hi rla,
your posts rank among my 'read next' lists regularly so i'm glad you responded to my last 'media science' post on my fantasy 'let's awaken americans' media project idea target='_blank'>
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ndpost&p=175572
given what is intimated by your post, i take it you are a professional in the pschologic or psychiatric fields? and your response obviously indicates understanding of some of the things important to:
1) what i refer as the wholesale conditioning of americans for reflexive consumption.
2) the place of the media directly as the motor for our economy that depends on unmitigated turnover of cash
3) by their concerted ability to put the next stimulating sensation in front of our hungry eyes.
4) our conditioning to consume, from birth, means it's an habitual reflex (redundant?)
5) and the fact that it's a passive activity to watch the tube tends to make it hypnotic
6) so whatever is channeled through the media pipe has a very good chance of establishment
7) if it's emotionally powerful, even moreso,
8) and repetition does that memory-reinforcing step of moving a standalone idea the first time it's encountered into the 'it's a pattern cause i've seen it more than once' longerterm memory. personally and as a biologist, this pattern establishment and recognition process i believe is what underlies so many aspects biology from the molecular level on up through what's involved in learning to the complexities that are the rules of social interaction.
9) the fact that one meme or idea establishes as a precedent means that what follows must displace a related meme to establish itself
10) so that when an important person makes an assertion and repeats it to make it a pattern on its way to meme-hood, any counter-assertions struggle uphill to first enter and then displace the original from that meme-space but also be repeated enough to establish as dominant itself.
sorry, given what you've expressed, my informed but not-formally-educated-in-this-area theory probably reiterates what's already been forgotten by a professional. i know it's not all new stuff but what seems important is that it's not widely recognized as the machine by which america runs at full-economic throttle while concomitantly refreshing the mechanism by which media condtions our consumption reflexes to swallow the current power's political agenda. or perhaps you'd refute some of this?!
i guess that's partly why i'm writing you, to see if you might be interested in consulting on some of these ideas. i'm kind of hopeless when it comes to thinking about the criminals running our country and can conceive of hope for the future only if we might somehow slap half of our country into the 'beyond comfortably numb' state i call reality.
as you outlined, it first requires perception that we are slaves to this conditioned-reflex machine, second that we can conceptualize the significance of that, third feel the emotions that drive our intentions to act.
ok, maybe i'll just mirror this in a new thread and seek your response there along with those of others. but thank you for referring me to 'integration' as what i mean by the intuitive process.
--
post-script: part of a concept i was recently prompted to take half-baked from the oven. i perceive the need for america to take back control of its daily perception from the machine that reprograms us at will to reflexively consume what power needs to run the economic machine and keep us politically inline.
a media project that i hope would recruit avg jane/joe participants into a broadcast program over the space of two weeks to a month wherein they'd watch a daily progrm fitting the current formula that is designed to demonstrate how such programs mechanically shape their perceptions. pre- and post-tests would document responses to a bank of questions that would measure what happens to their perceptions as this dialy broadcast bathes them in both true and propagandistic information.
recruits would be achieved by a being Paid-To-View mechanism.
by measuring the change in their perception with the program i'd hope to awaken them to the fact that they receive this through the glow of the blue-screen everyday.
to better understand the background, i refer you to
my first mention of it in confessions of a former dittohead
target='_blank'>
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...12&#entry174612
and my interjection of it into billfmsd's media science thread starting with this post:
target='_blank'>
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ndpost&p=174634
i've gotta run now but will be checking back.
oh yeah, i also posted a few related to TV viewing on my blog:
http://beyondcomfortablynumb.blogspot.com/...l-me-where.html
looking forward to some stimulating discussion!
Full Version: Redemption Song: How to Retake our Country?
I'll offer my two cents, and listen to what is said!
Big Time investments by wealthy Liberals in Progressive Talk Radio, and TV!
Big Time investments (and use by Progressive candidates) in Progressive "Think Tanks", especially on Framing issues!
Continued investment in Progressive Internet Organizations , like CGCS, MoveOn, etc..!
Big Time investments by wealthy Liberals in Progressive Talk Radio, and TV!
Big Time investments (and use by Progressive candidates) in Progressive "Think Tanks", especially on Framing issues!
Continued investment in Progressive Internet Organizations , like CGCS, MoveOn, etc..!
Say the Right Name and They Light Up
December 7, 2004
NEUROLOGY
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
think there's nothing biological about marketing?
THINK about your favorite retail store. Call it XYZ. On a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 means you're neutral, 5 means you agree strongly; rate these statements:
XYZ always treats me with respect.
I feel proud to be an XYZ customer.
If a problem arises, I can always count on XYZ to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
XYZ always treats me fairly.
XYZ always delivers on what it promises.
XYZ is a name I can always trust.
I can't imagine a world without XYZ.
XYZ is the perfect store for me.
Now think about your bank. Go through the same statements and rate how you feel.
Earlier this year in Japan, 16 women participated in a study that measured such responses and determined store loyalty by using a brain scan. The subjects identified their own XYZ — an upscale department store in Tokyo — and agreed to a scan while they were asked 32 yes-or-no-type questions about the store, their bank and their daily life.
The women, who were 22 to 66 years old, placed their heads into machines that track brain blood flow as the women performed the mental tasks. For example, when people see a face, make a decision, feel a reward, pay attention, sense deception or react to countless stimuli, specific regions of the brain light up.
Before entering the scanner, a third of the women revealed that they were passionately loyal customers of XYZ. A third said they liked to shop there but were not fanatical about it. The rest were neutral. During the session, each woman was asked to imagine her most recent experiences at XYZ and at the bank.
Everyone had similar brain patterns when answering questions about mundane daily life or trips to the bank, said John Fleming, a senior consultant for the Gallup Organization in Princeton, N.J., which led the study. But those who indicated an extremely strong emotional attachment to the store, as measured by questions like "this is the store for me," showed a distinct pattern.
Three areas of the brain — the orbitofrontal cortex, the temporal pole and the amygdala — lighted up brightly. All are associated with visual memory and emotion, Mr. Fleming said. The most "brand addicted" subjects, he said, showed the greatest activation in the amygdala, which is a sensory gateway to the emotions.
"If the company they love screws up, they blame themselves," Mr. Fleming said. "They ask themselves what they did to contribute to the problem."
Women who were mildly fond of or neutral about the store showed far less activation or no activation in these emotional areas of the brain.
The study, carried out at Nihon University in Tokyo, was reported in late October at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, held in San Diego.
Marketing and neuroscience are becoming bedfellows. Corporations and advertisers are turning to brain-imaging technologies as a way of learning customer preferences. By peering at brain circuits as people think about products or services, neuromarketers hope to glean what buyers really want instead of what they might say in a focus group or write on a questionnaire.
The Gallup study is a variation on this theme. It explored the brains of people who already professed different degrees of brand loyalty. A result is startling evidence that brands can invade the brain's most intimate emotional centers — and drive behavior.
Companies have long known that brand loyalty is important, Mr. Fleming said. Loyal customers buy more, expanding profits. They tend to try new offerings and tell their friends. It costs less to keep loyal customers than to recruit new ones.
If a company could turn 5 percent more of its customers into loyalists, with hooks into their amygdalas, profits would increase 25 to 100 percent a customer, said Frederick F. Reichheld, author of "The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value."
Marketing executives naturally want to know what creates brand loyalty. It does not stem from flashy ad campaigns, Mr. Fleming said. Nor is it a measure of customer satisfaction, a better-quality product or even a lesser-quality product.
What drives behavior in a complex world is often emotions, said Dr. Daniel Kahneman, a psychology professor at Princeton University who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. He argues that emotions are important determinants of economic behavior, more so than rationality.
To win brand loyalty, companies need to establish strong emotional bonds with their customers. Moreover, this builds one transaction at a time, involving face-to-face contacts. "A brand is more than a virtual symbol in the marketplace," Mr. Fleming said. "It has a face of the people who interact in the marketplace."
Many corporations are waking up to the fact that their lowest-paid employees are the people who create, or fail to create, the emotional connections that lead to brand loyalty. They are also aware of local differences in how employees engage customers. "For me, a good example is Continental Airlines," Mr. Fleming said. "I love the airline, but maybe that's because I fly out of Newark. I know people in Houston who do not have the same experience."
It is probably too soon to tell if buying goods on the Internet will lead to similar levels of brand loyalty. A prompt, courteous, cost-competitive Web site could conceivably build loyal customers. But without face-to-face contact and those small touches that mean great service, will America's amygdalas light up in cyberspace? Perhaps a future brain imaging experiment will tell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business...print&position=
December 7, 2004
NEUROLOGY
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
think there's nothing biological about marketing?
THINK about your favorite retail store. Call it XYZ. On a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 means you're neutral, 5 means you agree strongly; rate these statements:
XYZ always treats me with respect.
I feel proud to be an XYZ customer.
If a problem arises, I can always count on XYZ to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
XYZ always treats me fairly.
XYZ always delivers on what it promises.
XYZ is a name I can always trust.
I can't imagine a world without XYZ.
XYZ is the perfect store for me.
Now think about your bank. Go through the same statements and rate how you feel.
Earlier this year in Japan, 16 women participated in a study that measured such responses and determined store loyalty by using a brain scan. The subjects identified their own XYZ — an upscale department store in Tokyo — and agreed to a scan while they were asked 32 yes-or-no-type questions about the store, their bank and their daily life.
The women, who were 22 to 66 years old, placed their heads into machines that track brain blood flow as the women performed the mental tasks. For example, when people see a face, make a decision, feel a reward, pay attention, sense deception or react to countless stimuli, specific regions of the brain light up.
Before entering the scanner, a third of the women revealed that they were passionately loyal customers of XYZ. A third said they liked to shop there but were not fanatical about it. The rest were neutral. During the session, each woman was asked to imagine her most recent experiences at XYZ and at the bank.
Everyone had similar brain patterns when answering questions about mundane daily life or trips to the bank, said John Fleming, a senior consultant for the Gallup Organization in Princeton, N.J., which led the study. But those who indicated an extremely strong emotional attachment to the store, as measured by questions like "this is the store for me," showed a distinct pattern.
Three areas of the brain — the orbitofrontal cortex, the temporal pole and the amygdala — lighted up brightly. All are associated with visual memory and emotion, Mr. Fleming said. The most "brand addicted" subjects, he said, showed the greatest activation in the amygdala, which is a sensory gateway to the emotions.
"If the company they love screws up, they blame themselves," Mr. Fleming said. "They ask themselves what they did to contribute to the problem."
Women who were mildly fond of or neutral about the store showed far less activation or no activation in these emotional areas of the brain.
The study, carried out at Nihon University in Tokyo, was reported in late October at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, held in San Diego.
Marketing and neuroscience are becoming bedfellows. Corporations and advertisers are turning to brain-imaging technologies as a way of learning customer preferences. By peering at brain circuits as people think about products or services, neuromarketers hope to glean what buyers really want instead of what they might say in a focus group or write on a questionnaire.
The Gallup study is a variation on this theme. It explored the brains of people who already professed different degrees of brand loyalty. A result is startling evidence that brands can invade the brain's most intimate emotional centers — and drive behavior.
Companies have long known that brand loyalty is important, Mr. Fleming said. Loyal customers buy more, expanding profits. They tend to try new offerings and tell their friends. It costs less to keep loyal customers than to recruit new ones.
If a company could turn 5 percent more of its customers into loyalists, with hooks into their amygdalas, profits would increase 25 to 100 percent a customer, said Frederick F. Reichheld, author of "The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value."
Marketing executives naturally want to know what creates brand loyalty. It does not stem from flashy ad campaigns, Mr. Fleming said. Nor is it a measure of customer satisfaction, a better-quality product or even a lesser-quality product.
What drives behavior in a complex world is often emotions, said Dr. Daniel Kahneman, a psychology professor at Princeton University who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. He argues that emotions are important determinants of economic behavior, more so than rationality.
To win brand loyalty, companies need to establish strong emotional bonds with their customers. Moreover, this builds one transaction at a time, involving face-to-face contacts. "A brand is more than a virtual symbol in the marketplace," Mr. Fleming said. "It has a face of the people who interact in the marketplace."
Many corporations are waking up to the fact that their lowest-paid employees are the people who create, or fail to create, the emotional connections that lead to brand loyalty. They are also aware of local differences in how employees engage customers. "For me, a good example is Continental Airlines," Mr. Fleming said. "I love the airline, but maybe that's because I fly out of Newark. I know people in Houston who do not have the same experience."
It is probably too soon to tell if buying goods on the Internet will lead to similar levels of brand loyalty. A prompt, courteous, cost-competitive Web site could conceivably build loyal customers. But without face-to-face contact and those small touches that mean great service, will America's amygdalas light up in cyberspace? Perhaps a future brain imaging experiment will tell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business...print&position=
Consumer self-defense: an anti-advertisement tutorial
By +Insiderbetraying
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something by the counter-culturists
Reality Cracking
Courtesy of fravia's pages of reverse engineering, 10 July 1998
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Yes! Jawohl! Right so! ...and I hope to receive MANY MORE essays on these lines. For the first time in the history of humanity... well, actually I'm not kidding: have a search around and see what else you can find :-) the power and 'cleverness' of the Web offer us CONSUMER, guinea pigs of the marketing mavericks, give us stupid pavlovian slaves, whose brains are being relentlessly maimed to mud by tons of ads every minute of our poor lives, allow us the possibility to understand (first) exchange knowledge (second) and retaliate (third). Great! Read and head! And work! Let's go up from consumers to human beings, let's learn how to counter all the pavlovian techniques of the slave masters!
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Consumer self-defense
(an anti-advertisement tutorial)
Part n.1: Some amoebas slip from under the slide and take a quick look at the lab
by +Insiderbetraying ~ July 1998
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Nota Bene: there are in olive some more 'technical' parts that you may 'safely' jump over. This in fieri document is the first part of a series that I'll publish ONLY on the web (in fact at fravia's) since IMO "paper" publishing doesn't make today (July 1998) any more sense (I mean, if you'r seeking synergy, not money :o)
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Introduction
As you probably know, there is a whole scientific branch called 'consumer behavior'. What you might not know, unless you are on the take, is that there are MANY other less known disciplines aimed at allowing a better (in fact an absolute) control of the consumer (i.e. you).
The declared purpose of these studies is to fool you into buying gadgets and products you don't need (or are downright harmful to you) playing on your most elementary feelings. Pavlov and Goebbels would never have dreamed a so scary (and almost perfect) world of hidden and concealed compulsions. In order to defend yourself you must first of all understand the techniques used by your enemy. I'll here just list some of them, as you will see, this is scary enough per se.
A word of warning: once you will have understood the basic aims of some of the techniques used in order to tame consumers, you'll see your own life from a completely different point of view. While you may already have experienced something similar reading master +ORC's famous 'supermarket enslavement' essay (the masterpiece that started all sort of "reality reversing" studies), I know how upsetting this can be, especially once you'll have found yourself in a very peculiar position vis-à-vis almost all your friends and social relations: in fact they will mostly NOT understand the problem at all. See: some of them will have bought and wear colored nice T-shirts carrying advertisements or huge industrial logos on them; some other will have just returned from the mall with a lot of nice colored bags filled with "offers" they just couldn't resist buying; others, while apparently "listening" to you, will have turned the TV set on and happily munch some "crusty choco-bars" or some "chips" (or whatever they had to buy) under its continuous ads' bombarding... in fact the situation may dangerously recall you those science-fiction films of the fifties where everybody but the hero is completely controlled by some little green aliens... no, actually you'll feel even worse: you'r not an hero, you'r just sorta like an ameba that has escaped from underneath the microscope's slide and took a look at the scientific lab. It is NOT always a very nice feeling :-(
So I'll here -as introduction- just list some techniques, and show some examples... you'll be able to check how terribly true they are all by yourself, as you'll see, it's pretty easy to individuate them... once you know where to look.
Consumer Behavior
The purpose of "Consumer Behavior", as a discipline (which is a fairly young branch, with textbooks beginning to show up in the '60s), is to provide "a foundation for marketing management" through the advanced use of psychological, medical, ethical, cultural and historical knowledge on human behavior. In fact in order to allow what they also hypocritically call 'the development of a managerial strategy', these disciplines use (and misuse) theories and concepts from all the behavioral sciences - psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, demography, and economics. In fact the marketing and advertisement 'scientists' -as you will see- act just like those nazi and Japanese doctors of the '40s, that conducted criminal experiments on human prisoners.
The direct result of all these efforts is an almost pavlovian 'branding' of illiterate consumer minds, just to cite a typical, investigated example, when shown logos of children's brands, adult's brands and consumer products, over 51% of children aged 3 to 6 recognized the "Old Joe" camel cigarette logo. I repeat: children between 3 and 6 (!) and a CIGARETTES image! Second came Nike's logo. (source: Fischer "Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 5 years," JAMA, December 11, 1991, 3145-3148).
In the following text I'll use my own terminology: the term 'slave masters' is used to denote the unhealthy alliance between 'consumer behaviorists', 'marketing buffs', 'commercial sellers/producers' and politician and media anchormen that defend such a society and profit from it (let's not forget just to make an example, that the Reagan administration purposely reduced funding to many of the agencies responsible for enacting the consumer laws). Clearly the term is vague and imprecise, yet it does the job. The term 'puppets' or 'puppet-models' is used to denote the use of 'celebrities' in advertising and media for mass-control and mass-influencing purposes.
Memory patterns
One of the main problems for the slave masters is that consumers have a limited capacity to process information - information overload can impede consumer 'learning' (from their point of view, learning means here being conditioned with the need to buy a determinate product). Since emotions strongly influence how information is processed they are widely used in advertising. In fact Memory processes are influenced by affect and arousal.
A simplified memory model has three components: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
'Sensory memory' is a pre-attention stage where a stimulus is briefly analyzed to determine if it will receive additional processing (short-term in duration, usually less than a second), then follows the 'Short-term memory' stage - where information is temporarily stored while processing. If this information is not rehearsed (silently repeated to encode into long term memory) it is lost within 30 seconds. Short-term memory is characterized by limited capacity - Miller's law states people can handle 7 (+ or - 2) bits of information at a time. Information is transferred from short-term to long-term memory when it has been rehearsed with a transfer process known as encoding. Recall will be more difficult if there is clutter or too many stimuli. Example: the plethora of commercials on a Superbowl program make it difficult for the viewer to recall any one specific commercial. Long-term memory stores the meanings of words, symbols along with the associations among various semantic concepts. Here it is important to notice that 1) visual images or pictures tend to be more memorable than their verbal counterparts, especially when there is low-involvement on the part of the consumer; and 2) words that have high-imagery content are superior to words that do not. Example: high imagery words: table or car, low imagery words- future or peace. The slave masters of course concentrate on the storage process into and on the retrieval process from Long-term memory, so consumers will retrieve the conditioning presented with the advertisements when faced with a choice. Retrieval can be enhanced by repetition of a symbol from the advertisement to the package and by attaching a memorable jingle or music to the advertisement. This is 'brand imprinting'.
Brand imprinting
Brand imprinting consists of a brand 'node' implanted in memory which links a variety of associations (brand name, brand's characteristics, advertisements about the brand, the product category, and emotional reactions to the brand and its advertisements).
Some shrewd techniques are here used to numb the consumer, the most common one takes advantage of a psychological characteristic of our specie called the Zeigarnik effect (if a task is interrupted, material relevant to the task tends to be remembered ).
This is the concept behind all interrupted :15 second commercials. The first :15 presents 'information', is interrupted with a :30 that is different, and then a :15 returns to complete the presentation of the material begun with the first :15. This snaps the Zeigarnik effect: the slave will remember.
Behavioral learning and conditioning
'Behavioral learning' is the nice name that the slave masters have found for 'consumer conditioning'. It is divided in three main sectors: Classical consumer conditioning, Operant consumer conditioning and Vicarious consumer conditioning.
Classical conditioning - behavior is influenced by a stimulus that occurs prior to the behavior and elicits it in a manner that appears to be a reflex. Advertisers try to identify messages, sights or sounds that will elicit positive reactions from consumers to associate their product with a positive stimuli - thus eliciting a positive reaction to the product (half-naked babe on the car roof). The classical conditioning framework was discovered by Ivan Pavlov in his work with dogs and those same principles are ACTIVELY used by the slave masters. You better understand them, at least in their most elementary form.
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In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus or CS) is repeatedly paired with the eliciting stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus or UCS). To be effective the CS needs to occur prior to the UCS so it predicts the UCS. After a number of pairings, the ability to elicit a response is transferred from the UCS to the CS. The response is called the conditioned response or CR.
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A couple of examples: stores and mall all over the world know that the tempo of music played in the store resulted in various shopping speeds by consumers. The slower (and rithmic) the music, the slower (and almost trance-inducted) the shopping speed, the more (up to 40% !!) groceries purchased. La va sans dire that the customers would NOT have purchased this surplus if they could have maintained self-control. It is also obvious that music is only ONE of the 'hypnotizing' factors in play (see +ORC's essay). Note that customers are completely unaware of any differences in music cadence, since the effects of music operate at below consciousness levels. Music is also used purposely elsewhere: take restaurants: although customers take more time to complete their dinners when slow music is played, liquor sales increase. Every time the consumers take longer to eat, the time spent waiting for food increase the sales of liquor & aperitifs & second bottles of wine or mineral water made while waiting for the food... a trade off between number of times a table can be used and higher recipes per consumer... so to say a "slow food benefit" vis-à-vis fast food joints.
Another example, all stimuli associated with spending money (credit card insignias) actually elicite a spending response in shoppers. Yet another example: Using the symbol of the national flag (a conditioned stimulus) with a product or service (a previously neutral stimulus). The product or service gains increased status via higher order conditioning. Note that the conditioned stimulus should be consistently paired with the unconditioned stimulus. For example, if the slave masters use a 'celebrity bait' with a product in an advertisement, the celebrity should be shown in point-of-purchase displays as well.
Operant conditioning - behavior is influenced by the consequences of the behavior. Sales promotion and 'personal selling' involve providing consumers with reinforcers and/or punishments to influence later behavior. Operant conditioning is often used inn order to shape consumer responses - like training animals. Totally new operant behaviors can be created by selectively reinforcing behaviors that successively approximate the desired instrumental response. This happens for example giving consumers a free sample of a product. The reinforcement is the product's performance. The added reinforcement is the enclosed coupon for purchase. In the promotional mix, operant conditioning is particularly applied to personal selling and sales promotion. Sales people attempt to reinforce desired behaviors of clients by reinforcers (compliments, smiles, lunches, Christmas gifts) . Buying behaviors are shaped with sales promotions, discounts, coupons, samples, and contests.
