Propaganda

In what way does Propaganda play a part in modern society?
Who uses it and for what reasons?
What form (if any) and through which mediums does it exist?

Read Animal Farm if you already havent.

propaganda is a major tool, it is high-tech even

one of the most advanced and studied influences on our behaviour
it’s called marketing these days, at least there isn’t much of a distinction between those two…

propaganda is mostly used in “democratic” societies. its used as a tool of control… directed towards “the masses” aka “the people” in order to “keep them in line”. its very common in democratic societies (as opposed to totalitarian or fascist-type states) because you can’t just force people to think and do things the way you can in totalitarian political systems. you have to coerce them into thinking that the war in iraq is a necessary and good cause, for example. this is often referred to as the “manufacture of consent”.

i have done extensive research on this subject and i’d be more than pleased to help you find your way through this tangled mess!!

for now, check out:

http://cybrary.uwinnipeg.ca/services/il/Media/propagandamodel.htm

I’d just like to add a quote I particularly enjoy:

“Propaganda is to a democratic nation what violence is to a dictatorship.” - Noam Chomsky

there it is.

or, in the words of internet star “lil sis”:

“DATS IT AND DATS ALL.”

hope someone gets that reference.

Thanks to those who answered.
It seems that your all right about the amount of obvious forms of propaganda inherent within the commercial sectors, such as advertising and tabloid news papers, but surely this is just playgroup stuff, so obvious that repitition is the only way of effecting its reciever. People are not stupid, i think that they are aware of being manipulated somewhat by the media for the benefit of selling products and certain political parties policies at home and abroad, especially when we are at war (when were we ever not at war!!!).
Surely our governments do not think people are so stupid that thiis basic form of brainwashing works? or perhaps i’m putting to much faith in the average person?
It seems that we have been living, and still are, in a propaganda society
but has it watered down to every aspect of our lives as to become so obvious?
I personally believe, and i’m sure some of you will agree with me, that the form of propaganda inherent in today’ society is that of the saturation of consumerable objects as recepticles of desire, memory and identity and the inundation of (dis)information as commodity in an attempt to overwhelm the individual into a passive activism in which the individual is made to believe he is in control of his life when in fact they are not.
I’m sure that i’m stating the obvious, but hey…
Anyway, i am aware of Chomsky and the whole media language and image manipulation thing, but i am interested at the moment in the role of propaganda in modern cinema and art in relation to military aspects of manipulation of the social structure.
I am also aware of Paul Virilios work on this subject in the eighties but i am looking for more modern examples.
Apart from Blackhawk Down and some of the other terrible American soldier as hero type war film can anyone think of any less obviouus examples?
cheers guy’s.[

What we need to do is to decommercialize and depoliticize the media. Large parts of the media are coloured by commercial and political interests. Instead one should have neutral media who can give more objective information. The best solution, I think, would be TV-stations owned by the government but totally free-standing from them when it comes to how the station is run. This system we have in Sweden and other European countries. I think it works reasonably well (even if there have been (partly justified) complaints about these channels being partial in favour of the socialist side). I think such a system would help cool down the political climate, which seems to be clearly over-heated in the USA. You should absolutuely be able to trust what they say on the news.

Thanks Big Bro-

And yes, Piface, the brainwashing works. It starts when we are children, until it has become commonplace in the mind and we don’t notice. Good practice is to look at everything as some possible form of manipulation until you have no idea what is truth and what is a selling point…

I was at the Yankee/Met game on Saturday, got there late and left early. I think the only reason I made it there was to sit in my seat and watch this guy walk up and hand 2 children “this cool picture of the parachute team”

It was US Army propaganda, where these jumpers are in bright uniforms gliding in mid-air formation. Bright blue and yellow jump suits with a cool bright blue and yellow jet flying in the background. Oh those ever popular bright blue and yellow fatigues especially useful for invading- Candyland…

The parents thought they were pretty cool, too!

I think there is overt and covert propoganda going on there all in one neat care package. We have really cool friends in high places…

Now jump you miserable little maggot!

I thought Blackhawk Down was quite a lot a fun and a fairly decent film, actually. its propaganda value was not all that obvious as the film EASILY gave itself to an anti-war interpretation. Most “propaganda” in the States sin’t in the form of movies, but of Television news.

Actually, the milirary itself could give A rat's ass about manipulating the society. The American military is actually quite an interesting and critical organization. The problem in America is actually prepurchased chickenbhawk congressmen who've never picked up a gun while bullets whizzed past their ears rattling sabers and using the Military to solve All issues.

               H3M

i haven’t done any seriously critical studying of the film, but as far as i know, though it may have a slight “anti-war” spin on it, the underlying premise is that the US military was there to “do good” and “fight evil” (you know how that goes). the propaganda element of the film concerned the actual events, and that (false) representation of those events in the film, not the overall “tone” (whether it was an “anti-war” or “pro-war” sort of film).

the whole article is here, complete with an alternative description of the events that took place in Somalia:
http://www.zmag.org/content/ForeignPolicy/MonbiotBlackHawk.cfm

]

Actually, why in the hell did we go to Somalia?

hahha i can’t give you a total play-by-play …i haven’t done any serious digging on that topic. but i’m on it, buddy. that article does have some interesting stuff in it though… to balance out all of the mainstream propagandizing.

at the moment in australia we are heading up to a major election, and the current government is coming under some heavy flak for the amount of tax payers money that it is spending on advertising. i really dont know how blatant political advertising or what some people would call propaganda is, but in australia its a very fine line. an example of the miniscule differences is the recnet set of ads on our health care system. the government argues that they were merely informing the public about changes, however this was done i a way that clearly cast the government in a favourable light, and had almost no actually informative value. this is more the sort of thing we get here in terms of propaganda, ads “informing the citizens” but only really aiming to promote the party.

the other way in which we might be being cooerced is through the news that we are presented with every day. the only problem with mounting an argument about the political bias of reporting in the medai, is that there is nothing to compare it to. all the major sources for information on the war in iraq were amrican new outlets such as CNN or NBC and so we have no opposing information to compare the reports of thes networks to. i heard a theory the other day that the beheading of the american soldier was a cia conspiracy to turn opinion against the iraqis, but like everything else in this war, there is just no way to know either way, where its propaganda or not.