Maybe start by considering the ease with which large segments of a population might be seduced. The classic example of this goes back roughly one hundred years to the work of Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew and inventor of modern PR). He demonstrated the power of psychology in advertising by luring a generation of emancipation-seeking women into the world of smoking – those lighted cigarettes, you see, are actually torches of freedom. Bernays expanded this unseen mechanism as a way to mold public opinion for political purposes in his seminal work Propaganda.
Variations on the theme have been used to sell foreign policy initiatives (some may recall that tumbling domino imagery in the leadup to the Vietnam war by maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah). Others may recall the stagecraft behind the selling of that ill-fated Iraqi incursion in 2003 (U.N. address featuring the WMD blue-capped vial). Policy sold like dish soap.
Now add the power of the internet and social media to seduce a crowd. The opportunity for real reflection, once offered by legacy print media, communal discourse, and quiet contemplation has now largely been replaced by the incursion of those twenty-four hour nodal connections to hyperactive Ids. Reflex over reflection.
That brings us to our focus piece (click: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment) on the collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its replacement by monopoly social media platforms to enable the Obama White House to sell policy and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices in new ways…
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