Vicarious conditioning - behavior is influenced by observing the actions of others and by modeling or imitating those actions. Many advertising strategies make use of appealing puppet-models (Jordan, Spice girls, whatever) using a product or experiencing its positive outcomes in the hopes the consumer will imitate the behavior. Effectiveness of the puppet-model increases in the following instances: 1.The puppet is physically attractive. 2. The puppet is "successful". 3. The puppet is shown overcoming difficulties and then succeeding.
Of course, the more dependent, and the lower the self-esteem of the consumer the more prone he/she will be to model the behavior of successful puppets. Note that this also apply, more generally, to the 'celebrities' hype all over the media. The slave masters use vicarious learning for 3 purposes. Puppet's actions can be used to create entirely new types of consumer behaviors. Puppets can be used to decrease the likelihood that an undesired consumer behavior will occur. Puppets can be used to facilitate the occurrence of a previously learned consumer behavior.
Motivation
Time to examine what the slave masters call 'motivation'.
Motivation refers to an activated state within a consumer that leads to the goal-directed behavior. It consists of drives, urges, wishes, affect or desires that initiate the sequence of events leading to the goal-directed behavior. It begins with a stimulus that is processed by the consumer, going through the information processing stages of exposure, attention, and comprehension. That stimulus can come from inside the consumer or from outside the consumer.
Need activation a discrepancy caused when the stimulus processed causes the actual state of being to diverge from the desired state. Needs can be innate or learned and are never fully satisfied. Needs produce drive states. Affect is the central concept behind the experiential perspective of consumer behavior. Evidence suggests that even low intensity feelings created by advertisements may affect cognition and behavior. Evidence also indicates that consumer responses to advertisements have two emotional dimensions positive and negative affect. The emotion created can activate a consumer and place the consumer into a drive state. There's a bias called 'the fundamental attribution error' which is widely used by the slave masters: people are unfortunately biased to make internal attributions. I.e. they tend wrongly to believe that a person's actions or words are caused by that person's true beliefs and preferences, and that they are not making certain statements about a product influenced by environmental pressures like the company they work for and the money they gain for that. That's another of the reasons behind the use of the celebrities puppets and of 'average people', 'good granny', 'old dentist', 'cooking grand-ma' or various 'peopleonthestreet' interviews and ads.
Psychoanalytic theory and promotional strategy
The slave masters, using Psychoanalytic Theory, use symbols and flights of fantasy to propel consumers to buy their products. All symbols that exist in Psychoanalytic Theory are being used, such as phallic and ovarian symbols, for instance, to release sexual energy or libido.
Product symbolism
Products may act as symbols for consumers, expressing a stereotyped "something" about their owners. Of course the lower the self-esteem of the consumer the more he will view his possessions as extensions of himself.
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Wicklund and Gollwitzer observed that people make use of material possessions, amongst other strategies, to compensate for perceived inadequacies in certain dimensions of their self-concept. For instance, by displaying a recognised masculine symbol, such as strutting around in a black leather motorbike suit, a young man can compensate for not feeling 'masculine' enough by using the object to tell both himself and others that he is indeed 'masculine'. This compensatory function of material objects obviously entails that the 'symbols' have to fit in with a person's gender (amongst other social categories) to provide a potential bridge for closing perceived discrepancies between actual and ideal dimensions of self.
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Certain products have a self-image/productimage congruence. Example: Automobiles, health products, cleaning products, grooming products, leisure products, clothing, retail store patronage, food products, cigarettes, home appliances, magazines, home furnishings
All products that consumers use to communicate themselves to others act as symbols and have three characteristics. 1. They must have visibility in use their purchase, consumption, and disposition are readily apparent to others 2.The product must show variability some consumers have the resources to own the product and some do not. 3.The product must have its 'personalizability' the extent to which a product denotes a stereotypical image to the average user.
The LOV (list of values) scale used by the slave masters has 3 dimensions:
1.Individual values (selffulfillment, excitement, sense of accomplishment, and selfrespect). 2.Focus on the external world (belonging, being wellrespected, security). 3.Interpersonal orientation (fun and Enjoyment, warm relationships with others).
Halo effects and imaginary attributes
Halo effects occur when consumers assume that because a product is good on one product characteristic it is also good on another product characteristic. Example: if a consumer believes that crest toothpaste is the best cavity fighting toothpaste, he might also belief it has the lowest abrasive qualities.
Directing consumers' attention to an existing (or not existing) attribute
Directing consumers' attention to an attribute, and causing them to allocate cognitive capacity to the attribute increases the perceived importance of the attribute. It doesn't matter in the least if said attribute does not exist. Example: in the 80s, burger king convinced consumers that an important attribute of fast food hamburgers was the particular method of cooking flame broiling . Colgate used for year a non existent additive 'Gardol' (most toothpaste and soap advertisements resort to fantastic chemicalfictionist constructions)
Mere exposure phenomenon and behavior
Mere exposure phenomenon is a method through which positive feelings may be formed through repeated exposures to a stimulus. This is of course not cognitively based, as a matter of fact it has no rational motivation whatever: positive feelings from repeated exposures can occur without the person consciously knowing or perceiving the repetitions or familiarity of the object. The slave masters use mere exposure by developing strategies that ensure that the product, its name, or symbol, are repeatedly encountered by the consumer, e.g., Coke, Budweiser, since behavior formation corresponds to the behavioral influence perspective. In fact behavior results from people engaging in behaviors because of environmental or situational factors. Example: large retail chains design the physical layout of departments within the store to create behavior directly (see +ORC's essay). The entrance to a department store may have high status products directly in front of the door (jewelry, cosmetics) with sensuously appealing options to the right (lingerie). The consumer's first hurdle is to walk past the 'attractive' departments without buying anything there.
Physical layout can induce behaviors through aisle arrangement or then use of textures, smells and lighting. This is called Atmospherics. Atmospherics are "the effort to design buying environments to produce specific emotional effects in the buyer that enhance his/her probability of purchase" this is pure pavlovian conditioning btw.
The Fishbein models
A mathematical model used by the slave masters (Fishbein)
The Fishbein attitudetowardstheobject model relies on an algebraic formula to explain the decision process consumers actually go through.
The formula is:
Ao = bi x ei
Ao the overall attitude towards the object.
Bi the belief of whether the object "o" has some particular 'magic'
attribute or achieves some particular 'lure' goal.
Ei the evaluation of the goodness of the attribute to the consumer.
Later Fishbein developed another model (BI = w1 (ab) + w2 (SN)) that contains a new construct called the subjective norm which assesses what consumers believe other people think they should do, but we don't need to get into such details here.
Ok, how do the slave masters assess if the promotion was able to influence attitudes (i.e.: has the slave's behavior changed after being bombarded)?.
Usually the consumer is tied into a lowinvolvement information processing where cognitive responses are less likely to occur. Since the consumer is not considering the pros and cons of the issue, he uses peripheral cues (attractiveness and expertise of the source, the number of arguments presented, positive or negative stimuli in message context, music, etc.) to determine acceptance or rejection of the message. Research has indicated that using peripheral cues, such as the physical attractiveness of a model as an endorser, had great impact on consumers. Companies attempt to create a unit relation between the endorser and the brand (x) by 1. Hiring puppets who are supposed experts (or seen as experts) in using the product, 2.Signing the endorser to longterm, exclusive contracts so that the celebrity puppet is associated only with the same company's brand, 3.Having the puppet consistently wear or use the product when in public to strengthen the association with the product.
Techniques of ingratiation (Lying)
Ingratiation tactics.
These are selfserving tactics engaged in by one person to make him/herself more attractive to another. As the attractiveness of 1 person increases, the likelihood of another complying with his/her wishes increases, this is a very subtle way of obtaining increased power over another person.
Ingratiation efforts are manipulative and calculating.
Appearing to be similar to the target the ingratiator appraises the target person's attitudes, opinions, and interests and modifies his/her statements to match the perceived beliefs of the other
Conforming to the target's wishes making the target feel important
Offering compliments, and gifts rewards for the target.
Expressing liking the target is likely to return the liking
Asking advice makes the target feel respected.
Ingratiation techniques are used in personal selling situations, yet a problem occurs if the target gets wise to the techniques , since even easy targets feel manipulated if that happens :o)
The foot-inthedoor technique.
To increase the likelihood of a prospect saying yes to a moderate request, a person may ask for a smaller request first. By saying yes to the first, small request, the person may agree to the second request to maintain consistency with selfperception. This technique has been used most frequently to increase response rate to market research surveys.
The 'Istanbul bazaar' technique
This is the opposite of the footinthedoor technique. The initial request is very large large enough that no one could be expected to comply with it. It is then followed by a smaller, more reasonable request. This technique relies on the norm of reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity states if a person does something for you, you should do something in return for that person. Illicitly invoking the norm, the requester makes a large request (although never expecting compliance) then appears to give up something by making a smaller request. The target then feels as though he or she must return the favor
Evenapennywillhelp technique.
This technique is based on the tendency for people to want to make themselves "look good." Since everyone has a penny, one would look foolish to say no to the request. The target cannot simply give a penny without looking foolish. The target tends to give whatever is appropriate for the situation.
Inherent in all 4 techniques is the attempt by an influencer to manipulate another by engaging in subtle subterfuge. Remember a simple truth: in using the techniques, the influencer is always lying.
"Persuasion"
Ultimately communications are given to persuade.
Persuasion is a process in which a communication is delivered in order to change beliefs and/or attitudes in a desired manner.
The matchup hypothesis indicates that endorsers who matchup with the product on relevant attributes may be more effective regardless of their likability. Example: Karl Malden played a TV cop for many years. He is an effective spokesperson in explaining the warnings against carrying a lot of cash instead of the American Express card. Yet if they use a source that is perceived as overexposed the audience understands that the source has been bought off.
Fear appeals
Fear appeals communicate the message that unfortunate circumstances will result if the consumer fails to use a particular product or service. Fear appeals (Hitler's and all religious fanatics' methods) are effective at producing attitude change when the message contains one or more of the following types of information: Specific instructions on how to cope with and reduce the fear. An indication that following the instructions will solve the problem. Giving a highfear message to an audience that feels highly threatened and vulnerable to the threat. A supposed solution to the problem can be quickly presented. Fear appeals can be effective by creating emotional responses that focus attention on how to cope with a supposed problem giving for acquainted the problem without questioning it.
Primacy and recency effects
Primacy effect occurs when material early in the message has the most influence. Recency effect occurs when material at the end of the message has the most influence. Information in the middle of a message is relatively poorly remembered and has the least impact.
Repetition effects
This refers to how much repetition is enough and how much is too much (advertising wearout). Usually the slave masters believe that 3 exposures should be sufficient to dumb the consumer and 4 would be too much. In fact even among the lowest forms of TV-watching drooling beings, counter arguments increase as the number of repetitions increase, causing attitudes toward the ad to become (very slowly) more negative. In order to avoid negative reactions due to boredom, the slave masters try to vary the same ad with each repetition to avoid wearout.
Representativeness heuristic
The representativeness heuristic is a rule of thumb in which a person determines the probability that "object a" belongs to "class b" by assessing the degree that object a is similar or stereotypical of class b. "knockoff" brands that have names and packaging similar to leading brands make use of this heuristic. There are at least twenty macaroni producers in Europe that use purposely (almost) the same blue boxes as the universally famous Italian "Pasta Barilla".
Time scales
Because people tend to discount the psychological value of the future loss and having the good now is so important, a consumer might pay a higher price in the future to have the good in the present the delaypayment effect. If a consumer "just missed" a sale, he will feel more of a loss than if the sale was 6 months prior. Consumer selfcontrol refers to the ability of people to delay gratification and avoid making purchases that provide pleasure in the present but pain in the future.
Frequency heuristic
The frequency heuristic occurs when choice is influenced by the mere number of positive and negative attributes associated with a brand, or by the mere number of dimensions on which one brand outperforms another. Consumers act as though they simply count the number of features on which one brand surpasses another little or no attention paid to the relative importance of the features. The slave masters utilize this heuristic when they provide buyers with a series of extra gifts for a purchase to increase the perceived number of benefits, e.g., fragrance companies that offer a "$60" makeup case with the purchase of a $40 bottle of perfume.
Decision makers' bending
Marketers can sometimes bend the decision maker's frame, e.g., meat that is "75% lean" as opposed to meat that is 25% fat. "Best before" as opposed to 'Do not consume after' and so on...
Impulse purchases
Purchases made with no cognitive control in an automatic manner. It is the antithesis of rational consumption.
Clear symptom of a successful strategy implemented by the slave masters. It's defined as a buying action undertaken without a problem having been previously recognized or a buying intention formed prior to entering the store a spur of the moment decision based on positive feelings toward an object, it's in reality the effect of some of the techniques used by the slave masters and explained above. There are some defenses against this, the main one being the very old trick of NEVER buying anything that you didn't list on paper before leaving your house... whatever your mind keeps telling you :o)
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Impulse buying constitutes a substantial 'non-rational' segment of purchasing behaviour, which can assume such excessive proportions that individuals find themselves in considerable financial debt and psychological distress. Empirical studies on 'shopping addiction' or 'compulsive buying' have been carried out recently in the United States (e.g., Friese and Koenig, 1993; O'Guinn and Faber, 1989; Hanley and Wilhelm, 1992), Canada (e.g., Valence, d'Astous, and Fortier, 1988), Germany (e.g., Scherhorn, Reisch and Raab, 1990; Reisch and Scherhorn, 1994) and the United Kingdom (e.g., Elliott, 1994). All suggest that extreme impulse (compulsive) buying is on the increase, affecting an estimated 5% to 10% of the adult population, and that at least occasional bouts of impulse buying are much more common than that. Scherhorn, et al. (1990) describe 25% of German adults as showing some mild compulsive shopping tendencies.
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Group psychology
I won't enter too much in this huge field. Suffice to note that there are two main groups used scientifically for consumer enslaving purposes: Aspiration groups: those sets of people to whom a consumer wishes to belong and Dissociative groups: those sets of people from which the consumer hopes to separate.
To explain this, remember that in a group there are roles and that a "rolerelated" product cluster is a set of products necessary for playing a particular role inside an aspiration group: An example is given by a "business person's" suit, expensive pen, expensive attache case, secretary, etc.
Note also how people that ARE REALLY part of the 'aspiration group' (real rich people, real businessmen, real celebrities etc.) often refuse the 'role-related' product clusters ("real rich" despising any "Lacoste crocodile" (even to the point of sewing it off their T-shirts) or any similar mass-consumer logos, for instance.
One more observation about any "age groups" subdivision: Elder "Mature consumers" group members feel always younger than they actually are, while "teenagers" feel always older than they actually are... the implication is that all slave master's promotional materials focus on portraying both elderly and youngsters at the age they feel not, their chronological age (with clear and dangerous implications: fast cars, cigarettes, booze, etc.).
"Don't waste a second without consuming"
Distribution systems have more and more 'flexibilized' their opening times.
Nowadays you can consume something else in the middle of the night, should you feel that you have not consumed enough during the day. This is also perfectly in line with the increasingly successful struggle of the slave masters in order to destroy any 'Sunday' (intended as the only one day 'without consume') in the name of 'rationalization' and 'globalisation' and 'progress' and 'more flexibility'. In reality the existence of the simple concept of a 'Sunday' (man! a whole day WITHOUT consuming!) is a blasphemy for the slave masters: kids and grown up slaves could eventually come to the idea that consuming is after all NOT so important.
Hence the growing push -everywhere- in order that retail stores can be open weekends and evenings (a trend feebly countered by obsolete churches or almost destroyed worker unions, NOT countered by any mass media or 'opinion leader'). At the same time Mailorder purchasing has increased in "popularity". People are so conditioned that they simply NEED to buy something during those long terrible TV-ads filled Sunday afternoons, and mail-ordering gives them at least the 'good feeling' that they are not condemned to endure a whole day without throwing some more money away :o)
Rituals
In our society goods are able to carry and communicate "cultural" meanings to individuals.
The transfer of meaning from consumer goods to individuals may take place through various rituals, including possessions, exchange, grooming and divestment rituals.
Certain rituals or symbolic actions link people to material goods ('forced' exchanges at birthdays and 'forced' presents at Christmas).
A typical (negative and alarming) symptom of the decay of the society we live in can easily be seen just examining the evolution of print advertising themes during the last 10 years: Utilitarian themes (where a product's benefits were described in terms of practicality and efficiency) have dramatically decreased and Luxury themes increased dramatically (where having the possession is the end in itself, a destructive activity that leads -and is motivated- by the "cultural" meanings of envy, possessiveness, selfishness and greed).
Trends
Trends (the "slave masters' whips", as +ORC called them) have such an importance that apparel companies had to introduce clothing for working women that does not go "out of style" each year. If you observe this kind of clothing you will notice a very interesting series of "no-no-frill" common (functional) characteristics. As a simple rule of thumb, the more of these characteristics carries your own clothing, the less probably it will 'look' obsolete during the next 5-7 years (not that you could care less about that, I know, but nevertheless... :o)
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Hope for the future?
OK, this all said, there are some (small) signs of relief. I'll list some of them:
1) Advertisement is more and more frowned upon. This is a consequence, inter alia of the development of the telecommunication market and of the Web itself.
Clearly once you know that you can get a cellular phone FOR FREE if you decide to listen to some advertisement while you'r using it (Berliner experiment in Germany, Sweden, Benelux experiments, now elsewhere too) you may decide to get it for free, but you (and anybody else) begin to realize at the same time that 'publicity and advertisements' are for poor people and lusers, real rich can AFFORD not to have to listen/see to any advertisement.
The mere promotion of all these 'free in exchange of ads' campaigns (email addresses on the web, cellular phones, television channels etceteras) contributes therefore to the more and more perceived truth that 'advertisements are for slaves and lusers' (as they in fact are, btw) and to a growing refusal of the same advertisement if there's nothing (or not enough) in exchange...
2) The main "segmentation" purpose of the slave masters' strategy (always trying to identify target groups that have divergent time pressures, characteristics or 'gullibility', or targeting certain household segments in order to deliver product designs that should meet AT THE SAME TIME the time needs, characteristics or gullibility of diverse segments) means that the final product will NOT be able to really satisfy well the (perceived) needs of anyone of the different segments and will therefore just be a minimal common denominator for many and not 'the best possible solution' for each one (hence a general bad mood -even among slaves- when indulging in useless consuming). This can of course be exploited and reversed by us.
http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/conself2.htm
By +Insiderbetraying
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something by the counter-culturists
Reality Cracking
Courtesy of fravia's pages of reverse engineering, 10 July 1998
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Yes! Jawohl! Right so! ...and I hope to receive MANY MORE essays on these lines. For the first time in the history of humanity... well, actually I'm not kidding: have a search around and see what else you can find :-) the power and 'cleverness' of the Web offer us CONSUMER, guinea pigs of the marketing mavericks, give us stupid pavlovian slaves, whose brains are being relentlessly maimed to mud by tons of ads every minute of our poor lives, allow us the possibility to understand (first) exchange knowledge (second) and retaliate (third). Great! Read and head! And work! Let's go up from consumers to human beings, let's learn how to counter all the pavlovian techniques of the slave masters!
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Consumer self-defense
(an anti-advertisement tutorial)
Part n.1: Some amoebas slip from under the slide and take a quick look at the lab
by +Insiderbetraying ~ July 1998
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Nota Bene: there are in olive some more 'technical' parts that you may 'safely' jump over. This in fieri document is the first part of a series that I'll publish ONLY on the web (in fact at fravia's) since IMO "paper" publishing doesn't make today (July 1998) any more sense (I mean, if you'r seeking synergy, not money :o)
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Introduction
As you probably know, there is a whole scientific branch called 'consumer behavior'. What you might not know, unless you are on the take, is that there are MANY other less known disciplines aimed at allowing a better (in fact an absolute) control of the consumer (i.e. you).
The declared purpose of these studies is to fool you into buying gadgets and products you don't need (or are downright harmful to you) playing on your most elementary feelings. Pavlov and Goebbels would never have dreamed a so scary (and almost perfect) world of hidden and concealed compulsions. In order to defend yourself you must first of all understand the techniques used by your enemy. I'll here just list some of them, as you will see, this is scary enough per se.
A word of warning: once you will have understood the basic aims of some of the techniques used in order to tame consumers, you'll see your own life from a completely different point of view. While you may already have experienced something similar reading master +ORC's famous 'supermarket enslavement' essay (the masterpiece that started all sort of "reality reversing" studies), I know how upsetting this can be, especially once you'll have found yourself in a very peculiar position vis-à-vis almost all your friends and social relations: in fact they will mostly NOT understand the problem at all. See: some of them will have bought and wear colored nice T-shirts carrying advertisements or huge industrial logos on them; some other will have just returned from the mall with a lot of nice colored bags filled with "offers" they just couldn't resist buying; others, while apparently "listening" to you, will have turned the TV set on and happily munch some "crusty choco-bars" or some "chips" (or whatever they had to buy) under its continuous ads' bombarding... in fact the situation may dangerously recall you those science-fiction films of the fifties where everybody but the hero is completely controlled by some little green aliens... no, actually you'll feel even worse: you'r not an hero, you'r just sorta like an ameba that has escaped from underneath the microscope's slide and took a look at the scientific lab. It is NOT always a very nice feeling :-(
So I'll here -as introduction- just list some techniques, and show some examples... you'll be able to check how terribly true they are all by yourself, as you'll see, it's pretty easy to individuate them... once you know where to look.
Consumer Behavior
The purpose of "Consumer Behavior", as a discipline (which is a fairly young branch, with textbooks beginning to show up in the '60s), is to provide "a foundation for marketing management" through the advanced use of psychological, medical, ethical, cultural and historical knowledge on human behavior. In fact in order to allow what they also hypocritically call 'the development of a managerial strategy', these disciplines use (and misuse) theories and concepts from all the behavioral sciences - psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, demography, and economics. In fact the marketing and advertisement 'scientists' -as you will see- act just like those nazi and Japanese doctors of the '40s, that conducted criminal experiments on human prisoners.
