move into the more critical dimensions and approaches to the study of communication following the midterm. What is important in these last two entries is to grasp the reasoning behind, and why Chomsky and his associates take this position on mass media.

4.
While both these sets of readings move us away from the interpersonal and F2F emphasis of the Chicago School and to Europe, then again America, and mass communication, they do carry over themes originally founded or articulated with the Chicago School:
1. Social science can play an important role in alleviating or ameliorating serious social problems.
2. People are formed in/by social settings, and command over media is much like command over their generalized other.
3. Empirical research using case studies and life histories, while rejected with the subsequent rise of quantitative and experimental studies of communication in the 30s & 40s, would also pave the way for those very same studies and anchor much of social constructionist and symbolic interactions research and theory into the present.