The direct result of all these efforts is an almost pavlovian 'branding' of illiterate consumer minds, just to cite a typical, investigated example, when shown logos of children's brands, adult's brands and consumer products, over 51% of children aged 3 to 6 recognized the "Old Joe" camel cigarette logo. I repeat: children between 3 and 6 (!) and a CIGARETTES image! Second came Nike's logo. (source: Fischer "Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 5 years," JAMA, December 11, 1991, 3145-3148).
In the following text I'll use my own terminology: the term 'slave masters' is used to denote the unhealthy alliance between 'consumer behaviorists', 'marketing buffs', 'commercial sellers/producers' and politician and media anchormen that defend such a society and profit from it (let's not forget just to make an example, that the Reagan administration purposely reduced funding to many of the agencies responsible for enacting the consumer laws). Clearly the term is vague and imprecise, yet it does the job. The term 'puppets' or 'puppet-models' is used to denote the use of 'celebrities' in advertising and media for mass-control and mass-influencing purposes.
Memory patterns
One of the main problems for the slave masters is that consumers have a limited capacity to process information - information overload can impede consumer 'learning' (from their point of view, learning means here being conditioned with the need to buy a determinate product). Since emotions strongly influence how information is processed they are widely used in advertising. In fact Memory processes are influenced by affect and arousal.
A simplified memory model has three components: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
'Sensory memory' is a pre-attention stage where a stimulus is briefly analyzed to determine if it will receive additional processing (short-term in duration, usually less than a second), then follows the 'Short-term memory' stage - where information is temporarily stored while processing. If this information is not rehearsed (silently repeated to encode into long term memory) it is lost within 30 seconds. Short-term memory is characterized by limited capacity - Miller's law states people can handle 7 (+ or - 2) bits of information at a time. Information is transferred from short-term to long-term memory when it has been rehearsed with a transfer process known as encoding. Recall will be more difficult if there is clutter or too many stimuli. Example: the plethora of commercials on a Superbowl program make it difficult for the viewer to recall any one specific commercial. Long-term memory stores the meanings of words, symbols along with the associations among various semantic concepts. Here it is important to notice that 1) visual images or pictures tend to be more memorable than their verbal counterparts, especially when there is low-involvement on the part of the consumer; and 2) words that have high-imagery content are superior to words that do not. Example: high imagery words: table or car, low imagery words- future or peace. The slave masters of course concentrate on the storage process into and on the retrieval process from Long-term memory, so consumers will retrieve the conditioning presented with the advertisements when faced with a choice. Retrieval can be enhanced by repetition of a symbol from the advertisement to the package and by attaching a memorable jingle or music to the advertisement. This is 'brand imprinting'.
Brand imprinting
Brand imprinting consists of a brand 'node' implanted in memory which links a variety of associations (brand name, brand's characteristics, advertisements about the brand, the product category, and emotional reactions to the brand and its advertisements).
Some shrewd techniques are here used to numb the consumer, the most common one takes advantage of a psychological characteristic of our specie called the Zeigarnik effect (if a task is interrupted, material relevant to the task tends to be remembered ).
This is the concept behind all interrupted :15 second commercials. The first :15 presents 'information', is interrupted with a :30 that is different, and then a :15 returns to complete the presentation of the material begun with the first :15. This snaps the Zeigarnik effect: the slave will remember.
Behavioral learning and conditioning
'Behavioral learning' is the nice name that the slave masters have found for 'consumer conditioning'. It is divided in three main sectors: Classical consumer conditioning, Operant consumer conditioning and Vicarious consumer conditioning.
Classical conditioning - behavior is influenced by a stimulus that occurs prior to the behavior and elicits it in a manner that appears to be a reflex. Advertisers try to identify messages, sights or sounds that will elicit positive reactions from consumers to associate their product with a positive stimuli - thus eliciting a positive reaction to the product (half-naked babe on the car roof). The classical conditioning framework was discovered by Ivan Pavlov in his work with dogs and those same principles are ACTIVELY used by the slave masters. You better understand them, at least in their most elementary form.
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In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus or CS) is repeatedly paired with the eliciting stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus or UCS). To be effective the CS needs to occur prior to the UCS so it predicts the UCS. After a number of pairings, the ability to elicit a response is transferred from the UCS to the CS. The response is called the conditioned response or CR.
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A couple of examples: stores and mall all over the world know that the tempo of music played in the store resulted in various shopping speeds by consumers. The slower (and rithmic) the music, the slower (and almost trance-inducted) the shopping speed, the more (up to 40% !!) groceries purchased. La va sans dire that the customers would NOT have purchased this surplus if they could have maintained self-control. It is also obvious that music is only ONE of the 'hypnotizing' factors in play (see +ORC's essay). Note that customers are completely unaware of any differences in music cadence, since the effects of music operate at below consciousness levels. Music is also used purposely elsewhere: take restaurants: although customers take more time to complete their dinners when slow music is played, liquor sales increase. Every time the consumers take longer to eat, the time spent waiting for food increase the sales of liquor & aperitifs & second bottles of wine or mineral water made while waiting for the food... a trade off between number of times a table can be used and higher recipes per consumer... so to say a "slow food benefit" vis-à-vis fast food joints.
Another example, all stimuli associated with spending money (credit card insignias) actually elicite a spending response in shoppers. Yet another example: Using the symbol of the national flag (a conditioned stimulus) with a product or service (a previously neutral stimulus). The product or service gains increased status via higher order conditioning. Note that the conditioned stimulus should be consistently paired with the unconditioned stimulus. For example, if the slave masters use a 'celebrity bait' with a product in an advertisement, the celebrity should be shown in point-of-purchase displays as well.
Operant conditioning - behavior is influenced by the consequences of the behavior. Sales promotion and 'personal selling' involve providing consumers with reinforcers and/or punishments to influence later behavior. Operant conditioning is often used inn order to shape consumer responses - like training animals. Totally new operant behaviors can be created by selectively reinforcing behaviors that successively approximate the desired instrumental response. This happens for example giving consumers a free sample of a product. The reinforcement is the product's performance. The added reinforcement is the enclosed coupon for purchase. In the promotional mix, operant conditioning is particularly applied to personal selling and sales promotion. Sales people attempt to reinforce desired behaviors of clients by reinforcers (compliments, smiles, lunches, Christmas gifts) . Buying behaviors are shaped with sales promotions, discounts, coupons, samples, and contests.
Vicarious conditioning - behavior is influenced by observing the actions of others and by modeling or imitating those actions. Many advertising strategies make use of appealing puppet-models (Jordan, Spice girls, whatever) using a product or experiencing its positive outcomes in the hopes the consumer will imitate the behavior. Effectiveness of the puppet-model increases in the following instances: 1.The puppet is physically attractive. 2. The puppet is "successful". 3. The puppet is shown overcoming difficulties and then succeeding.
Of course, the more dependent, and the lower the self-esteem of the consumer the more prone he/she will be to model the behavior of successful puppets. Note that this also apply, more generally, to the 'celebrities' hype all over the media. The slave masters use vicarious learning for 3 purposes. Puppet's actions can be used to create entirely new types of consumer behaviors. Puppets can be used to decrease the likelihood that an undesired consumer behavior will occur. Puppets can be used to facilitate the occurrence of a previously learned consumer behavior.
Motivation
Time to examine what the slave masters call 'motivation'.
Motivation refers to an activated state within a consumer that leads to the goal-directed behavior. It consists of drives, urges, wishes, affect or desires that initiate the sequence of events leading to the goal-directed behavior. It begins with a stimulus that is processed by the consumer, going through the information processing stages of exposure, attention, and comprehension. That stimulus can come from inside the consumer or from outside the consumer.
Need activation a discrepancy caused when the stimulus processed causes the actual state of being to diverge from the desired state. Needs can be innate or learned and are never fully satisfied. Needs produce drive states. Affect is the central concept behind the experiential perspective of consumer behavior. Evidence suggests that even low intensity feelings created by advertisements may affect cognition and behavior. Evidence also indicates that consumer responses to advertisements have two emotional dimensions positive and negative affect. The emotion created can activate a consumer and place the consumer into a drive state. There's a bias called 'the fundamental attribution error' which is widely used by the slave masters: people are unfortunately biased to make internal attributions. I.e. they tend wrongly to believe that a person's actions or words are caused by that person's true beliefs and preferences, and that they are not making certain statements about a product influenced by environmental pressures like the company they work for and the money they gain for that. That's another of the reasons behind the use of the celebrities puppets and of 'average people', 'good granny', 'old dentist', 'cooking grand-ma' or various 'peopleonthestreet' interviews and ads.
Psychoanalytic theory and promotional strategy
The slave masters, using Psychoanalytic Theory, use symbols and flights of fantasy to propel consumers to buy their products. All symbols that exist in Psychoanalytic Theory are being used, such as phallic and ovarian symbols, for instance, to release sexual energy or libido.
Product symbolism
Products may act as symbols for consumers, expressing a stereotyped "something" about their owners. Of course the lower the self-esteem of the consumer the more he will view his possessions as extensions of himself.
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Wicklund and Gollwitzer observed that people make use of material possessions, amongst other strategies, to compensate for perceived inadequacies in certain dimensions of their self-concept. For instance, by displaying a recognised masculine symbol, such as strutting around in a black leather motorbike suit, a young man can compensate for not feeling 'masculine' enough by using the object to tell both himself and others that he is indeed 'masculine'. This compensatory function of material objects obviously entails that the 'symbols' have to fit in with a person's gender (amongst other social categories) to provide a potential bridge for closing perceived discrepancies between actual and ideal dimensions of self.
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Certain products have a self-image/productimage congruence. Example: Automobiles, health products, cleaning products, grooming products, leisure products, clothing, retail store patronage, food products, cigarettes, home appliances, magazines, home furnishings
All products that consumers use to communicate themselves to others act as symbols and have three characteristics. 1. They must have visibility in use their purchase, consumption, and disposition are readily apparent to others 2.The product must show variability some consumers have the resources to own the product and some do not. 3.The product must have its 'personalizability' the extent to which a product denotes a stereotypical image to the average user.
The LOV (list of values) scale used by the slave masters has 3 dimensions:
1.Individual values (selffulfillment, excitement, sense of accomplishment, and selfrespect). 2.Focus on the external world (belonging, being wellrespected, security). 3.Interpersonal orientation (fun and Enjoyment, warm relationships with others).
Halo effects and imaginary attributes
Halo effects occur when consumers assume that because a product is good on one product characteristic it is also good on another product characteristic. Example: if a consumer believes that crest toothpaste is the best cavity fighting toothpaste, he might also belief it has the lowest abrasive qualities.
Directing consumers' attention to an existing (or not existing) attribute
Directing consumers' attention to an attribute, and causing them to allocate cognitive capacity to the attribute increases the perceived importance of the attribute. It doesn't matter in the least if said attribute does not exist. Example: in the 80s, burger king convinced consumers that an important attribute of fast food hamburgers was the particular method of cooking flame broiling . Colgate used for year a non existent additive 'Gardol' (most toothpaste and soap advertisements resort to fantastic chemicalfictionist constructions)
Mere exposure phenomenon and behavior
Mere exposure phenomenon is a method through which positive feelings may be formed through repeated exposures to a stimulus. This is of course not cognitively based, as a matter of fact it has no rational motivation whatever: positive feelings from repeated exposures can occur without the person consciously knowing or perceiving the repetitions or familiarity of the object. The slave masters use mere exposure by developing strategies that ensure that the product, its name, or symbol, are repeatedly encountered by the consumer, e.g., Coke, Budweiser, since behavior formation corresponds to the behavioral influence perspective. In fact behavior results from people engaging in behaviors because of environmental or situational factors. Example: large retail chains design the physical layout of departments within the store to create behavior directly (see +ORC's essay). The entrance to a department store may have high status products directly in front of the door (jewelry, cosmetics) with sensuously appealing options to the right (lingerie). The consumer's first hurdle is to walk past the 'attractive' departments without buying anything there.
Physical layout can induce behaviors through aisle arrangement or then use of textures, smells and lighting. This is called Atmospherics. Atmospherics are "the effort to design buying environments to produce specific emotional effects in the buyer that enhance his/her probability of purchase" this is pure pavlovian conditioning btw.
The Fishbein models
A mathematical model used by the slave masters (Fishbein)
The Fishbein attitudetowardstheobject model relies on an algebraic formula to explain the decision process consumers actually go through.
The formula is:
Ao = bi x ei
Ao the overall attitude towards the object.
Bi the belief of whether the object "o" has some particular 'magic'
attribute or achieves some particular 'lure' goal.
Ei the evaluation of the goodness of the attribute to the consumer.
Later Fishbein developed another model (BI = w1 (ab) + w2 (SN)) that contains a new construct called the subjective norm which assesses what consumers believe other people think they should do, but we don't need to get into such details here.
Ok, how do the slave masters assess if the promotion was able to influence attitudes (i.e.: has the slave's behavior changed after being bombarded)?.
Usually the consumer is tied into a lowinvolvement information processing where cognitive responses are less likely to occur. Since the consumer is not considering the pros and cons of the issue, he uses peripheral cues (attractiveness and expertise of the source, the number of arguments presented, positive or negative stimuli in message context, music, etc.) to determine acceptance or rejection of the message. Research has indicated that using peripheral cues, such as the physical attractiveness of a model as an endorser, had great impact on consumers. Companies attempt to create a unit relation between the endorser and the brand (x) by 1. Hiring puppets who are supposed experts (or seen as experts) in using the product, 2.Signing the endorser to longterm, exclusive contracts so that the celebrity puppet is associated only with the same company's brand, 3.Having the puppet consistently wear or use the product when in public to strengthen the association with the product.
Techniques of ingratiation (Lying)
Ingratiation tactics.
These are selfserving tactics engaged in by one person to make him/herself more attractive to another. As the attractiveness of 1 person increases, the likelihood of another complying with his/her wishes increases, this is a very subtle way of obtaining increased power over another person.
Ingratiation efforts are manipulative and calculating.
Appearing to be similar to the target the ingratiator appraises the target person's attitudes, opinions, and interests and modifies his/her statements to match the perceived beliefs of the other
Conforming to the target's wishes making the target feel important
Offering compliments, and gifts rewards for the target.
Expressing liking the target is likely to return the liking
Asking advice makes the target feel respected.
Ingratiation techniques are used in personal selling situations, yet a problem occurs if the target gets wise to the techniques , since even easy targets feel manipulated if that happens :o)
The foot-inthedoor technique.
To increase the likelihood of a prospect saying yes to a moderate request, a person may ask for a smaller request first. By saying yes to the first, small request, the person may agree to the second request to maintain consistency with selfperception. This technique has been used most frequently to increase response rate to market research surveys.
The 'Istanbul bazaar' technique
This is the opposite of the footinthedoor technique. The initial request is very large large enough that no one could be expected to comply with it. It is then followed by a smaller, more reasonable request. This technique relies on the norm of reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity states if a person does something for you, you should do something in return for that person. Illicitly invoking the norm, the requester makes a large request (although never expecting compliance) then appears to give up something by making a smaller request. The target then feels as though he or she must return the favor
Evenapennywillhelp technique.
This technique is based on the tendency for people to want to make themselves "look good." Since everyone has a penny, one would look foolish to say no to the request. The target cannot simply give a penny without looking foolish. The target tends to give whatever is appropriate for the situation.
Inherent in all 4 techniques is the attempt by an influencer to manipulate another by engaging in subtle subterfuge. Remember a simple truth: in using the techniques, the influencer is always lying.
"Persuasion"
Ultimately communications are given to persuade.
Persuasion is a process in which a communication is delivered in order to change beliefs and/or attitudes in a desired manner.
The matchup hypothesis indicates that endorsers who matchup with the product on relevant attributes may be more effective regardless of their likability. Example: Karl Malden played a TV cop for many years. He is an effective spokesperson in explaining the warnings against carrying a lot of cash instead of the American Express card. Yet if they use a source that is perceived as overexposed the audience understands that the source has been bought off.
Fear appeals
Fear appeals communicate the message that unfortunate circumstances will result if the consumer fails to use a particular product or service. Fear appeals (Hitler's and all religious fanatics' methods) are effective at producing attitude change when the message contains one or more of the following types of information: Specific instructions on how to cope with and reduce the fear. An indication that following the instructions will solve the problem. Giving a highfear message to an audience that feels highly threatened and vulnerable to the threat. A supposed solution to the problem can be quickly presented. Fear appeals can be effective by creating emotional responses that focus attention on how to cope with a supposed problem giving for acquainted the problem without questioning it.
Primacy and recency effects
Primacy effect occurs when material early in the message has the most influence. Recency effect occurs when material at the end of the message has the most influence. Information in the middle of a message is relatively poorly remembered and has the least impact.
Repetition effects
This refers to how much repetition is enough and how much is too much (advertising wearout). Usually the slave masters believe that 3 exposures should be sufficient to dumb the consumer and 4 would be too much. In fact even among the lowest forms of TV-watching drooling beings, counter arguments increase as the number of repetitions increase, causing attitudes toward the ad to become (very slowly) more negative. In order to avoid negative reactions due to boredom, the slave masters try to vary the same ad with each repetition to avoid wearout.
Representativeness heuristic
The representativeness heuristic is a rule of thumb in which a person determines the probability that "object a" belongs to "class b" by assessing the degree that object a is similar or stereotypical of class b. "knockoff" brands that have names and packaging similar to leading brands make use of this heuristic. There are at least twenty macaroni producers in Europe that use purposely (almost) the same blue boxes as the universally famous Italian "Pasta Barilla".
Time scales
Because people tend to discount the psychological value of the future loss and having the good now is so important, a consumer might pay a higher price in the future to have the good in the present the delaypayment effect. If a consumer "just missed" a sale, he will feel more of a loss than if the sale was 6 months prior. Consumer selfcontrol refers to the ability of people to delay gratification and avoid making purchases that provide pleasure in the present but pain in the future.
Frequency heuristic
The frequency heuristic occurs when choice is influenced by the mere number of positive and negative attributes associated with a brand, or by the mere number of dimensions on which one brand outperforms another. Consumers act as though they simply count the number of features on which one brand surpasses another little or no attention paid to the relative importance of the features. The slave masters utilize this heuristic when they provide buyers with a series of extra gifts for a purchase to increase the perceived number of benefits, e.g., fragrance companies that offer a "$60" makeup case with the purchase of a $40 bottle of perfume.
Decision makers' bending
Marketers can sometimes bend the decision maker's frame, e.g., meat that is "75% lean" as opposed to meat that is 25% fat. "Best before" as opposed to 'Do not consume after' and so on...
Impulse purchases
Purchases made with no cognitive control in an automatic manner. It is the antithesis of rational consumption.
Clear symptom of a successful strategy implemented by the slave masters. It's defined as a buying action undertaken without a problem having been previously recognized or a buying intention formed prior to entering the store a spur of the moment decision based on positive feelings toward an object, it's in reality the effect of some of the techniques used by the slave masters and explained above. There are some defenses against this, the main one being the very old trick of NEVER buying anything that you didn't list on paper before leaving your house... whatever your mind keeps telling you :o)
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Impulse buying constitutes a substantial 'non-rational' segment of purchasing behaviour, which can assume such excessive proportions that individuals find themselves in considerable financial debt and psychological distress. Empirical studies on 'shopping addiction' or 'compulsive buying' have been carried out recently in the United States (e.g., Friese and Koenig, 1993; O'Guinn and Faber, 1989; Hanley and Wilhelm, 1992), Canada (e.g., Valence, d'Astous, and Fortier, 1988), Germany (e.g., Scherhorn, Reisch and Raab, 1990; Reisch and Scherhorn, 1994) and the United Kingdom (e.g., Elliott, 1994). All suggest that extreme impulse (compulsive) buying is on the increase, affecting an estimated 5% to 10% of the adult population, and that at least occasional bouts of impulse buying are much more common than that. Scherhorn, et al. (1990) describe 25% of German adults as showing some mild compulsive shopping tendencies.
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Group psychology
I won't enter too much in this huge field. Suffice to note that there are two main groups used scientifically for consumer enslaving purposes: Aspiration groups: those sets of people to whom a consumer wishes to belong and Dissociative groups: those sets of people from which the consumer hopes to separate.
To explain this, remember that in a group there are roles and that a "rolerelated" product cluster is a set of products necessary for playing a particular role inside an aspiration group: An example is given by a "business person's" suit, expensive pen, expensive attache case, secretary, etc.
Note also how people that ARE REALLY part of the 'aspiration group' (real rich people, real businessmen, real celebrities etc.) often refuse the 'role-related' product clusters ("real rich" despising any "Lacoste crocodile" (even to the point of sewing it off their T-shirts) or any similar mass-consumer logos, for instance.
One more observation about any "age groups" subdivision: Elder "Mature consumers" group members feel always younger than they actually are, while "teenagers" feel always older than they actually are... the implication is that all slave master's promotional materials focus on portraying both elderly and youngsters at the age they feel not, their chronological age (with clear and dangerous implications: fast cars, cigarettes, booze, etc.).
"Don't waste a second without consuming"
Distribution systems have more and more 'flexibilized' their opening times.
Nowadays you can consume something else in the middle of the night, should you feel that you have not consumed enough during the day. This is also perfectly in line with the increasingly successful struggle of the slave masters in order to destroy any 'Sunday' (intended as the only one day 'without consume') in the name of 'rationalization' and 'globalisation' and 'progress' and 'more flexibility'. In reality the existence of the simple concept of a 'Sunday' (man! a whole day WITHOUT consuming!) is a blasphemy for the slave masters: kids and grown up slaves could eventually come to the idea that consuming is after all NOT so important.
Hence the growing push -everywhere- in order that retail stores can be open weekends and evenings (a trend feebly countered by obsolete churches or almost destroyed worker unions, NOT countered by any mass media or 'opinion leader'). At the same time Mailorder purchasing has increased in "popularity". People are so conditioned that they simply NEED to buy something during those long terrible TV-ads filled Sunday afternoons, and mail-ordering gives them at least the 'good feeling' that they are not condemned to endure a whole day without throwing some more money away :o)
Rituals
In our society goods are able to carry and communicate "cultural" meanings to individuals.
The transfer of meaning from consumer goods to individuals may take place through various rituals, including possessions, exchange, grooming and divestment rituals.
Certain rituals or symbolic actions link people to material goods ('forced' exchanges at birthdays and 'forced' presents at Christmas).
A typical (negative and alarming) symptom of the decay of the society we live in can easily be seen just examining the evolution of print advertising themes during the last 10 years: Utilitarian themes (where a product's benefits were described in terms of practicality and efficiency) have dramatically decreased and Luxury themes increased dramatically (where having the possession is the end in itself, a destructive activity that leads -and is motivated- by the "cultural" meanings of envy, possessiveness, selfishness and greed).
Trends
Trends (the "slave masters' whips", as +ORC called them) have such an importance that apparel companies had to introduce clothing for working women that does not go "out of style" each year. If you observe this kind of clothing you will notice a very interesting series of "no-no-frill" common (functional) characteristics. As a simple rule of thumb, the more of these characteristics carries your own clothing, the less probably it will 'look' obsolete during the next 5-7 years (not that you could care less about that, I know, but nevertheless... :o)
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Hope for the future?
OK, this all said, there are some (small) signs of relief. I'll list some of them:
1) Advertisement is more and more frowned upon. This is a consequence, inter alia of the development of the telecommunication market and of the Web itself.
Clearly once you know that you can get a cellular phone FOR FREE if you decide to listen to some advertisement while you'r using it (Berliner experiment in Germany, Sweden, Benelux experiments, now elsewhere too) you may decide to get it for free, but you (and anybody else) begin to realize at the same time that 'publicity and advertisements' are for poor people and lusers, real rich can AFFORD not to have to listen/see to any advertisement.
The mere promotion of all these 'free in exchange of ads' campaigns (email addresses on the web, cellular phones, television channels etceteras) contributes therefore to the more and more perceived truth that 'advertisements are for slaves and lusers' (as they in fact are, btw) and to a growing refusal of the same advertisement if there's nothing (or not enough) in exchange...
2) The main "segmentation" purpose of the slave masters' strategy (always trying to identify target groups that have divergent time pressures, characteristics or 'gullibility', or targeting certain household segments in order to deliver product designs that should meet AT THE SAME TIME the time needs, characteristics or gullibility of diverse segments) means that the final product will NOT be able to really satisfy well the (perceived) needs of anyone of the different segments and will therefore just be a minimal common denominator for many and not 'the best possible solution' for each one (hence a general bad mood -even among slaves- when indulging in useless consuming). This can of course be exploited and reversed by us.
http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/conself2.htm
ARTIST: Bob Marley and the Wailers
TITLE: Redemption Song
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my ha-a-and was made strong
By the hand of the almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
{Refrain}
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom
'Cause all I ever had
Redemption songs, redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book
{Refrain}
Redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery...
How long shall they kill our prophets...
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom
'Cause all I ever had, redemption songs
All I ever had, redemption songs
These songs of freedom, songs of freedom
TITLE: Redemption Song
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my ha-a-and was made strong
By the hand of the almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
{Refrain}
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom
'Cause all I ever had
Redemption songs, redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book
{Refrain}
Redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery...
How long shall they kill our prophets...
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom
'Cause all I ever had, redemption songs
All I ever had, redemption songs
These songs of freedom, songs of freedom
Media Effect: The Psychology of Television
i'm trying to collect references that address the ideas on which the concepts i've talked about are based or have some bearing.
Bryan, J. and D. Zillion.
Explain what is meant by "cultivation." Discuss the methods of cultivation analysis.
Daily exposure to television provides a centralized mass media production of a coherent set of images and messages produced for total populations, and in its relatively nonselective, almost ritualistic use by most viewers. This total pattern accounts for the historically new and distinct consequences of living with television as a cultivation of shared conceptions of reality among otherwise diverse populations. Compared to other media, television provides a relatively restricted set of choices for a virtually unrestricted variety of interests and public gratification. Most of its programs distribute material by commercial necessity designed to be watched by large and heterogeneous audiences in a relatively nonselective fashion.
Much time, energy and money has been invested in efforts to change people's attitudes and behaviors. These include massive long term and common exposure of large and heterogeneous publics to mass-distributed and repetitive systems of stories. However, research traditions and ideological inhibitions both tend to produce resistance to the "cultivation perspective."
Scholars steeped in research efforts find it difficult to accept the emphasis of cultivation analysis on total immersion rather than on selective viewing and on the spread of stable similarities of outlook rather than on the remaining sources of cultural differentiation and change.
The Cultural Indicators project focused early on the nature and functions of television violence. As it developed, the project continued to take into account a wider range of topics, issues and concerns. Studies extended into audience conceptions of gender, minority, age-role stereotypes, health, science, the family, educational achievement and others.
The project has used the term "cultivation" to describe the independent contributions television viewing makes to viewer conceptions of social reality. The "cultivation differential" margins the difference in conceptions of reality between light and heavy viewers in the same demographic subgroups. This "cultivation" does not provide another definition for "effects," nor does it necessarily imply a one-way monolithic process.
The elements of cultivation do not originate with television or appear out of a void. Layers of social, personal and cultural context also determine the shape, scope and degree of the contribution television is likely to make. People get born into a symbolic environment with television as its mainstream. Children begin viewing several years before they begin reading, and well before they can even talk. Television viewing both shapes and stabilizes life-styles and outlooks.
Cultivation should not be confused with simple reinforcement nor should it suggest that television's viewing becomes merely symptomatic of other dispositions and outlooks. The point is that cultivations does not need to be conceived as unidirectional but rather like a gravitational process. The angle and direction of the "pull" depends upon there groups of viewers and their styles of life are with reference to the line of gravity, the "mainstream" world of television.While each group may strain in their own direction, a central point affects all groups.
Cultivation implies the steady entrenchment of mainstream orientation for most viewers. The process of apparent convergence of outlooks is called mainstreaming.
Cultivation analysis begins with message system analysis identifying the most recurrent, stable and overreaching patterns of television content. The consistent images, portrayals and values cut across most types of programs become an integral part of most viewers, the heavy viewers in particular. They remain as aggregate messages embedded in television as a system rather than in specific programs, types or genres.
Using standard techniques of surveying methodology, questions are posed to samples of adults, adolescents or children. Secondary analysis of large-scale national surveys are often used when they include questions that relate to potential "lessons" of the television world and viewing data are available for the respondents.
The questions posed do not mention television, and the respondents awareness of or beliefs in the source of their information are seen as irrelevant. The resulting relations between amount of viewing and the tendency to respond to these questions in the terms of the dominant and repetitive facts, values and ideologies of the world of television reflect televisions contribution to viewer's conceptions of social reality.
The observable evidence of cultivation is likely to be modest in terms of absolute size. Even as viewers may watch several hours of television a day, and live in the same general culture as heavy viewers, the discovery of a systematic pattern of even small but pervasive differences between light and heavy viewers may have far-reaching consequences similar to the few degrees to create an ice age or global warming. A single percentage point may affect several million dollars worth of advertising.
Findings of cultivation provide interesting beliefs that often run contrary to reality. Television drama tends to be sharply underrepresent older people, even as the over 65 age group constitute the fastest growing of the real-world population; heavy viewers were more likely to feel that the elderly constitute a vanishing breed. Another example relates to violence. Well over half of the major television characters become involved in some kind of violent actions. FBI statistics indicate that in any one year, less than 1% of the people in the United States are victims of criminal violence.
How does cultivation analysis compare to traditional approaches to measuring the effects of media?
Cultivation analysis is not a substitute for but a complement to traditional approaches to media effects. Traditional research is concerned with change rather than stability and with processes more applicable to media that enter a person's life at later stages with mobility, literacy, etc.
Neither "before and after exposure" models, nor the notion of "predispositions" as intervening variables apply in the context of cultivation analysis. Television enters life in infancy so there is no "before exposure" condition. Television plays a role in the formation of those very "predispositions" that later intervene and often resist other influences and attempts at persuasion.
Cultivation analysis concentrates on the enduring and common consequences of growing up and living with television as a series of stable, resistant and widely shared assumptions, images, and conceptions expressing the institutional characteristics and interests of the medium itself.
Explain the concept of "priming."
"Priming" holds that when people witness, read or hear of an event via the mass media, ideas having a similar meaning are activated in them for a short time afterwards, and that these thoughts in turn can activate other semantically related ideas and action tendencies. This theory derives from a cognitive-neoassociative perspective that regards memory as a collection of networks, with each network consisting of units or nodes that represent substantive elements of thought, feelings and so forth, linked through associated pathways. The presentation of a certain stimulus "primes" other semantically related concepts, thus heightening the likelihood that thoughts with much the same meaning as the presentation stimulus will come to mind.
A rapidly increasing body of research supports the influence of priming effects can have on people thoughts and actions.
Discuss the priming of aggression-related ideas as it applies to television, radio and other forms of media.
Feelings and motor tendencies tend to be activated. Depressive thoughts frequently generate depressive feelings, whereas ideas having an aggressive meaning can, under proper conditions, evoke angry feelings and even aggressive action tendencies.
As a result, the present analysis suggests what could be the result of depictions of violence in the mass media: Under certain circumstances and for a short period of time, there is an increased chance that viewers will have hostile thoughts that can color their interpretation of other people and they can believe other forms of aggressive conduct can be justified and will bring them benefits in addition to be overly aggressively inclined.
This priming process can occur automatically and even without awareness. In the experiments of Bargh and Pietromonaco, participants were unknowingly exposed to single words, some of which were sematically related to hostility. Then, after reading a brief description of a target person, the participants had to evaluate that person. Even though the participants had not consciously been aware of the primed words, the more hostility related words to which they had been exposed, the more negative were their evaluation of the target person.
In other studies social interactions could be modified by primed ideas. Male participants read a story describing either a "boy-meets-girl" encounter or a control story. Those who read the "boy-meets-girl" story later smiled more, talked more, leaned forward more, and gazed at the female confederate more than those who read the control story.
In another study participants were exposed to the names of people having varying degrees of association with the notion of hostility. Thus, Joe Frazier had a moderately strong association with hostility, whereas Billie Jean King, the tennis player, was associated with non-hostility. When the participants were later then given a chance to evaluate an ambiguously described person, those who were primed with then names linked to hostility rated the individual as more hostile than the nonprimed group.
Good reasons exist to believe that portrayals of aggression in the print and aural media can also influence members of the audience adversely. Priming experiments requiring their participants to read and think about printed lists of words with hostile and symbols were relatively harsh towards another person.
Video games with their associated popularity and typically violent content have been targets for researchers. One study linked the emotional responses to 22 common arcade games and found that the predominant reaction to the games was aggression and hostility. Another focused on the content of the games and investigated the short-term effects of highly or mildly aggressive video games. Participants were assigned to play either a highly aggressive video game, a mildly aggressive game or a no-game control situation and their hostility, anxiety and depression were assessed later. The high aggression game led to higher hostility than the mild aggression game, although the results did not attain the conventional levels of significance. Those playing the high level aggressive game were significantly more anxious than the other participants.
This trend followed for sporting events such as football and gymnastics. Football can be so aggressive that even the mere mentioning of the name may evoke aggression in some fans.
Exceptions to this priming effect do indeed exist. Violence does not always have aggression-enhancing consequences. Contact sports do not always generate aggressions and hostility. Even when the aggressive events do activate ideas, feelings, and actions associated with aggression, these internal responses do not necessarily lead to the open display of violent behavior. Various intervening variables may influence the changes that people viewing the media violence will be overtly assaultive themselves.
Compare and contrast the two types of models for mass media persuasion.
Media persuasion models consist of direct and indirect methodologies. The ultimate goal of both consists of influencing people to purchase certain goods, vote for a political candidate, engage in safer driving, eating, and sexual activity, purchase specific goods, and donate money to various causes.
The initial assumptions about the effects of the mass media was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s when mass communications techniques were quite potent. There was a conclusion that "propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world." The direct model resulted from that various transmissions of information via mass communications producing direct effects on attitudes and behavior. There was an assumption that the audience was captive, attentive and gullible.
Many analysts of this period formulated their startling assessments of the power of the media on informal and anecdotal evidence rather than careful empirical research. Few attempts were made to actually measure the attitudes of message recipients prior to and following propaganda efforts.
The indirect model was tempered considerably in the next two decades largely as a result of the subsequent empirical research conducted. There was an analysis of survey information that concluded that the effectiveness of mass communications campaigns could not be increased simply by increasing the flow of messages. The psychological barriers to effective communications must be considered and properly dealt with to promote the message.
Some studies suggested that a campaign tended to simply reinforce people's already existing beliefs rather than change them. Some researchers argued that when public attitude change was produced, it was only indirectly attributable to the media. The media was thus more effective in influencing various opinion leaders than the average person, and these opinion leaders were responsible for changes in the mass public.
Political communication effects research as shown by many new areas of development over the last few years. Summarize the four types of cognitive changes in television.
The four types of cognitive changes that have received considerable attention in recent years are agenda setting, priming, knowledge gain and cognitive complexity, and framing.
Agenda setting bases itself upon the medial control of the agendas by setting certain issues for prominent coverage and prominence subsequently determines which issues are judged as important. Evidence exists that public judgments of the salience of issues follow the prominence of the media agenda. This evidence consisted of time-series comparisons of the national news agenda, panel studies examining the sequencing of changes in the media agenda with corresponding changes in the issue saliences of individual respondents and cross-sectional surveys comparing contrasting media agendas with the issue saliences of their respective audiences.
Audience agenda setting research has become so well recognized that it has become almost synonymous with powerful political effects of media. Real-world events such as wars and shifts in the economy are more likely to command the agenda than are fluctuations in media coverage. Less certain is how the power to control the agenda is distributed between the media and sources and how the news agenda is struggled over.
Priming is a key concept of the "cognitive revolution" that has transformed the social sciences. As applied to media use, exposure to a given type of content or message activates a concept, which for a period of time increases the probability that the concept, and thought and memories connected with it, will come to mind again.
Knowledge gain lies in the ability of the media to convey discernible if modest amounts of information to the audiences. Citizens remain remarkably uninformed about public affairs. While college graduates have greatly increased, factual knowledge of politics has actually declined. While viewers watched about 20 stories on average, they recalled only 1.2 in an interview immediately after a television news broadcast. Less than half were recalled even when the story heads were read to them.
Many reason have been offered for this relatively weak increments of knowledge conveyed by the new media. Most prominent is the charge that the "horse-race" coverage of political campaigns, focusing on who is winning rather than on issues, deters learning. News content considered more generally may also limit learning. Picking news for its entertainment value rather than for its political importance may prevent more complex issues from reaching the public. Increasingly shorter sound-bites on television news and factoids devoid of historical or political context in all media may lead to information deletion.
Framing considers the journalist's role in presenting new for the intended audience. The frame of a story sets a "schemata or interpretation" that allows individuals to "locate, perceive, identify and level" information coming from the environment. Framing typically involves low levels of attention and the use of various cognitive shortcuts to make enough sense of a story or issues. Processing is likely to be at the low level of just "good enough."
Audience framing is a complex construct in that it refers both to the process of individual and interpersonal sense-making and to the content or output of that process. One striking feature of the meanings given to new stories and to political issues by individuals is the incredible number of interpretations. Audience frames can be coded in various ways, such as cognitive complexity, personal vs. systemic causation, and these structures affect how people think and talk about issues.
Discuss how violence as portrayed on television affects the minds of viewers.
As each new entertainment or communications media appears in society, an unease about its mass appeal emerges. The very advent of printing causes some countries to have special "licenses" for printing presses. The appearance of popular romance and adventure novels in the 19th century caused unease as did the popularity of motion pictures in the early part of this century. The earliest coordinated social scientific research on media violence began in the 1920s in the United States with violence in motion pictures. Findings indicated that many scenes of crime and sex could be found in the movies that were contrary to moral standards of the day, but no conclusive evidence emerged that indicated a degenerating effect on the audience. Delinquency studies suggested, however, that there might be a link. One study of delinquency prone youngsters reported a direct connection of motion pictures in shaping delinquents into criminal careers. The methods of this study were highly criticized at the time.
In the 1950s attention was focused on comic books. While the analysis contained inconsistencies, the most significant impact of the most publicized study was to seriously undermine the comic industry. The studies themselves were based on interviews with children in clinical settings, with often unsystematic and ambiguous interpretations that gave rise to more questions than answers.
Since its inception, television has been the subject of studies of the link between the media and its portrayal of violence. The Surgeon General produced a report that stated that there was some evidence between viewing violent television and the likelihood of aggressive behavior among viewers.
Several major issues continue to arise in public debates about media violence. These include questions about how much violence exists in various media, the extent to which individuals are exposed to violent media content, and what effects media violence has on its consumers. Another interesting question is what does the public really think and feel about media violence.
Does TV violence cause aggressive behavior among viewers? What kind of effects are being referred to? How are the effects measured and to what extent can the evidence deriving from these measures be unquestioningly accepted?
TV violence may have an impact on viewers at a number of psychological levels that may broadly be classified into cognitive, affective and behavioral. Behavioral effect have received the greater attention.
According to the behavioral catharsis theory, accumulated aggressive impulses can be discharged by individuals if they become absorbed in violent events. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that individuals can harmlessly discharge their aggressive impulses either through fantasizing about violence or through watching fictional portrayals of violence. Reports of reduction of aggressive tendencies among teenage boys were reported as well. This research was criticized for failing to control for or take into account a number of important factors, and attempts to replicate it failed.
The arousal hypothesis suggests that watching violent television programs can arouse viewers and make them excited. Though not restricted to violent content, sexual or humorous content can have the same effect. There is some suggestion that arousal quickly disperses and that even a short delay between initial emotional arousal and an opportunity to respond aggressively can significantly reduce aggression.
Disinhibition holds that watching violence on television may legitimize the use of violence by the viewer in real life by undermining social sanctions that normally work to inhibit such behavior. Research under laboratory conditions tends to confirm this, especially if viewers were already angry before viewing. In an extension of this work, researchers investigate the specific effects of violent pornographic material on male attitudes towards women and the victims of rape and their propensities to behave aggressively toward women under different circumstances. Significant effects have been demonstrated to single or repeated exposures to such material.
Imitation suggests to the viewer that behaviors may be copied from behaviors demonstrated by TV characters. Children, for example, may learn that violence is a useful and appropriate way to overcome problems and obtain one's way. They may also copy a hero's behavior to become more like them. In a series of laboratory experiments findings indicated that children can be encouraged to behave in more aggressive ways following exposure to media violence, with this effect attributed partly to disinhibition and also to observational learning in which children imitate the behaviors of the models they watched.
Repeated viewing of violence has been cited as a way of desensitizing people towards violence and the resulting emotional response. The argument runs that young viewers become increasingly accustomed to violence in programs if they watch a lot of it. In consequence, demand grows for more and more extreme forms of fictional violence as the existing violence loses its `kick." Tests with 8 year olds show that children who watched violent material were less likely to seek the help of an adult to stop a fight they thought was taking place. In another research project, children viewing more than 25 hours per week were much less aroused to TV violence in terms of a psychological measure of arousal than were relatively light viewers.
Cognitive effects of television influence and shape an individual's beliefs and opinions about the world around them. Television represents one among a number of sources of information about the world that people take into account when developing their opinions and impressions of social reality. In the social context of crime, perceptions of the media has achieved prominence. TV in particular has been shown to have a major impact in this area.
Television can produce both weak and pronounced emotional responses among viewers. The reactions may be immediate to the content of specific programs. Longer term relationships have been observed to exposure to television violence over time and the cultivation of fearfulness of personal victimization. Children of all ages as well as adults have been shown to respond emotionally to violent scenes contained in media presentations.
The perception of television violence by the viewers themselves provides an alternate area of study. This takes the view that violence can come in many different forms and takes into account what the audience thinks about television violence. Viewers have their own scale for deciding the seriousness of incidents, and their opinions do not always agree with researcher's categorizations of violence. It is interesting to note that U.K. viewers were more likely to perceive potential harm than benefit in television violence. There was widespread public feeling that parents should take greater care and control over what their children watch. Adult viewers felt that reality-fantasy distinctions were very important and that young children were not able to make crucial distinctions between reality and fantasy.
Discuss what is meant by "fright reactions" to mass media. Explain the prevalence of this concept.
The fright response to a horror film or thriller responds to a media presentation of danger, injury, bizarre image and terror-stricken protagonist. Almost all of us can remember when we were a child and those responses that made us nervous, remained in our thoughts and affected other aspects of our behavior for some time afterwards. This even happened when we were old enough to know that what we were witnessing was not actually happening at the time and that the depicted dangers could not leave the screen and attack us directly. These reactions can also occur when we know what is being portrayed did not actually happen.
This immediate emotional response typically lasts for a short duration, but may, on occasions, endure for hours, days or even longer. I have had people tell me they are afraid to swim in the ocean since they saw Jaws years ago.
Research into this fright reaction to mass media has been sporadic until recently. The increasingly graphic horror filled films such as The Exorcist and Jaws continue to gain in popularity. Additionally, films intended for adult viewing because of violence and horror inevitably end up on cable television where viewing by children under the age of 13 is common. Widespread speculation concerning children's potential emotional responses continue to increase and similar concern have been expressed over graphic news coverage of various international tragedies such as war and famine.
Research into potential negative effects on children remain difficult because isolating a control group is not possible. Therefore, evidence for intense emotional disturbances in children comes from anecdotes, case studies, in-depth interviews and survey research.
Given the nature on the prevalence of immediate fright and other more enduring emotional disturbances produced by exposure to frightening productions, the question obviously arises as to why viewers subject themselves to such "psychic trauma." Children choose to watch this material because they can talk about the details with their friends at school. Indeed, many children enjoy such productions in spite of the unwanted side-effects that sometimes occur.
Fear is generally conceived as an emotional response of negative tone related to avoidance or escape do to a perception of a real or imagined threat. In typical mass media situations, the audience understands that what is being depicted is not actually happening. Indeed, in most cases the depictation has never happened and is quite unlikely to ever happen. Why then does the fright reaction occur? A preliminary explanation would involve a stimulus evoking either an unconditioned or a conditioned emotional response. Because of similarities between the real and the mediated stimulus, a stimulus that would evoke a fright response if experienced first hand will evoke a similar, but less intense response when encountered via the mass media. Stimulus could be perceived as dangerous such as a natural disaster (earthquakes, volcanos) or a familiar organism in an unfamiliar and unnatural form (monsters, ghosts, vampires).
In most cases viewers can be said to respond indirectly to the stimuli through the experience of the characters. One mechanism underlying such responses is empathy. People experience fear as a direct response to the fear expressed in others. Many frightening films seem to stress the character's expression of fear in response to dangers more than the perceptual clues with the threat itself.
Another indirect mechanism would be the vicarious experience of fear, even when the person at risk does not express fear because they are unaware of the danger or are unafraid. This could account for much of the tension in a thriller.
Explain how viewing audiences are affected by watching sex on television and in the media.
The United States has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the industrialized world. Where does information about the medical and values issues in sexuality come from? The sexually explicit information comes from television, movies, videos, magazine and song lyrics. Often sex becomes intertwined with violence that become popular with teen audiences. What effect does the heavy consumption of this sexual material have on the audience?
Face it, sex sells. And such material is highly profitable. This fact has ramifications for all media. As such, sex will not easily been banished from the media. The effect on the consumers needs to be determined.
An obvious effect of sex is arousal. Sexual violence in particular appeals to sexual offenders and much less to ordinary people. Sexual arousal to stimuli may be learned through classical conditioning. Contrary to expectations, the degree of arousal is not necessarily highly correlated to the degree of explicitness of the media. Censoring a sex scene may actually make a film more arousing because viewers fill in their own completion.
The effects on attitudes and values can relate to desensitization to certain expressions of sexuality deemed to be "inappropriate" by some. Parents may be concerned about television teenagers considering sexual activity. Women express concern that car magazines sell auto parts with advertisements of the auto part alongside scantily clad women in mock bondage. Can this desensitize readers about violence toward women?
Other groups express concern about sexually oriented material encouraging people not to take a sexual issue as seriously as they should. An ongoing cartoon of "Chester the Molester" can convey a callousness and disregard for the seriousness of child molestation. Attitude to women may be called into question with comedic sketches such as MTV's Bevis and Butthead portrays. Teenagers raised for years on such a diet may have few links to reality when confronted with their first sexual encounter.
Research indicates that slides and movies of beautiful female nudes engaged in sexual activity leads male subjects to rate their partners as being less physically endowed even though they reported undiminished sexual satisfaction. Similar studies showed significant attitude changes after a limited exposure to sexual media.
Another study showed participants weekly films and tested a few weeks later. These participants were likely to overestimate the popularity of sexual practices like fellatio, cunnilingus, anal intercourse, sadomachism, and bestiality relative to control groups viewing non-sexually explicit films.
People who watch more sexually oriented material make higher frequency estimates of various sexual behaviors. Sometimes sexual media may teach new behaviors. As part of sex therapy a couple may buy a sex manual in order to learn new positions and techniques. Sometimes this style may not be appropriate as the learning from "snuff" films should not be replicated.
Erotic material may also disinhibit previously learned behavior, such as when watching TV's treatment of premarital sex disinhibits a viewer's inhibition against engaging in such behavior. Watching a rape scene where a woman is portrayed as enjoying being assailed may disinhibit the constraints against some men's secret urge to commit such a crime. This is of particular concern given some evidence suggesting that a surprisingly large number of college men reported that they might rape is they were sure they would not get caught.
An interesting variable in the presentation of material could the "prevailing tone." This collection of variables can make enormous difference in the experience of consuming sexually explicit material. The degree of playfulness or seriousness in the presentation can make a great deal of difference. A serious look at incest with explicit pictures may be acceptable while a comedy with only verbal innuendos may be judged as unacceptable. Sex therapy information presented matter-of-factly may be highly explicit. The artistic worth and intent makes a great deal of difference. Scenes from Shakespear, Chaucer and other may be explicit and acceptable while Hustler stories may not be.
Explore how television influences the viewer through content and character perceptions and preferences.
In the midst of substantial research on identification, role-model preferences and context orientations, there lurk assumptions both implicit and tested about social learning and social effects. Both high school and elementary school children exhibit the same tendency to select same-race characters as their favorite television personalities. When limited to a single personality or a single television show, youngsters chose their a selection from their own race by an overwhelming majority. When the selection was broadened, the same-race selection became even more striking as Blacks and White are equally likely to identify with White television characters. Few youths of either race wanted to identify with most of the White models on television while Black youths are three times more likely to identify with Black characters.
A study of Blacks, Hispanics and Anglos added perceptions to the equity of portrayals of minorities. Blacks were most likely to say there were too few Blacks on TV. Both Blacks and Hispanics were more likely to perceive too few Hispanics and there was an overall perception among all that Hispanics were most underrepresented. An interesting correlation emerged regarding amount of viewing and perceptions: Heavy viewing Anglos were more likely to perceive that the representations of Hispanics were fair; heavy viewing Hispanics expressed the opposite perception, and for Blacks there was no correlation. Heavy viewing Blacks did say, however, that there were too few Blacks on TV.
Black youngsters approach TV more vigorously with the stated motivation to learn something they can apply in their daily lives. Several hundred Black preteens and teens claimed that TV taught them most of what they know about jobs, how men and women solve problems, how parents and children interact, how husbands and wives interact, and how teenagers act. Whites claim to learn more about Blacks from TV; Blacks claim to learn about both Whites and themselves.
White youngsters' interpretation of Black television character traits closely relates to parallel beliefs about the real world. Although the correlation may result from selective distortion, incoming perceptions exert a stronger influence. Thus, for some sets of beliefs, content is important, for others, predispositions clearly have a greater role. In this manner, television serves both to reinforce what is learned outside the television situation and offers the possibility of new information where little or none was available.
Explain the various types of models used in media planning.
Advertisers' early rules of thumb about media effects evolved into attempts to explicitly model these effects. Large databases combined with communications and psychology theory have yielded computer models that managers use to plan advertising campaigns. The models blend technological capabilities and algorithms generated by theory, experience, and rules of thumb. Most models account for the fact that various media have overlapping audiences. Most include an explicit advertising response functions designed to capture the relationship between advertising exposure and some measure of audience response. Most models provide a means for incorporating data or subjective judgements of the "quality" of a given media vehicle.
The media overlap profiles such parameters as the number of households that subscribe to both Time and Good Housekeeping, watch "60 Minutes" and "The Wonder Years." Advertisers identify the characteristics of heavy users of a brand or product category and determine the media habits of such buyers. The media planners calculate the "internal" and "external" overlap: households that subscribe to a particular magazine and or repeatedly watch a television program, and so can be reached multiple times with an advertisement in the same medium (internal overlap). Because data are available that indicate the variety of media used by households, it is possible to buy advertising space in multiple publications and time on multiple television programs in order to achieve "external overlap."
The advertising response function remains at the heart of most media planning models. This hypothetical relationship uses the cumulative number of exposures of an individual (or aggregate of individuals) to an advertisement for a product (within the same medium or across different media), and some dependent variable, such as purchase probability, product knowledge, and so on. The specific form of this response function has been the subject of considerable debate. One of two functions is thought to apply. One response is the S-curve that indicates that advertising generally requires a few exposures to have any impact at all (a threshold effect), a few more exposures to reach its maximum impact, and then a declining marginal impact. The second candidate is a simple orgive curve. This response function also consists of a rapidly rising level of effectiveness with each additional exposure, followed by diminishing marginal impact of each subsequent exposure. This response function assumes no threshold effect is necessary but that advertising is assumed to begin with the very first exposure.
Most media models include a capability for the media planners to specify "impact" factors. These weights may be assigned by the planner for factors such as medial types and vehicles, types of consumers, that will influence the model to buy particular media types and/or vehicles and to reach specified audience segments. The important point is that media vehicle weights represent subjective judgements that some media types (broadcast vs. print) and/or vehicles (New Yorker vs. People) have more impact or are more effective than others for a given purpose.
Research in a number of different disciples has provided a rather large catalog of dimensions along which media may differ. The weighting of these dimensions remains rather arbitrary. In a study using thorough briefings on the objective of advertising and a single standardized rating form, differences of 250% were noted. Even within agencies there was no agreement; differences of up to 200% were noted.
These model thus require subject judgment about receivers of advertising messages in different media. Media vehicles weights demand that the media planner weigh characteristics of individuals who attend to particular media vehicles. These characteristics are normally only understood in terms of demographic characteristics or in some cases "psychographic" characteristics that attempt to characterize individuals in terms of attitudes, opinions, beliefs and life-style habits. In contrast, academic research has focused on individual characteristics that may be correlated with demographics, but are oriented toward processes by which individuals interact with communications media.
How does commercial product advertising work? Give examples of products that are commonly advertised.
Despite the broadcast ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship of sporting events, more money was spent promoting tobacco than any other consumer product in the country. Tobacco companies have targeted adolescents who have not yet become smokers and adult population segments that have not had high rates of smoking: women and minorities. While cigarette companies argue that they do not target children or adolescents, research suggests their advertising increases smoking among the young. Our youth pays attention to cigarette advertising and recognizes tobacco symbols and slogans. Ad recognition is correlated with frequency of smoking. Life-style appeals present images of developing personal identities. In one research, smoking behavior was first predicted by their friend's smoking and second best by approval of cigarette advertising.
So great an economic clout remains with tobacco that editorial's deemed harmful to tobacco are not printed in magazines that accept tobacco advertising. Such economically driven silencing of print media may have contributed to the public's continuing ignorance of the harmful effects of tobacco.
The incredible success of tobacco advertising can be illustrated by the warning labels on each pack of cigarettes and how ineffectively they modify behavior of the consumers. It has been suggested that few people notice them. In outdoor advertisements, few people notice the warning label.
Alcohol advertising has been almost as controversial as tobacco advertising. Beer and wine are among the most heavily advertised products on TV and radio and remains a major revenue source for magazine and some newspapers. Studies have shown that adolescents' exposure to alcohol ads on TV were found to be more strongly correlated with both beer and liquor consumption than were parental influence, age, sex, religious upbringing, social status or viewing alcohol in entertainment programming.
Despite surveys, it is unclear whether advertising increases alcohol consumption. In one study young men exposed to alcohol ads while watching a televised football game drank more after viewing the first few commercials than men not exposed, but they did not continue to increase over the course of the program and exposure to more alcohol commercials. The ads may serve as a cue to drink, but not necessarily more than otherwise.
The Kellog Company introduced a new media campaign for their All-Bran cereal emphasizing high fiber content. They repeated the National Cancer Institute's recommendation of a high-fiber/low fat diet because it "may reduce the risk of some types of cancer." Evaluations showed that the public's awareness of the link between nutrition and cancer increased, and more people than before were eating high-fiber foods. Collaborations such as this might become more common as health agencies are impressed by advertising's power to change consumer behavior and because health authorities often lack the resources to mount such campaigns.
The average child views more than 100,000 food commercials per year. The overall effect of this barrage of sugared snacks, cereals and other junk food has a negative effect for children's short and long term food preferences. Despite successes such as Kellog's, overall nutritional impact of television is not positive. Children who watch television's food advertising and tend to increase between-meal snacks. These children also expend less energy in this non-activity. Television characters frequently eat and snack and few become obese (12%) contrasted to the real world of obesity at 25%.
What is the "uses-and-gratification" paradigm? How does it work?
Uses and gratification is a psychological communication perspective that shifts the focus of inquiry from the mechanistic perspective's interest in direct effects of media on receivers to assessing how people use the media: "that is, what purposes or functions the media serves for a body of active receiver." Individual use and choice become stressed. Media effects seek an explanation in terms of the purposes, functions or uses as controlled by the choice patterns of receivers.
Uses and gratifications' principal elements includes people's needs and motives to communicate, the psychological and social environment, the mass media, functional alternatives to media use, communications behavior, and the consequences of such behavior.
People turn to gratifications for such reasons as strengthening and understanding of self, friends, others or society; strengthening the status of self or society; and strengthening contact with family, friends, society or culture. As such, people used television for diversion, personal relationships, personal identity, and acquiring news and information. Programs can be multidimensional in appeal. These specifically include such uses as change, escape or vicarious experiences.
A few models attempt to explain uses and effects. As they link media motives, behaviors and content with other features in the mass communications process. One model suggests that behavior originates with expectations of anticipated gratifications and media attitudes. Another model predicts gratification seeking from communication channels based on the expectancy of an outcome. Linking the model to effects is possible by interpreting the outcome of behavioral intention in terms of the gratifications obtained, such as attitude and behavior. The model permits consideration of expectancy and evaluative thresholds for behaviors and comparisons of congruence of expectation and outcome.
The Uses and Dependency Model proposes placing the audience consumption at the center of dependency as a systems approach. Societal structure, the media system, individual needs and motive, media use, functional alternative and consequences of behavior are shaped by other components of the system. Each element produces different patterns of media use an dependencies on the media or their content. Links between needs and motive, information seeking strategies, media and functional alternative use, and medial dependency that produce narrow information seeking strategies might lead to dependency on certain channels. Dependency, in turn, leads to other effects such as attitude change and feeds back to alter system components and relationships. The ritualized use of a medium and instrumental use of media content produces different outcomes.
How does cable television make use of uses and gratification?
Insofar as many newer communications technologies enhance opportunities for individuals to choose and tailor their media experiences, uses and gratifications perspectives have allowed insight into precisely how the "new" media differ from the "old" insofar as audiences utilize these media.
Cable television expands viewing options and possible sites for media consumption, provides new opportunities for altering the message directly or upon replay (commercial elimination when video taped by a consumer), provides the ability to "time-shift" for certain media experiences for broadcast television and movie viewing, and modifies changes to interact with other audience members with computer conferences, telephone chat line, computer chat rooms, etc.
Early cable uses reported subscribing to cable as a way to improve television reception and to improve the variety in programming. Variety can be associated with specific programing interests and hence with gratifications sought by the subscriber. For example, subscribers could be interested in movies, sports, news or religious programming. In actuality, people have different interest at different times. Distressed individuals were most likely to watch soothing television programs lacking jarring emotional content. The additional programs available through cable permits certain viewing patterns to dominate. The opportunity to view certain channels affords amply opportunities for viewers to adopt specialized viewing patterns. Many cable viewers are actively selective in their viewing.
An interesting category of research sought to document the demographics of the cable subscriber to the non-subscriber. The typical cable viewer tended to be younger and middle class, having children, being more educated, and somewhat wealthier. The attraction of additional children's programs provides an obvious linkage. Current research is unable to establish any stable relationship between subscriber status and particular viewing "styles."
On a macro level, cable television has had a broader social and cultural impact that can be apprehended well by uses-and-gratifications perspectives. For example, when the Chicago superstation WGN attained broad distribution, Cubs fans proliferated throughout the country and was no longer limited to the immediate Chicago vicinity. Likewise, when a new music video ascends in popularity, fashion trends quickly incorporate the mode of dress represented in the video. Madonna "wanna-bes" result from the interaction of audiences and specific programming. Cable television narrowcasts these highly targeted audiences.
Compare and contrast how audiences identify with characters and television programs with reference to the term "affective reactions."
The effectiveness of character development derives from the viewers ability to bring empathy and moral considerations to the screen. What the agents do in a play matters the most. These actions provide the basis for the audience's approval or disapproval of conduct. Approval of conduct is assumed to promote liking. Disapproval is assumed to promote disliking. Affective dispositions toward protagonists and antagonists derive in large measure from moral considerations.
Once an audience has placed sentiments pro or con on a particular character, enjoyment of conflict and its resolution depends on the outcome. Positive affective dispositions inspire hopes of positive outcomes and fears of negative ones. Protagonists deserve good fortunes and fear negative ones. Negative affectations activate fear of positive outcomes and hopes for negative ones. Antagonists deserve bad fortunes and are undeserving of good ones. Moral considerations mediate these hopes and fears.
The hopes and fears displayed by the protagonists lead to empathizing with the emotions. The joys as well as the sufferings of liked characters tend to evoke concordant affect with the audience. Positive and negative affect are said to be shared. The villain's joy becomes the audience's distress, and their getting their just rewards is the audience's delight.
Liking and disliking characters are clearly a matter of degree. Enjoyment deriving from witnessing the debasement, failure, or defeat of a party, agent, or object increases with intensity or negative sentiment and decreases with the intensity of positive sentiment toward these entities. Enjoyment deriving from witnessing the enhancement, success, or victory of a party, agent or object decreases with the intensity of negative sentiment and increases with the intensity of positive sentiment. Annoyance deriving from the debasement, failure or defeat decreases with the intensity of negative sentiment and increases with the intensity of positive sentiment.
Predictions from this disposition model have been confirmed not only for the enjoyment of drama, but also for humor appreciation and the enjoyment of sports. Most victim jokes may be modeled in this manner. Sports mechanics operate in the same predictive manner. Fans have favorites and loathed ones. Seeing beloved ones beaten or loathed ones victorious can cause a riot or make a grown man cry. The reverse also holds. Seeing favorites humble a loathed team or figure can still cause a riot, but the fans will be drunk on victory rather than humiliation.
Explain the concept of "critical mass."
For physicists, critical mass relates to the amount of radioactive material necessary to sustain a chain reaction. The term has been adopted by social scientists to refer to the number of individuals necessary for a social movement to "explode" into being. Adoption of new media technology is one such social phenomenon that offers an excellent example of this critical mass process. At a certain point, adoption of the technology begins to "take off" dramatically.
Various descriptions of this phenomenon have been proposed. With such media as electronic mail or the telephone, critical mass occurs when all individuals in the community adopt the technology. If critical mass does not occur, then usage will drop because of the lack of reciprocity and eventually no one will use the technology. Other criteria such as time, money or skills relate to the critical mass. The fewer resources of time, money and ease of use, the greater the likelihood of achieving the critical mass leading to universal access. Certain individual tend to be "high resource" individuals and early adoption of the technology by them will increase the likelihood of achieving a critical mass.
One of the best examples of working with a critical mass involved fax machines. The first fax machines in the mid-1800s were used for a century for transmitting pictures and maps over telephone lines. In the 1960s standards emerged for common communications. This did not bear fruit until the mid 1980s when enough organizations had adopted the technology. Suddenly, it seemed as if "everyone else" had a fax machine available. Now the penetration of fax machines goes into residential usage. A lesson could be that people may be forced to adopt a communications technology, with all the benefits and drawbacks, simply to maintain their current communications networks.
Discuss the media system dependency theory. Why do viewers become dependent upon the media?
Media system dependency theory suggests that in order to understand media related phenomena, it is important to analyze dependency relationships within and across levels of analysis. The theory states that the power of media is a function of the dependencies of individuals, groups, organizations and systems on the scarce information resources controlled by the media. Thus, media content and related media effects is a product of a variety of dependency relationships operating at multiple levels of analysis.
The analysis of the television system in the United Sates demonstrates this dependency analysis. To understand its effect on a specific individual, it is important to note that the medium is dependent on advertisers for revenue, the government for the right to broadcast, and the individual viewer for continuing to use the medium as a "product" for advertisers. As such, each component depends on television in one form or another. Media system dependency theory states that because all of the dependency relationships affect each other, an analysis of the role of a medium in society should examine these dependency relationships across levels of analysis.
Media system theory is one of the many theories that provides insight into the complexity of new media technologies. By integrating this theory with others, such as diffusion of innovations, social information processing, uses-and-gratifications notions, and critical mass theories, a more accurate picture of new media technologies may be possible.
An individual may exhibit a stable dependency relationship with a medium to fulfill specific goals of play, orientation and understanding. This may be expected to remain stable over a period of time. However, in times of ambiguity or threat, dependency on mass media increases as individuals seek additional information to help them in their daily lives.
http://www.lucidexperience.com/HypnoPapers/529.html
i'm trying to collect references that address the ideas on which the concepts i've talked about are based or have some bearing.
Bryan, J. and D. Zillion.
Explain what is meant by "cultivation." Discuss the methods of cultivation analysis.
Daily exposure to television provides a centralized mass media production of a coherent set of images and messages produced for total populations, and in its relatively nonselective, almost ritualistic use by most viewers. This total pattern accounts for the historically new and distinct consequences of living with television as a cultivation of shared conceptions of reality among otherwise diverse populations. Compared to other media, television provides a relatively restricted set of choices for a virtually unrestricted variety of interests and public gratification. Most of its programs distribute material by commercial necessity designed to be watched by large and heterogeneous audiences in a relatively nonselective fashion.
Much time, energy and money has been invested in efforts to change people's attitudes and behaviors. These include massive long term and common exposure of large and heterogeneous publics to mass-distributed and repetitive systems of stories. However, research traditions and ideological inhibitions both tend to produce resistance to the "cultivation perspective."
Scholars steeped in research efforts find it difficult to accept the emphasis of cultivation analysis on total immersion rather than on selective viewing and on the spread of stable similarities of outlook rather than on the remaining sources of cultural differentiation and change.
The Cultural Indicators project focused early on the nature and functions of television violence. As it developed, the project continued to take into account a wider range of topics, issues and concerns. Studies extended into audience conceptions of gender, minority, age-role stereotypes, health, science, the family, educational achievement and others.
The project has used the term "cultivation" to describe the independent contributions television viewing makes to viewer conceptions of social reality. The "cultivation differential" margins the difference in conceptions of reality between light and heavy viewers in the same demographic subgroups. This "cultivation" does not provide another definition for "effects," nor does it necessarily imply a one-way monolithic process.
The elements of cultivation do not originate with television or appear out of a void. Layers of social, personal and cultural context also determine the shape, scope and degree of the contribution television is likely to make. People get born into a symbolic environment with television as its mainstream. Children begin viewing several years before they begin reading, and well before they can even talk. Television viewing both shapes and stabilizes life-styles and outlooks.
Cultivation should not be confused with simple reinforcement nor should it suggest that television's viewing becomes merely symptomatic of other dispositions and outlooks. The point is that cultivations does not need to be conceived as unidirectional but rather like a gravitational process. The angle and direction of the "pull" depends upon there groups of viewers and their styles of life are with reference to the line of gravity, the "mainstream" world of television.While each group may strain in their own direction, a central point affects all groups.
Cultivation implies the steady entrenchment of mainstream orientation for most viewers. The process of apparent convergence of outlooks is called mainstreaming.
Cultivation analysis begins with message system analysis identifying the most recurrent, stable and overreaching patterns of television content. The consistent images, portrayals and values cut across most types of programs become an integral part of most viewers, the heavy viewers in particular. They remain as aggregate messages embedded in television as a system rather than in specific programs, types or genres.
Using standard techniques of surveying methodology, questions are posed to samples of adults, adolescents or children. Secondary analysis of large-scale national surveys are often used when they include questions that relate to potential "lessons" of the television world and viewing data are available for the respondents.
The questions posed do not mention television, and the respondents awareness of or beliefs in the source of their information are seen as irrelevant. The resulting relations between amount of viewing and the tendency to respond to these questions in the terms of the dominant and repetitive facts, values and ideologies of the world of television reflect televisions contribution to viewer's conceptions of social reality.
The observable evidence of cultivation is likely to be modest in terms of absolute size. Even as viewers may watch several hours of television a day, and live in the same general culture as heavy viewers, the discovery of a systematic pattern of even small but pervasive differences between light and heavy viewers may have far-reaching consequences similar to the few degrees to create an ice age or global warming. A single percentage point may affect several million dollars worth of advertising.
Findings of cultivation provide interesting beliefs that often run contrary to reality. Television drama tends to be sharply underrepresent older people, even as the over 65 age group constitute the fastest growing of the real-world population; heavy viewers were more likely to feel that the elderly constitute a vanishing breed. Another example relates to violence. Well over half of the major television characters become involved in some kind of violent actions. FBI statistics indicate that in any one year, less than 1% of the people in the United States are victims of criminal violence.
How does cultivation analysis compare to traditional approaches to measuring the effects of media?
Cultivation analysis is not a substitute for but a complement to traditional approaches to media effects. Traditional research is concerned with change rather than stability and with processes more applicable to media that enter a person's life at later stages with mobility, literacy, etc.
Neither "before and after exposure" models, nor the notion of "predispositions" as intervening variables apply in the context of cultivation analysis. Television enters life in infancy so there is no "before exposure" condition. Television plays a role in the formation of those very "predispositions" that later intervene and often resist other influences and attempts at persuasion.
Cultivation analysis concentrates on the enduring and common consequences of growing up and living with television as a series of stable, resistant and widely shared assumptions, images, and conceptions expressing the institutional characteristics and interests of the medium itself.
Explain the concept of "priming."
"Priming" holds that when people witness, read or hear of an event via the mass media, ideas having a similar meaning are activated in them for a short time afterwards, and that these thoughts in turn can activate other semantically related ideas and action tendencies. This theory derives from a cognitive-neoassociative perspective that regards memory as a collection of networks, with each network consisting of units or nodes that represent substantive elements of thought, feelings and so forth, linked through associated pathways. The presentation of a certain stimulus "primes" other semantically related concepts, thus heightening the likelihood that thoughts with much the same meaning as the presentation stimulus will come to mind.
A rapidly increasing body of research supports the influence of priming effects can have on people thoughts and actions.
Discuss the priming of aggression-related ideas as it applies to television, radio and other forms of media.
Feelings and motor tendencies tend to be activated. Depressive thoughts frequently generate depressive feelings, whereas ideas having an aggressive meaning can, under proper conditions, evoke angry feelings and even aggressive action tendencies.
As a result, the present analysis suggests what could be the result of depictions of violence in the mass media: Under certain circumstances and for a short period of time, there is an increased chance that viewers will have hostile thoughts that can color their interpretation of other people and they can believe other forms of aggressive conduct can be justified and will bring them benefits in addition to be overly aggressively inclined.
This priming process can occur automatically and even without awareness. In the experiments of Bargh and Pietromonaco, participants were unknowingly exposed to single words, some of which were sematically related to hostility. Then, after reading a brief description of a target person, the participants had to evaluate that person. Even though the participants had not consciously been aware of the primed words, the more hostility related words to which they had been exposed, the more negative were their evaluation of the target person.
In other studies social interactions could be modified by primed ideas. Male participants read a story describing either a "boy-meets-girl" encounter or a control story. Those who read the "boy-meets-girl" story later smiled more, talked more, leaned forward more, and gazed at the female confederate more than those who read the control story.
In another study participants were exposed to the names of people having varying degrees of association with the notion of hostility. Thus, Joe Frazier had a moderately strong association with hostility, whereas Billie Jean King, the tennis player, was associated with non-hostility. When the participants were later then given a chance to evaluate an ambiguously described person, those who were primed with then names linked to hostility rated the individual as more hostile than the nonprimed group.
Good reasons exist to believe that portrayals of aggression in the print and aural media can also influence members of the audience adversely. Priming experiments requiring their participants to read and think about printed lists of words with hostile and symbols were relatively harsh towards another person.
Video games with their associated popularity and typically violent content have been targets for researchers. One study linked the emotional responses to 22 common arcade games and found that the predominant reaction to the games was aggression and hostility. Another focused on the content of the games and investigated the short-term effects of highly or mildly aggressive video games. Participants were assigned to play either a highly aggressive video game, a mildly aggressive game or a no-game control situation and their hostility, anxiety and depression were assessed later. The high aggression game led to higher hostility than the mild aggression game, although the results did not attain the conventional levels of significance. Those playing the high level aggressive game were significantly more anxious than the other participants.
This trend followed for sporting events such as football and gymnastics. Football can be so aggressive that even the mere mentioning of the name may evoke aggression in some fans.
Exceptions to this priming effect do indeed exist. Violence does not always have aggression-enhancing consequences. Contact sports do not always generate aggressions and hostility. Even when the aggressive events do activate ideas, feelings, and actions associated with aggression, these internal responses do not necessarily lead to the open display of violent behavior. Various intervening variables may influence the changes that people viewing the media violence will be overtly assaultive themselves.
Compare and contrast the two types of models for mass media persuasion.
Media persuasion models consist of direct and indirect methodologies. The ultimate goal of both consists of influencing people to purchase certain goods, vote for a political candidate, engage in safer driving, eating, and sexual activity, purchase specific goods, and donate money to various causes.
The initial assumptions about the effects of the mass media was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s when mass communications techniques were quite potent. There was a conclusion that "propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world." The direct model resulted from that various transmissions of information via mass communications producing direct effects on attitudes and behavior. There was an assumption that the audience was captive, attentive and gullible.
Many analysts of this period formulated their startling assessments of the power of the media on informal and anecdotal evidence rather than careful empirical research. Few attempts were made to actually measure the attitudes of message recipients prior to and following propaganda efforts.
The indirect model was tempered considerably in the next two decades largely as a result of the subsequent empirical research conducted. There was an analysis of survey information that concluded that the effectiveness of mass communications campaigns could not be increased simply by increasing the flow of messages. The psychological barriers to effective communications must be considered and properly dealt with to promote the message.
Some studies suggested that a campaign tended to simply reinforce people's already existing beliefs rather than change them. Some researchers argued that when public attitude change was produced, it was only indirectly attributable to the media. The media was thus more effective in influencing various opinion leaders than the average person, and these opinion leaders were responsible for changes in the mass public.
Political communication effects research as shown by many new areas of development over the last few years. Summarize the four types of cognitive changes in television.
The four types of cognitive changes that have received considerable attention in recent years are agenda setting, priming, knowledge gain and cognitive complexity, and framing.
Agenda setting bases itself upon the medial control of the agendas by setting certain issues for prominent coverage and prominence subsequently determines which issues are judged as important. Evidence exists that public judgments of the salience of issues follow the prominence of the media agenda. This evidence consisted of time-series comparisons of the national news agenda, panel studies examining the sequencing of changes in the media agenda with corresponding changes in the issue saliences of individual respondents and cross-sectional surveys comparing contrasting media agendas with the issue saliences of their respective audiences.
Audience agenda setting research has become so well recognized that it has become almost synonymous with powerful political effects of media. Real-world events such as wars and shifts in the economy are more likely to command the agenda than are fluctuations in media coverage. Less certain is how the power to control the agenda is distributed between the media and sources and how the news agenda is struggled over.
Priming is a key concept of the "cognitive revolution" that has transformed the social sciences. As applied to media use, exposure to a given type of content or message activates a concept, which for a period of time increases the probability that the concept, and thought and memories connected with it, will come to mind again.
Knowledge gain lies in the ability of the media to convey discernible if modest amounts of information to the audiences. Citizens remain remarkably uninformed about public affairs. While college graduates have greatly increased, factual knowledge of politics has actually declined. While viewers watched about 20 stories on average, they recalled only 1.2 in an interview immediately after a television news broadcast. Less than half were recalled even when the story heads were read to them.
Many reason have been offered for this relatively weak increments of knowledge conveyed by the new media. Most prominent is the charge that the "horse-race" coverage of political campaigns, focusing on who is winning rather than on issues, deters learning. News content considered more generally may also limit learning. Picking news for its entertainment value rather than for its political importance may prevent more complex issues from reaching the public. Increasingly shorter sound-bites on television news and factoids devoid of historical or political context in all media may lead to information deletion.
Framing considers the journalist's role in presenting new for the intended audience. The frame of a story sets a "schemata or interpretation" that allows individuals to "locate, perceive, identify and level" information coming from the environment. Framing typically involves low levels of attention and the use of various cognitive shortcuts to make enough sense of a story or issues. Processing is likely to be at the low level of just "good enough."
Audience framing is a complex construct in that it refers both to the process of individual and interpersonal sense-making and to the content or output of that process. One striking feature of the meanings given to new stories and to political issues by individuals is the incredible number of interpretations. Audience frames can be coded in various ways, such as cognitive complexity, personal vs. systemic causation, and these structures affect how people think and talk about issues.
Discuss how violence as portrayed on television affects the minds of viewers.
As each new entertainment or communications media appears in society, an unease about its mass appeal emerges. The very advent of printing causes some countries to have special "licenses" for printing presses. The appearance of popular romance and adventure novels in the 19th century caused unease as did the popularity of motion pictures in the early part of this century. The earliest coordinated social scientific research on media violence began in the 1920s in the United States with violence in motion pictures. Findings indicated that many scenes of crime and sex could be found in the movies that were contrary to moral standards of the day, but no conclusive evidence emerged that indicated a degenerating effect on the audience. Delinquency studies suggested, however, that there might be a link. One study of delinquency prone youngsters reported a direct connection of motion pictures in shaping delinquents into criminal careers. The methods of this study were highly criticized at the time.
In the 1950s attention was focused on comic books. While the analysis contained inconsistencies, the most significant impact of the most publicized study was to seriously undermine the comic industry. The studies themselves were based on interviews with children in clinical settings, with often unsystematic and ambiguous interpretations that gave rise to more questions than answers.
Since its inception, television has been the subject of studies of the link between the media and its portrayal of violence. The Surgeon General produced a report that stated that there was some evidence between viewing violent television and the likelihood of aggressive behavior among viewers.
Several major issues continue to arise in public debates about media violence. These include questions about how much violence exists in various media, the extent to which individuals are exposed to violent media content, and what effects media violence has on its consumers. Another interesting question is what does the public really think and feel about media violence.
Does TV violence cause aggressive behavior among viewers? What kind of effects are being referred to? How are the effects measured and to what extent can the evidence deriving from these measures be unquestioningly accepted?
TV violence may have an impact on viewers at a number of psychological levels that may broadly be classified into cognitive, affective and behavioral. Behavioral effect have received the greater attention.
According to the behavioral catharsis theory, accumulated aggressive impulses can be discharged by individuals if they become absorbed in violent events. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that individuals can harmlessly discharge their aggressive impulses either through fantasizing about violence or through watching fictional portrayals of violence. Reports of reduction of aggressive tendencies among teenage boys were reported as well. This research was criticized for failing to control for or take into account a number of important factors, and attempts to replicate it failed.
The arousal hypothesis suggests that watching violent television programs can arouse viewers and make them excited. Though not restricted to violent content, sexual or humorous content can have the same effect. There is some suggestion that arousal quickly disperses and that even a short delay between initial emotional arousal and an opportunity to respond aggressively can significantly reduce aggression.
Disinhibition holds that watching violence on television may legitimize the use of violence by the viewer in real life by undermining social sanctions that normally work to inhibit such behavior. Research under laboratory conditions tends to confirm this, especially if viewers were already angry before viewing. In an extension of this work, researchers investigate the specific effects of violent pornographic material on male attitudes towards women and the victims of rape and their propensities to behave aggressively toward women under different circumstances. Significant effects have been demonstrated to single or repeated exposures to such material.
Imitation suggests to the viewer that behaviors may be copied from behaviors demonstrated by TV characters. Children, for example, may learn that violence is a useful and appropriate way to overcome problems and obtain one's way. They may also copy a hero's behavior to become more like them. In a series of laboratory experiments findings indicated that children can be encouraged to behave in more aggressive ways following exposure to media violence, with this effect attributed partly to disinhibition and also to observational learning in which children imitate the behaviors of the models they watched.
Repeated viewing of violence has been cited as a way of desensitizing people towards violence and the resulting emotional response. The argument runs that young viewers become increasingly accustomed to violence in programs if they watch a lot of it. In consequence, demand grows for more and more extreme forms of fictional violence as the existing violence loses its `kick." Tests with 8 year olds show that children who watched violent material were less likely to seek the help of an adult to stop a fight they thought was taking place. In another research project, children viewing more than 25 hours per week were much less aroused to TV violence in terms of a psychological measure of arousal than were relatively light viewers.
Cognitive effects of television influence and shape an individual's beliefs and opinions about the world around them. Television represents one among a number of sources of information about the world that people take into account when developing their opinions and impressions of social reality. In the social context of crime, perceptions of the media has achieved prominence. TV in particular has been shown to have a major impact in this area.
Television can produce both weak and pronounced emotional responses among viewers. The reactions may be immediate to the content of specific programs. Longer term relationships have been observed to exposure to television violence over time and the cultivation of fearfulness of personal victimization. Children of all ages as well as adults have been shown to respond emotionally to violent scenes contained in media presentations.
The perception of television violence by the viewers themselves provides an alternate area of study. This takes the view that violence can come in many different forms and takes into account what the audience thinks about television violence. Viewers have their own scale for deciding the seriousness of incidents, and their opinions do not always agree with researcher's categorizations of violence. It is interesting to note that U.K. viewers were more likely to perceive potential harm than benefit in television violence. There was widespread public feeling that parents should take greater care and control over what their children watch. Adult viewers felt that reality-fantasy distinctions were very important and that young children were not able to make crucial distinctions between reality and fantasy.
Discuss what is meant by "fright reactions" to mass media. Explain the prevalence of this concept.
The fright response to a horror film or thriller responds to a media presentation of danger, injury, bizarre image and terror-stricken protagonist. Almost all of us can remember when we were a child and those responses that made us nervous, remained in our thoughts and affected other aspects of our behavior for some time afterwards. This even happened when we were old enough to know that what we were witnessing was not actually happening at the time and that the depicted dangers could not leave the screen and attack us directly. These reactions can also occur when we know what is being portrayed did not actually happen.
This immediate emotional response typically lasts for a short duration, but may, on occasions, endure for hours, days or even longer. I have had people tell me they are afraid to swim in the ocean since they saw Jaws years ago.
Research into this fright reaction to mass media has been sporadic until recently. The increasingly graphic horror filled films such as The Exorcist and Jaws continue to gain in popularity. Additionally, films intended for adult viewing because of violence and horror inevitably end up on cable television where viewing by children under the age of 13 is common. Widespread speculation concerning children's potential emotional responses continue to increase and similar concern have been expressed over graphic news coverage of various international tragedies such as war and famine.
Research into potential negative effects on children remain difficult because isolating a control group is not possible. Therefore, evidence for intense emotional disturbances in children comes from anecdotes, case studies, in-depth interviews and survey research.
Given the nature on the prevalence of immediate fright and other more enduring emotional disturbances produced by exposure to frightening productions, the question obviously arises as to why viewers subject themselves to such "psychic trauma." Children choose to watch this material because they can talk about the details with their friends at school. Indeed, many children enjoy such productions in spite of the unwanted side-effects that sometimes occur.
Fear is generally conceived as an emotional response of negative tone related to avoidance or escape do to a perception of a real or imagined threat. In typical mass media situations, the audience understands that what is being depicted is not actually happening. Indeed, in most cases the depictation has never happened and is quite unlikely to ever happen. Why then does the fright reaction occur? A preliminary explanation would involve a stimulus evoking either an unconditioned or a conditioned emotional response. Because of similarities between the real and the mediated stimulus, a stimulus that would evoke a fright response if experienced first hand will evoke a similar, but less intense response when encountered via the mass media. Stimulus could be perceived as dangerous such as a natural disaster (earthquakes, volcanos) or a familiar organism in an unfamiliar and unnatural form (monsters, ghosts, vampires).
In most cases viewers can be said to respond indirectly to the stimuli through the experience of the characters. One mechanism underlying such responses is empathy. People experience fear as a direct response to the fear expressed in others. Many frightening films seem to stress the character's expression of fear in response to dangers more than the perceptual clues with the threat itself.
Another indirect mechanism would be the vicarious experience of fear, even when the person at risk does not express fear because they are unaware of the danger or are unafraid. This could account for much of the tension in a thriller.
Explain how viewing audiences are affected by watching sex on television and in the media.
The United States has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the industrialized world. Where does information about the medical and values issues in sexuality come from? The sexually explicit information comes from television, movies, videos, magazine and song lyrics. Often sex becomes intertwined with violence that become popular with teen audiences. What effect does the heavy consumption of this sexual material have on the audience?
Face it, sex sells. And such material is highly profitable. This fact has ramifications for all media. As such, sex will not easily been banished from the media. The effect on the consumers needs to be determined.
An obvious effect of sex is arousal. Sexual violence in particular appeals to sexual offenders and much less to ordinary people. Sexual arousal to stimuli may be learned through classical conditioning. Contrary to expectations, the degree of arousal is not necessarily highly correlated to the degree of explicitness of the media. Censoring a sex scene may actually make a film more arousing because viewers fill in their own completion.
The effects on attitudes and values can relate to desensitization to certain expressions of sexuality deemed to be "inappropriate" by some. Parents may be concerned about television teenagers considering sexual activity. Women express concern that car magazines sell auto parts with advertisements of the auto part alongside scantily clad women in mock bondage. Can this desensitize readers about violence toward women?
Other groups express concern about sexually oriented material encouraging people not to take a sexual issue as seriously as they should. An ongoing cartoon of "Chester the Molester" can convey a callousness and disregard for the seriousness of child molestation. Attitude to women may be called into question with comedic sketches such as MTV's Bevis and Butthead portrays. Teenagers raised for years on such a diet may have few links to reality when confronted with their first sexual encounter.
Research indicates that slides and movies of beautiful female nudes engaged in sexual activity leads male subjects to rate their partners as being less physically endowed even though they reported undiminished sexual satisfaction. Similar studies showed significant attitude changes after a limited exposure to sexual media.
Another study showed participants weekly films and tested a few weeks later. These participants were likely to overestimate the popularity of sexual practices like fellatio, cunnilingus, anal intercourse, sadomachism, and bestiality relative to control groups viewing non-sexually explicit films.
People who watch more sexually oriented material make higher frequency estimates of various sexual behaviors. Sometimes sexual media may teach new behaviors. As part of sex therapy a couple may buy a sex manual in order to learn new positions and techniques. Sometimes this style may not be appropriate as the learning from "snuff" films should not be replicated.
Erotic material may also disinhibit previously learned behavior, such as when watching TV's treatment of premarital sex disinhibits a viewer's inhibition against engaging in such behavior. Watching a rape scene where a woman is portrayed as enjoying being assailed may disinhibit the constraints against some men's secret urge to commit such a crime. This is of particular concern given some evidence suggesting that a surprisingly large number of college men reported that they might rape is they were sure they would not get caught.
An interesting variable in the presentation of material could the "prevailing tone." This collection of variables can make enormous difference in the experience of consuming sexually explicit material. The degree of playfulness or seriousness in the presentation can make a great deal of difference. A serious look at incest with explicit pictures may be acceptable while a comedy with only verbal innuendos may be judged as unacceptable. Sex therapy information presented matter-of-factly may be highly explicit. The artistic worth and intent makes a great deal of difference. Scenes from Shakespear, Chaucer and other may be explicit and acceptable while Hustler stories may not be.
Explore how television influences the viewer through content and character perceptions and preferences.
In the midst of substantial research on identification, role-model preferences and context orientations, there lurk assumptions both implicit and tested about social learning and social effects. Both high school and elementary school children exhibit the same tendency to select same-race characters as their favorite television personalities. When limited to a single personality or a single television show, youngsters chose their a selection from their own race by an overwhelming majority. When the selection was broadened, the same-race selection became even more striking as Blacks and White are equally likely to identify with White television characters. Few youths of either race wanted to identify with most of the White models on television while Black youths are three times more likely to identify with Black characters.
A study of Blacks, Hispanics and Anglos added perceptions to the equity of portrayals of minorities. Blacks were most likely to say there were too few Blacks on TV. Both Blacks and Hispanics were more likely to perceive too few Hispanics and there was an overall perception among all that Hispanics were most underrepresented. An interesting correlation emerged regarding amount of viewing and perceptions: Heavy viewing Anglos were more likely to perceive that the representations of Hispanics were fair; heavy viewing Hispanics expressed the opposite perception, and for Blacks there was no correlation. Heavy viewing Blacks did say, however, that there were too few Blacks on TV.
Black youngsters approach TV more vigorously with the stated motivation to learn something they can apply in their daily lives. Several hundred Black preteens and teens claimed that TV taught them most of what they know about jobs, how men and women solve problems, how parents and children interact, how husbands and wives interact, and how teenagers act. Whites claim to learn more about Blacks from TV; Blacks claim to learn about both Whites and themselves.
White youngsters' interpretation of Black television character traits closely relates to parallel beliefs about the real world. Although the correlation may result from selective distortion, incoming perceptions exert a stronger influence. Thus, for some sets of beliefs, content is important, for others, predispositions clearly have a greater role. In this manner, television serves both to reinforce what is learned outside the television situation and offers the possibility of new information where little or none was available.
Explain the various types of models used in media planning.
Advertisers' early rules of thumb about media effects evolved into attempts to explicitly model these effects. Large databases combined with communications and psychology theory have yielded computer models that managers use to plan advertising campaigns. The models blend technological capabilities and algorithms generated by theory, experience, and rules of thumb. Most models account for the fact that various media have overlapping audiences. Most include an explicit advertising response functions designed to capture the relationship between advertising exposure and some measure of audience response. Most models provide a means for incorporating data or subjective judgements of the "quality" of a given media vehicle.
The media overlap profiles such parameters as the number of households that subscribe to both Time and Good Housekeeping, watch "60 Minutes" and "The Wonder Years." Advertisers identify the characteristics of heavy users of a brand or product category and determine the media habits of such buyers. The media planners calculate the "internal" and "external" overlap: households that subscribe to a particular magazine and or repeatedly watch a television program, and so can be reached multiple times with an advertisement in the same medium (internal overlap). Because data are available that indicate the variety of media used by households, it is possible to buy advertising space in multiple publications and time on multiple television programs in order to achieve "external overlap."
The advertising response function remains at the heart of most media planning models. This hypothetical relationship uses the cumulative number of exposures of an individual (or aggregate of individuals) to an advertisement for a product (within the same medium or across different media), and some dependent variable, such as purchase probability, product knowledge, and so on. The specific form of this response function has been the subject of considerable debate. One of two functions is thought to apply. One response is the S-curve that indicates that advertising generally requires a few exposures to have any impact at all (a threshold effect), a few more exposures to reach its maximum impact, and then a declining marginal impact. The second candidate is a simple orgive curve. This response function also consists of a rapidly rising level of effectiveness with each additional exposure, followed by diminishing marginal impact of each subsequent exposure. This response function assumes no threshold effect is necessary but that advertising is assumed to begin with the very first exposure.
Most media models include a capability for the media planners to specify "impact" factors. These weights may be assigned by the planner for factors such as medial types and vehicles, types of consumers, that will influence the model to buy particular media types and/or vehicles and to reach specified audience segments. The important point is that media vehicle weights represent subjective judgements that some media types (broadcast vs. print) and/or vehicles (New Yorker vs. People) have more impact or are more effective than others for a given purpose.
Research in a number of different disciples has provided a rather large catalog of dimensions along which media may differ. The weighting of these dimensions remains rather arbitrary. In a study using thorough briefings on the objective of advertising and a single standardized rating form, differences of 250% were noted. Even within agencies there was no agreement; differences of up to 200% were noted.
These model thus require subject judgment about receivers of advertising messages in different media. Media vehicles weights demand that the media planner weigh characteristics of individuals who attend to particular media vehicles. These characteristics are normally only understood in terms of demographic characteristics or in some cases "psychographic" characteristics that attempt to characterize individuals in terms of attitudes, opinions, beliefs and life-style habits. In contrast, academic research has focused on individual characteristics that may be correlated with demographics, but are oriented toward processes by which individuals interact with communications media.
How does commercial product advertising work? Give examples of products that are commonly advertised.
Despite the broadcast ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship of sporting events, more money was spent promoting tobacco than any other consumer product in the country. Tobacco companies have targeted adolescents who have not yet become smokers and adult population segments that have not had high rates of smoking: women and minorities. While cigarette companies argue that they do not target children or adolescents, research suggests their advertising increases smoking among the young. Our youth pays attention to cigarette advertising and recognizes tobacco symbols and slogans. Ad recognition is correlated with frequency of smoking. Life-style appeals present images of developing personal identities. In one research, smoking behavior was first predicted by their friend's smoking and second best by approval of cigarette advertising.
So great an economic clout remains with tobacco that editorial's deemed harmful to tobacco are not printed in magazines that accept tobacco advertising. Such economically driven silencing of print media may have contributed to the public's continuing ignorance of the harmful effects of tobacco.
The incredible success of tobacco advertising can be illustrated by the warning labels on each pack of cigarettes and how ineffectively they modify behavior of the consumers. It has been suggested that few people notice them. In outdoor advertisements, few people notice the warning label.
Alcohol advertising has been almost as controversial as tobacco advertising. Beer and wine are among the most heavily advertised products on TV and radio and remains a major revenue source for magazine and some newspapers. Studies have shown that adolescents' exposure to alcohol ads on TV were found to be more strongly correlated with both beer and liquor consumption than were parental influence, age, sex, religious upbringing, social status or viewing alcohol in entertainment programming.
Despite surveys, it is unclear whether advertising increases alcohol consumption. In one study young men exposed to alcohol ads while watching a televised football game drank more after viewing the first few commercials than men not exposed, but they did not continue to increase over the course of the program and exposure to more alcohol commercials. The ads may serve as a cue to drink, but not necessarily more than otherwise.
The Kellog Company introduced a new media campaign for their All-Bran cereal emphasizing high fiber content. They repeated the National Cancer Institute's recommendation of a high-fiber/low fat diet because it "may reduce the risk of some types of cancer." Evaluations showed that the public's awareness of the link between nutrition and cancer increased, and more people than before were eating high-fiber foods. Collaborations such as this might become more common as health agencies are impressed by advertising's power to change consumer behavior and because health authorities often lack the resources to mount such campaigns.
The average child views more than 100,000 food commercials per year. The overall effect of this barrage of sugared snacks, cereals and other junk food has a negative effect for children's short and long term food preferences. Despite successes such as Kellog's, overall nutritional impact of television is not positive. Children who watch television's food advertising and tend to increase between-meal snacks. These children also expend less energy in this non-activity. Television characters frequently eat and snack and few become obese (12%) contrasted to the real world of obesity at 25%.
What is the "uses-and-gratification" paradigm? How does it work?
Uses and gratification is a psychological communication perspective that shifts the focus of inquiry from the mechanistic perspective's interest in direct effects of media on receivers to assessing how people use the media: "that is, what purposes or functions the media serves for a body of active receiver." Individual use and choice become stressed. Media effects seek an explanation in terms of the purposes, functions or uses as controlled by the choice patterns of receivers.
Uses and gratifications' principal elements includes people's needs and motives to communicate, the psychological and social environment, the mass media, functional alternatives to media use, communications behavior, and the consequences of such behavior.
People turn to gratifications for such reasons as strengthening and understanding of self, friends, others or society; strengthening the status of self or society; and strengthening contact with family, friends, society or culture. As such, people used television for diversion, personal relationships, personal identity, and acquiring news and information. Programs can be multidimensional in appeal. These specifically include such uses as change, escape or vicarious experiences.
A few models attempt to explain uses and effects. As they link media motives, behaviors and content with other features in the mass communications process. One model suggests that behavior originates with expectations of anticipated gratifications and media attitudes. Another model predicts gratification seeking from communication channels based on the expectancy of an outcome. Linking the model to effects is possible by interpreting the outcome of behavioral intention in terms of the gratifications obtained, such as attitude and behavior. The model permits consideration of expectancy and evaluative thresholds for behaviors and comparisons of congruence of expectation and outcome.
The Uses and Dependency Model proposes placing the audience consumption at the center of dependency as a systems approach. Societal structure, the media system, individual needs and motive, media use, functional alternative and consequences of behavior are shaped by other components of the system. Each element produces different patterns of media use an dependencies on the media or their content. Links between needs and motive, information seeking strategies, media and functional alternative use, and medial dependency that produce narrow information seeking strategies might lead to dependency on certain channels. Dependency, in turn, leads to other effects such as attitude change and feeds back to alter system components and relationships. The ritualized use of a medium and instrumental use of media content produces different outcomes.
How does cable television make use of uses and gratification?
Insofar as many newer communications technologies enhance opportunities for individuals to choose and tailor their media experiences, uses and gratifications perspectives have allowed insight into precisely how the "new" media differ from the "old" insofar as audiences utilize these media.
Cable television expands viewing options and possible sites for media consumption, provides new opportunities for altering the message directly or upon replay (commercial elimination when video taped by a consumer), provides the ability to "time-shift" for certain media experiences for broadcast television and movie viewing, and modifies changes to interact with other audience members with computer conferences, telephone chat line, computer chat rooms, etc.
Early cable uses reported subscribing to cable as a way to improve television reception and to improve the variety in programming. Variety can be associated with specific programing interests and hence with gratifications sought by the subscriber. For example, subscribers could be interested in movies, sports, news or religious programming. In actuality, people have different interest at different times. Distressed individuals were most likely to watch soothing television programs lacking jarring emotional content. The additional programs available through cable permits certain viewing patterns to dominate. The opportunity to view certain channels affords amply opportunities for viewers to adopt specialized viewing patterns. Many cable viewers are actively selective in their viewing.
An interesting category of research sought to document the demographics of the cable subscriber to the non-subscriber. The typical cable viewer tended to be younger and middle class, having children, being more educated, and somewhat wealthier. The attraction of additional children's programs provides an obvious linkage. Current research is unable to establish any stable relationship between subscriber status and particular viewing "styles."
On a macro level, cable television has had a broader social and cultural impact that can be apprehended well by uses-and-gratifications perspectives. For example, when the Chicago superstation WGN attained broad distribution, Cubs fans proliferated throughout the country and was no longer limited to the immediate Chicago vicinity. Likewise, when a new music video ascends in popularity, fashion trends quickly incorporate the mode of dress represented in the video. Madonna "wanna-bes" result from the interaction of audiences and specific programming. Cable television narrowcasts these highly targeted audiences.
Compare and contrast how audiences identify with characters and television programs with reference to the term "affective reactions."
The effectiveness of character development derives from the viewers ability to bring empathy and moral considerations to the screen. What the agents do in a play matters the most. These actions provide the basis for the audience's approval or disapproval of conduct. Approval of conduct is assumed to promote liking. Disapproval is assumed to promote disliking. Affective dispositions toward protagonists and antagonists derive in large measure from moral considerations.
Once an audience has placed sentiments pro or con on a particular character, enjoyment of conflict and its resolution depends on the outcome. Positive affective dispositions inspire hopes of positive outcomes and fears of negative ones. Protagonists deserve good fortunes and fear negative ones. Negative affectations activate fear of positive outcomes and hopes for negative ones. Antagonists deserve bad fortunes and are undeserving of good ones. Moral considerations mediate these hopes and fears.
The hopes and fears displayed by the protagonists lead to empathizing with the emotions. The joys as well as the sufferings of liked characters tend to evoke concordant affect with the audience. Positive and negative affect are said to be shared. The villain's joy becomes the audience's distress, and their getting their just rewards is the audience's delight.
Liking and disliking characters are clearly a matter of degree. Enjoyment deriving from witnessing the debasement, failure, or defeat of a party, agent, or object increases with intensity or negative sentiment and decreases with the intensity of positive sentiment toward these entities. Enjoyment deriving from witnessing the enhancement, success, or victory of a party, agent or object decreases with the intensity of negative sentiment and increases with the intensity of positive sentiment. Annoyance deriving from the debasement, failure or defeat decreases with the intensity of negative sentiment and increases with the intensity of positive sentiment.
Predictions from this disposition model have been confirmed not only for the enjoyment of drama, but also for humor appreciation and the enjoyment of sports. Most victim jokes may be modeled in this manner. Sports mechanics operate in the same predictive manner. Fans have favorites and loathed ones. Seeing beloved ones beaten or loathed ones victorious can cause a riot or make a grown man cry. The reverse also holds. Seeing favorites humble a loathed team or figure can still cause a riot, but the fans will be drunk on victory rather than humiliation.
Explain the concept of "critical mass."
For physicists, critical mass relates to the amount of radioactive material necessary to sustain a chain reaction. The term has been adopted by social scientists to refer to the number of individuals necessary for a social movement to "explode" into being. Adoption of new media technology is one such social phenomenon that offers an excellent example of this critical mass process. At a certain point, adoption of the technology begins to "take off" dramatically.
Various descriptions of this phenomenon have been proposed. With such media as electronic mail or the telephone, critical mass occurs when all individuals in the community adopt the technology. If critical mass does not occur, then usage will drop because of the lack of reciprocity and eventually no one will use the technology. Other criteria such as time, money or skills relate to the critical mass. The fewer resources of time, money and ease of use, the greater the likelihood of achieving the critical mass leading to universal access. Certain individual tend to be "high resource" individuals and early adoption of the technology by them will increase the likelihood of achieving a critical mass.
One of the best examples of working with a critical mass involved fax machines. The first fax machines in the mid-1800s were used for a century for transmitting pictures and maps over telephone lines. In the 1960s standards emerged for common communications. This did not bear fruit until the mid 1980s when enough organizations had adopted the technology. Suddenly, it seemed as if "everyone else" had a fax machine available. Now the penetration of fax machines goes into residential usage. A lesson could be that people may be forced to adopt a communications technology, with all the benefits and drawbacks, simply to maintain their current communications networks.
Discuss the media system dependency theory. Why do viewers become dependent upon the media?
Media system dependency theory suggests that in order to understand media related phenomena, it is important to analyze dependency relationships within and across levels of analysis. The theory states that the power of media is a function of the dependencies of individuals, groups, organizations and systems on the scarce information resources controlled by the media. Thus, media content and related media effects is a product of a variety of dependency relationships operating at multiple levels of analysis.
The analysis of the television system in the United Sates demonstrates this dependency analysis. To understand its effect on a specific individual, it is important to note that the medium is dependent on advertisers for revenue, the government for the right to broadcast, and the individual viewer for continuing to use the medium as a "product" for advertisers. As such, each component depends on television in one form or another. Media system dependency theory states that because all of the dependency relationships affect each other, an analysis of the role of a medium in society should examine these dependency relationships across levels of analysis.
Media system theory is one of the many theories that provides insight into the complexity of new media technologies. By integrating this theory with others, such as diffusion of innovations, social information processing, uses-and-gratifications notions, and critical mass theories, a more accurate picture of new media technologies may be possible.
An individual may exhibit a stable dependency relationship with a medium to fulfill specific goals of play, orientation and understanding. This may be expected to remain stable over a period of time. However, in times of ambiguity or threat, dependency on mass media increases as individuals seek additional information to help them in their daily lives.
http://www.lucidexperience.com/HypnoPapers/529.html
public opinion
The crux of defining public opinion is the consideration of public, rather than of opinionwhich, simply, unlike fact, is unverifiable. Instead of a well-defined, distinct public, many publics exist, and the state of public opinion depends upon which particular public one is interested in.
This article considers the role of public opinion in a democratic society such as the United States. In nondemocratic countries control of public opinion can include extreme use of censorship and propaganda.
In the broadest sense it is possible to speak of the mass public, referring to all voting-age citizens. This is the public referred to in the typical opinion poll. Within this amorphous body it is useful to distinguish between several subsets. One might be interested, for example, in the opinion of the voting public. Depending on the specific election involved, the size of this group can be a fairly tiny fraction of the mass public. Moreover, studies of voters and nonvoters reveal that the two groups are quite dissimilar in their political beliefs and opinions. Public officials are thus likely to get two different messages, depending on which public they choose to listen to.
Other constituents of the mass public include various issue groupsspecial interest groups of citizens who care passionately about a particular issue. In recent years abortion, crime, gun control, protection of the environment, health-care reform, campaign finance reform, and other matters have emerged as issues with their own followings. The presence of issue publics poses important questions concerning the practice of democratic government. Typically, members hold very strong and well-defined opinions on their own issue, while the general public, in contrast, is characterized by indifference. The critical question is whether public officials should heed the opinions of the numerically significant but indifferent majority or the opinions of the much smaller intense minority.
The example of issue publics illustrates the general importance of public opinion in democratic societynamely, that of restraining and guiding the actions of governmental institutions. Earlier theorizers about democratic government reasoned that citizens would elect leaders whose political views they found most acceptable and that these leaders, once elected, would enact their political opinions into governmental policies, thus making for "government by the people."
Today many observers maintain that the notion that public opinion serves as the driving force behind governmental policy making is unrealistic. For this to hold, citizens must take an interest in political subjects, monitor the activities of their leaders vigilantly, and be reasonably well informed about political events or issues. In fact, most Americans have, at best, only a passing interest in things political. It is only during periods of unusual significancesuch as the congressional hearing concerning the Iran-contra affairthat most Americans turn their attention to the political world. Consequently, most Americans are ignorant about current issues.
Thus, in practice, "government by the people" means government by people who care about public issues. More often than not, intense minorities such as members of the National Rifle Association achieve their political goals even though their views may be at odds with those held by the numerical majority. In short, if public opinion means the opinion of average Americans, then the impact of public opinion on governmental policy is, at best, weak.
While the role of public opinion in the policy-formulation process is limited, it is nonetheless true that political leaders serve at the pleasure of their constituents. From the president down to state legislators, elected officials are careful to cultivate a high degree of public approval. Thus, while public opinion on specific issues may be poorly defined, public approval of political leaders, and the president in particular, can be a potent restraining force: the less popular the president with the public, the less likely he is to wield influence in Washington and the more unlikely to win a second term.
How the Public Acquires Opinions
People do not manufacture opinions spontaneously; they learn them. It is useful to distinguish between two separate learning processesone that is lifelong, the other episodic. Beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life, individuals are exposed to a variety of social milieus, groups, and individuals, all of whom leave their mark on political opinions. The basic psychological mechanism is social influence or conformity; individuals adopt the opinions of those close to them.
The family plays a critical part in the learning process because it has the earliest access to individuals and because children are least able to resist social influence. In the case of public opinion, the contribution of family socialization is particularly significant because the sense of party identification is instilled in early childhood and proves highly resistant to change during adult years. In addition to the family and peer groups, educational institutions also contribute to political socialization by providing formal "civics" training and by offering opportunities to develop participant skills.
Among the most important of short-term learning forces are the mass medianewspapers, television, and radio. Ordinary citizens' only contact with the political world is the "pictures in their heads" put there by news accounts or other public-affairs media presentations. As a result of this dependence, it is inevitable that what people think about politics is subject to considerable media influence.
The strongest media effect on public opinion is referred to as "agenda-setting"those issues or events receiving a greater degree of media attention become the issues and events that are uppermost in citizens' minds. By granting extended news coverage to drug abuse, for example, the media cause people to cite drug abuse as a significant national problem. In effect, the media direct individuals' attention toward particular issues and away from others.
Uses of Public Opinion
Public opinion is increasingly newsworthy. With the rapid development of survey and polling technology the number of organizations conducting public opinion polls has mushroomed. Today virtually every major news organization conducts polls regularly and reports extensively on the results. Public officials are also seasoned poll users. Legislators frequently send their constituents questionnaires (at taxpayer expense), while candidates for major public offices employ political consultants whose responsibilities include keeping track of the state of public opinion in the candidate's state or district.
Finally, opinion polling is a major tool of social scientists. Political scientists, economists, and sociologists rely extensively on sample surveys to test propositions about human behavior. Two major academic research polling institutions are the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Shanto Iyengar
Bibliography:
Dalton, Russell J., Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 2d ed. (1996).
Glasser, Theodore, Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent (1995).
Kennamer, David J., Public Opinion, the Press, and Public Policy (1994).
Lenart, Silvio, Shaping Political Attitudes: The Impact of Interpersonal Communication and Mass Media (1994).
Mutz, Diane, et al., eds., Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (1995).
Pratkanis, Anthony, and Aronson, Elliot, The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (1991).
Price, Vincent, Public Opinion (1992).
Rothman, Stanley, ed., The Mass Media in Liberal Democratic Societies (1992).
Yankelovich, Daniel, Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (1991).
Zaller, John R., The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992).
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0238...le/article.html
The crux of defining public opinion is the consideration of public, rather than of opinionwhich, simply, unlike fact, is unverifiable. Instead of a well-defined, distinct public, many publics exist, and the state of public opinion depends upon which particular public one is interested in.
This article considers the role of public opinion in a democratic society such as the United States. In nondemocratic countries control of public opinion can include extreme use of censorship and propaganda.
In the broadest sense it is possible to speak of the mass public, referring to all voting-age citizens. This is the public referred to in the typical opinion poll. Within this amorphous body it is useful to distinguish between several subsets. One might be interested, for example, in the opinion of the voting public. Depending on the specific election involved, the size of this group can be a fairly tiny fraction of the mass public. Moreover, studies of voters and nonvoters reveal that the two groups are quite dissimilar in their political beliefs and opinions. Public officials are thus likely to get two different messages, depending on which public they choose to listen to.
Other constituents of the mass public include various issue groupsspecial interest groups of citizens who care passionately about a particular issue. In recent years abortion, crime, gun control, protection of the environment, health-care reform, campaign finance reform, and other matters have emerged as issues with their own followings. The presence of issue publics poses important questions concerning the practice of democratic government. Typically, members hold very strong and well-defined opinions on their own issue, while the general public, in contrast, is characterized by indifference. The critical question is whether public officials should heed the opinions of the numerically significant but indifferent majority or the opinions of the much smaller intense minority.
The example of issue publics illustrates the general importance of public opinion in democratic societynamely, that of restraining and guiding the actions of governmental institutions. Earlier theorizers about democratic government reasoned that citizens would elect leaders whose political views they found most acceptable and that these leaders, once elected, would enact their political opinions into governmental policies, thus making for "government by the people."
Today many observers maintain that the notion that public opinion serves as the driving force behind governmental policy making is unrealistic. For this to hold, citizens must take an interest in political subjects, monitor the activities of their leaders vigilantly, and be reasonably well informed about political events or issues. In fact, most Americans have, at best, only a passing interest in things political. It is only during periods of unusual significancesuch as the congressional hearing concerning the Iran-contra affairthat most Americans turn their attention to the political world. Consequently, most Americans are ignorant about current issues.
Thus, in practice, "government by the people" means government by people who care about public issues. More often than not, intense minorities such as members of the National Rifle Association achieve their political goals even though their views may be at odds with those held by the numerical majority. In short, if public opinion means the opinion of average Americans, then the impact of public opinion on governmental policy is, at best, weak.
While the role of public opinion in the policy-formulation process is limited, it is nonetheless true that political leaders serve at the pleasure of their constituents. From the president down to state legislators, elected officials are careful to cultivate a high degree of public approval. Thus, while public opinion on specific issues may be poorly defined, public approval of political leaders, and the president in particular, can be a potent restraining force: the less popular the president with the public, the less likely he is to wield influence in Washington and the more unlikely to win a second term.
How the Public Acquires Opinions
People do not manufacture opinions spontaneously; they learn them. It is useful to distinguish between two separate learning processesone that is lifelong, the other episodic. Beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life, individuals are exposed to a variety of social milieus, groups, and individuals, all of whom leave their mark on political opinions. The basic psychological mechanism is social influence or conformity; individuals adopt the opinions of those close to them.
The family plays a critical part in the learning process because it has the earliest access to individuals and because children are least able to resist social influence. In the case of public opinion, the contribution of family socialization is particularly significant because the sense of party identification is instilled in early childhood and proves highly resistant to change during adult years. In addition to the family and peer groups, educational institutions also contribute to political socialization by providing formal "civics" training and by offering opportunities to develop participant skills.
Among the most important of short-term learning forces are the mass medianewspapers, television, and radio. Ordinary citizens' only contact with the political world is the "pictures in their heads" put there by news accounts or other public-affairs media presentations. As a result of this dependence, it is inevitable that what people think about politics is subject to considerable media influence.
The strongest media effect on public opinion is referred to as "agenda-setting"those issues or events receiving a greater degree of media attention become the issues and events that are uppermost in citizens' minds. By granting extended news coverage to drug abuse, for example, the media cause people to cite drug abuse as a significant national problem. In effect, the media direct individuals' attention toward particular issues and away from others.
Uses of Public Opinion
Public opinion is increasingly newsworthy. With the rapid development of survey and polling technology the number of organizations conducting public opinion polls has mushroomed. Today virtually every major news organization conducts polls regularly and reports extensively on the results. Public officials are also seasoned poll users. Legislators frequently send their constituents questionnaires (at taxpayer expense), while candidates for major public offices employ political consultants whose responsibilities include keeping track of the state of public opinion in the candidate's state or district.
Finally, opinion polling is a major tool of social scientists. Political scientists, economists, and sociologists rely extensively on sample surveys to test propositions about human behavior. Two major academic research polling institutions are the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Shanto Iyengar
Bibliography:
Dalton, Russell J., Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 2d ed. (1996).
Glasser, Theodore, Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent (1995).
Kennamer, David J., Public Opinion, the Press, and Public Policy (1994).
Lenart, Silvio, Shaping Political Attitudes: The Impact of Interpersonal Communication and Mass Media (1994).
Mutz, Diane, et al., eds., Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (1995).
Pratkanis, Anthony, and Aronson, Elliot, The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (1991).
Price, Vincent, Public Opinion (1992).
Rothman, Stanley, ed., The Mass Media in Liberal Democratic Societies (1992).
Yankelovich, Daniel, Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (1991).
Zaller, John R., The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992).
http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0238...le/article.html
The Emperor's New Hump
The New York Times killed a story that could have changed the election—because it could have changed the election
the picture that was missing from their heads.
it's really difficult to understand if another revolution ever occurred in the US just who it is that would be rebelled against
Extra! January/February 2005
By Dave Lindorff
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 election, the New York Times was abuzz with excitement. Besides the election itself, the paper’s reporters were hard at work on two hot investigative projects, each of which could have a major impact on the outcome of the tight presidential race.
One week before Election Day, the Times (10/25/04) ran a hard-hitting and controversial exposé of the Al-Qaqaa ammunition dump—identified by U.N. inspectors before the war as containing 400 tons of special high-density explosives useful for aircraft bombings and as triggers for nuclear devices, but left unguarded and available to insurgents by U.S. forces after the invasion.
On Thursday, just three days after that first exposé, the paper was set to run a second, perhaps more explosive piece, exposing how George W. Bush had worn an electronic cueing device in his ear and probably cheated during the presidential debates.
It's clear even from unenhanced photos that George W. Bush has been wearing some kind of object under his clothing, both during the debates and at other public appearances. The enhancements done by NASA scientist Robert Nelson show a rectangular object with a long "tail"; in some shots a wire leading over Bush's shoulder is visible. This configuration closely resembles a PTT (Push To Talk) receiver with an induction earpiece, a device used by some actors, newscasters and politicians to allow for inaudible voice communication in a public setting. The particular model pictured here (which does not appear to be the exact type Bush wore) was manufactured by Resistance Technology, Inc. of Arden Hills, Minn.
The so-called Bulgegate story had been getting tremendous attention on the Internet. Stories about it had also run in many mainstream papers, including the New York Times (10/9/04, 10/18/04) and Washington Post (10/9/04), but most of these had been light-hearted. Indeed, the issue had even made it into the comedy circuit, including the monologues of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and a set of strips by cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
That the story hadn’t gotten more serious treatment in the mainstream press was largely thanks to a well-organized media effort by the Bush White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign to label those who attempted to investigate the bulge as "conspiracy buffs" (Washington Post, 10/9/04). In an era of pinched budgets and an equally pinched notion of the role of the Fourth Estate, the fact that the Kerry camp was offering no comment on the matter—perhaps for fear of earning a "conspiracy buff" label for the candidate himself—may also have made reporters skittish. Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of Mother Jones magazine, told Mother Jones (online edition, 10/30/04) he had called a number of contacts at leading news organizations across the country, and was told that unless the Kerry campaign raised the issue, they couldn’t pursue it.
"Totally off base"
The Times’ effort to get to the bottom of the matter through a serious investigation seemed to be a striking exception. That investigation, however, despite extensive reporting over several weeks by three Times reporters, never ran. Now, like the mythic weapons of mass destruction that were the raison d’etre for the Iraq War, the Times is thus far claiming that the Bush Bulgegate story never existed in the first place.
Referring to a FAIR press release (11/5/04) about the spiked story, Village Voice press critic Jarrett Murphy wrote (11/16/04), "A Times reporter alleged to have worked on such a piece says FAIR was totally off base: The paper never pursued the story."
Murphy told Extra! that his source at the nation’s self-proclaimed paper of record—whom he would not identify—told him the information about the bulge seen under Bush’s jacket during the debates, provided by a senior astronomer and photo imaging specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, had been tossed onto the "nutpile," and was never researched further.
In fact, several sources, including a journalist at the Times, have told Extra! that the paper put a good deal of effort into this important story about presidential competence and integrity; they claim that a story was written, edited and scheduled to run on several different days, before senior editors finally axed it at the last minute on Wednesday evening, October 27. A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were "pretty upset" about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt Thursday was "too close" to the election to run such a piece. Emails from the Times to the NASA scientist corroborate these sources’ accounts.
Battle of the bulge
The Bulgegate story originated when a number of alert viewers of the first presidential debate noticed a peculiar rectangular bulge on the back of Bush’s jacket. That they got to see that portion of his anatomy at all was an accident; the Bush campaign had specifically, and inexplicably, demanded that the Presidential Debate Commission bar pool TV cameras from taking rear shots of the candidates during any debates. Fox TV, the first pool camera for debate one, ignored the rule and put two cameras behind the candidates to provide establishing shots.
Photos depicting the bulge and speculating on just what it might be (a medical device, a radio receiver?) began circulating widely around the Internet, and several special blog sites were established to discuss them. The suspicion that Bush had been getting cues or answers in his ear was bolstered by his strange behavior in that first debate, which included several uncomfortably long pauses before and during his answers. On one occasion, he burst out angrily with "Now let me finish!" at a time when nobody was interrupting him and his warning light was not flashing. Images of visibly bulging backs from earlier Bush appearances began circulating, along with reports of prior incidents that suggested Bush might have been receiving hidden cues (London Guardian, 10/8/04).
Finally, on October 8, this reporter ran an investigative report about the bulge in the online magazine Salon, following up with a second report (10/13/04)—an interview with an executive of a firm that makes wireless cueing devices that link to hidden earpieces—that suggested that Bush was likely to have been improperly receiving secret help during the debates.
At that point, Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who works on photo imaging for NASA’s various space probes and currently is part of a photo enhancement team for the Cassini Saturn space probe, entered the picture. Nelson recounts that after seeing the Salon story on the bulge, professional curiosity prompted him to apply his skills at photo enhancement to a digital image he took from a videotape of the first debate. He says that when he saw the results of his efforts, which clearly revealed a significant T-shaped object in the middle of Bush’s back and a wire running up and over his shoulder, he realized it was an important story.
After first offering it unsuccessfully to his local paper, the Pasadena Star-News, and then, with equal lack of success, to the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh, where he had gone to college, he offered it to the Los Angeles Times. (In all his media contacts, Nelson says, he offered the use of his enhanced photos free of charge.) "About three weeks before the election, I gave the photos to the L.A. Times’ Eric Slater, who shopped them around the paper," recalls Nelson. "After four days, in which they never got back to me, I went to the New York Times."
Contradictory explanations
The Times was at first very interested, Nelson reports. There was, after all, clearly good reason to investigate the issue. The White House and Bush/ Cheney campaign had initially mocked the bulge story when it had run in Salon, first attributing it to "doctored" photos circulating on the Internet (New York Times, 10/9/04), and later claiming that the bulge, so noticeable in video images, was the result of a "badly tailored suit" (New York Times, 10/18/04). Bush himself contradicted this White House and campaign line when he told ABC’s Charles Gibson (Good Morning America, 10/26/04) that the bulge was the result of his wearing a "poorly tailored shirt" to the debate.
Now Nelson’s photos—the result of his applying the same enhancement techniques to the debate pictures that he uses to clarify photo images from space probes—rendered all these official if mutually contradictory explanations obviously false. (A November 4, 2004 report in the Washington paper The Hill, citing an unidentified source in the Secret Service, claimed that the bulge was caused by a bulletproof vest worn by Bush during the debates, though this had been specifically denied by the White House and by Bush himself—New York Times, 10/9/04. In any event, no known vests have rear protuberances resembling the image discovered by Nelson.)
Times science writer William Broad, as well as reporters Andrew Revkin and John Schwartz, got to work on the story, according to Nelson, and produced a story that he says they assured him was scheduled to run the week of October 25. "It got pushed back because of the explosives story," he says, first to Wednesday, and then to Thursday, October 28. That would still have been five days ahead of Election Day.
An indication of the seriousness with which the story was being pursued is provided by an email Schwartz sent to Nelson on October 26—one of a string of back-and-forth emails between Schwartz and Nelson. It read:
Hey there, Dr. Nelson—this story is shaping up very nicely, but my_editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you’ll hold tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get our story out there.
Please call me with any concerns that you might have about this, and thanks again for letting us tell your story.
But on October 28, the article was not in the paper. After learning from the reporters working on the story that their article had been killed the night before by senior editors, Nelson eventually sent his photographic evidence of presidential cheating to Salon magazine, which ran the photos as the magazine’s lead item on October 29. That same day, Nelson received the following email from the Times’ Schwartz:
Congratulations on getting the story into Salon. It’s already all over the Web in every blog I’ve seen this morning. I’m sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you, but I’m very happy to see your story getting out there.
Best wishes,
John
Not exactly the kind of message you’d expect a reporter to send to a "nut."
"The bar is raised higher"
In fact, Schwartz, Revkin and Broad, using Nelson’s photographic evidence as their starting point, had made a major effort to put together the story of presidential debate misconduct and deception. Among those called in the course of their reporting, in addition to Nelson, who says he received numerous calls and emails from the team, were Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, who was asked to vouch for Nelson’s professional credentials; Bush/Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman (information about this call was provided by a journalist at the Times); and Jim Atkinson, an owner of a spyware and debugging company in Gloucester, Mass., called Granite Island Group.
"The Times reporters called me a number of times on this story," confirms Atkinson. "I was able to identify the object Nelson highlighted definitively as a magnetic cueing device that uses a wire yoke around the neck to communicate with a hidden earpiece—the kind of thing that is used routinely now by music performers, actors, reporters—and by politicians."
He adds, "The Times reporters called me repeatedly. They were absolutely going after this story aggressively, though at one point they told me they were concerned that their editors were going to kill it."
Efforts to learn more about the history and fate of this story at the New York Times met for weeks with official silence. Several inquiries were made by phone and email to Times public editor Daniel Okrent over a period of three weeks, eliciting one response—an email from his assistant asking for the names of Extra!’s sources at the Times. He was not provided with the sources, but was given the names of the three reporters who worked on the piece, which had been disclosed by Dr. Nelson. (At deadline time, Okrent did finally call, and promised to seek the answer to the story’s fate. A week later, at press time, he had yet to do so.)
One clue as to what happened at the Times is provided by a final email message sent by Times reporter Schwartz to Nelson, who had written to Schwartz to alert him that he had gone on to analyze photos of Bush’s back in the subsequent two debates. Schwartz wrote:
Subject: Re: reanalysis of debate images more convincing than before
Dear Dr. Nelson,
Thanks for sticking with me on this. I don’t know what might convince them—and the bar is raised higher the closer we are to the election, because they don’t want to seem to be springing something at the last moment—but I will bring this up with my bosses.
"Voters have a right to know"
Ironically, however, on November 1, the New York Times ran a story by reporters Jacques Steinberg and David Carr, titled "Media Timing and the October Surprise." The Times had been taking considerable heat from conservatives and from the Bush campaign for running the Al-Qaqaa story, an investigative piece critical of Iraq War leadership—and thus damaging to Bush’s election campaign—so close to Election Day.
While the thrust of this article was a justification for the Times’ decision to run the controversial missing-explosives story a week ahead of the election, executive editor Bill Keller added a comment about the seemingly hypothetical issue of running a damaging story about a candidate as close as two days ahead of the voting:
I can’t say categorically you should not publish an article damaging to a candidate in the last days before an election. . . . If you learned a day or two before the election that a candidate had lied about some essential qualification for the job—his health or criminal record—and there’s no real doubt and you’ve given the candidate a chance to respond and the response doesn’t cast doubt on the story, do you publish it? Yes. Voters certainly have a right to know that.
Oddly, though, despite Keller’s having taken such a position, the Times apparently chose not to run the Nelson pictures story on the grounds of proximity to Election Day. Even more oddly, despite the fact that the Times had thoroughly researched and reported Nelson’s story before deciding not to run it—even after the story had run in both Salon and Mother Jones—the Times still ducked (and continues to duck) the whole bulge story itself, ignoring an important issue that it knew to be factually substantiated.
No mention of the Bush bulge was made in either the Times or the Washington Post between October 29 and Election Day—aside from a one-line mention in a New York Times Magazine essay by Matt Bai (10/31/04) that used the Bulgegate story as an example of the paranoia of "political conspiracists":
A rumor that the president somehow cheated in the televised debates—was that a wire under his jacket? was he listening to Karl Rove on a microscopic earpiece?—flies across the Internet and takes hold in dark corners of the public imagination.
The only subsequent reference to the bulge was a light post-election piece by Times Washington reporter Elizabeth Bumiller (11/8/04), who cited the anonymously sourced Hill story saying the bulge was body armor (an odd decision by the Times, which officially frowns on unidentified sources even for its own pieces). She reported that the White House tailor was miffed at having earlier been blamed for the bulge by the White House.
“A lot of hoops”
While the New York Times seems to have been the only newspaper to write an investigative story on the Bush bulge and then kill it, it was not the only paper to duck the story about the bulge and its dramatic confirmation and delineation by Nelson. In addition to the L. A. Times and the two local papers that showed no interest, Nelson says that the same day he learned that his story had been killed at the Times, October 28, he received a phone call from Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, famous for his investigative reports on Watergate. "Woodward said he’d heard the Times had killed the story and asked me if I could send the photos to him," says Nelson.
The JPL scientist did so immediately, via email, noting that he had also been in touch with Salon magazine. He says Woodward then sent his photographs over to a photo analyst at the paper to check them for authenticity, which Nelson says was confirmed.
A day later, realizing time was getting short, Nelson called Woodward back. Recalls Nelson: "He told me, 'Look, I’m going to have to go through a lot of hoops to get this story published. You’re already talking to Salon. Why don’t you work with them?'" (Several emails to Woodward asking him about Nelson's account have gone unanswered.)
At that point Nelson, despairing of getting the pictures in a major publication, went with the online magazine Salon. This reporter subsequently asked Nelson to do a similar photo analysis of digital images of Bush’s back taken from the tapes of the second and third presidential debates. The resulting photos, which also clearly show the cueing device and magnetic loop harness under his jacket on both occasions, were posted, together with Nelson’s images from the first debate, on the news website of Mother Jones magazine (10/30/04).
What should affect elections?
Ben Bagdikian, retired dean of U.C. Berkeley's journalism school, held Woodward's current position at the Washington Post during the time of the Pentagon Papers. Informed of the fate of the bulge story and Nelson's photos at the three newspapers, he said:
I cannot imagine a paper I worked for turning down a story like this before an election. This was credible photographic evidence not about breaking the rules, but of a total lack of integrity on the part of the president, evidence that he'd cheated in the debate, and also of a lack of confidence in his ability on the part of his campaign. I'm shocked to hear top management decided not to run such a story.
Could the last-minute decision by the New York Times not to run the Nelson photos story, or the decision by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times not even to pursue it, have affected the outcome of the recent presidential race? There is no question that if such a story had run in any one of those major venues, instead of just in two online publications, Bulgegate would have been a major issue in the waning days of the campaign.
Given that exit polls show many who voted for Bush around the country listed "moral values" as a big factor in their decision, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some would have changed their minds had evidence been presented in the nation’s biggest and most influential newspapers that Bush had been dishonest.
"Cheating on a debate should affect an election," says Bagdikian. "The decision not to let people know this story could affect the history of the United States."
Investigative journalist Dave Lindorff is a regular columnist for CounterPunch. His latest book is This Can’t Be Happening: Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press). His writings can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Spiking the Bush Bulge Story:
Confirmed
As Extra! went to press, New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent posted a message on his website (12/21/04) confirming that his paper had, in fact, killed a story about the device under George W. Bush’s suit. Here is the text of Okrent’s message:
President Bush and the Jacket Bulge
Online discussion of the famous bulge on President Bush’s back at the first presidential debate hasn’t stopped. One reporter (Dave Lindorff of Salon.com) asserted that the Times had a story in the works about a NASA scientist who had done a careful study of the graphic evidence, but it was spiked by the paper’s top editors sometime during the week before the election. Many readers have asked me for an explanation.
I checked into Lindorff’s assertion, and he’s right. The story’s life at the Times began with a tip from the NASA scientist, Robert Nelson, to reporter Bill Broad. Soon his colleagues on the science desk, John Schwartz and Andrew Revkin, took on the bulk of the reporting. Science editor Laura Chang presented the story at the daily news meeting but, like many other stories, it did not make the cut. According to executive editor Bill Keller, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death."
Revkin, for one, wished it had run. Here’s what he told me in an e-mail message:
I can appreciate the broader factors weighing on the paper’s top editors, particularly that close to the election. But personally, I think that Nelson’s assertions did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. Here was a veteran government scientist, whose decades-long career revolves around interpreting imagery like features of Mars, who decided to say very publicly that, without reservation, he was convinced there was something under a president’s jacket when the White House said there was nothing. He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line (not to mention his job) in doing so and certainly with little prospect that he might gain something as a result—except, as he put it, his preserved integrity.
Revkin also told me that before Nelson called Broad, he had approached other media outlets as well. None—until Salon—published anything on Nelson’s analysis. "I’d certainly choose [Nelson’s] opinion over that of a tailor," Revkin concluded, referring to news reports that cited the man who makes the president’s suits. "Hard to believe that so many in the media chose the tailor, even in coverage after the election."
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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2012
The New York Times killed a story that could have changed the election—because it could have changed the election
the picture that was missing from their heads.
it's really difficult to understand if another revolution ever occurred in the US just who it is that would be rebelled against
Extra! January/February 2005
By Dave Lindorff
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 election, the New York Times was abuzz with excitement. Besides the election itself, the paper’s reporters were hard at work on two hot investigative projects, each of which could have a major impact on the outcome of the tight presidential race.
One week before Election Day, the Times (10/25/04) ran a hard-hitting and controversial exposé of the Al-Qaqaa ammunition dump—identified by U.N. inspectors before the war as containing 400 tons of special high-density explosives useful for aircraft bombings and as triggers for nuclear devices, but left unguarded and available to insurgents by U.S. forces after the invasion.
On Thursday, just three days after that first exposé, the paper was set to run a second, perhaps more explosive piece, exposing how George W. Bush had worn an electronic cueing device in his ear and probably cheated during the presidential debates.
It's clear even from unenhanced photos that George W. Bush has been wearing some kind of object under his clothing, both during the debates and at other public appearances. The enhancements done by NASA scientist Robert Nelson show a rectangular object with a long "tail"; in some shots a wire leading over Bush's shoulder is visible. This configuration closely resembles a PTT (Push To Talk) receiver with an induction earpiece, a device used by some actors, newscasters and politicians to allow for inaudible voice communication in a public setting. The particular model pictured here (which does not appear to be the exact type Bush wore) was manufactured by Resistance Technology, Inc. of Arden Hills, Minn.
The so-called Bulgegate story had been getting tremendous attention on the Internet. Stories about it had also run in many mainstream papers, including the New York Times (10/9/04, 10/18/04) and Washington Post (10/9/04), but most of these had been light-hearted. Indeed, the issue had even made it into the comedy circuit, including the monologues of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and a set of strips by cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
That the story hadn’t gotten more serious treatment in the mainstream press was largely thanks to a well-organized media effort by the Bush White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign to label those who attempted to investigate the bulge as "conspiracy buffs" (Washington Post, 10/9/04). In an era of pinched budgets and an equally pinched notion of the role of the Fourth Estate, the fact that the Kerry camp was offering no comment on the matter—perhaps for fear of earning a "conspiracy buff" label for the candidate himself—may also have made reporters skittish. Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of Mother Jones magazine, told Mother Jones (online edition, 10/30/04) he had called a number of contacts at leading news organizations across the country, and was told that unless the Kerry campaign raised the issue, they couldn’t pursue it.
"Totally off base"
The Times’ effort to get to the bottom of the matter through a serious investigation seemed to be a striking exception. That investigation, however, despite extensive reporting over several weeks by three Times reporters, never ran. Now, like the mythic weapons of mass destruction that were the raison d’etre for the Iraq War, the Times is thus far claiming that the Bush Bulgegate story never existed in the first place.
Referring to a FAIR press release (11/5/04) about the spiked story, Village Voice press critic Jarrett Murphy wrote (11/16/04), "A Times reporter alleged to have worked on such a piece says FAIR was totally off base: The paper never pursued the story."
Murphy told Extra! that his source at the nation’s self-proclaimed paper of record—whom he would not identify—told him the information about the bulge seen under Bush’s jacket during the debates, provided by a senior astronomer and photo imaging specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, had been tossed onto the "nutpile," and was never researched further.
In fact, several sources, including a journalist at the Times, have told Extra! that the paper put a good deal of effort into this important story about presidential competence and integrity; they claim that a story was written, edited and scheduled to run on several different days, before senior editors finally axed it at the last minute on Wednesday evening, October 27. A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were "pretty upset" about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt Thursday was "too close" to the election to run such a piece. Emails from the Times to the NASA scientist corroborate these sources’ accounts.
Battle of the bulge
The Bulgegate story originated when a number of alert viewers of the first presidential debate noticed a peculiar rectangular bulge on the back of Bush’s jacket. That they got to see that portion of his anatomy at all was an accident; the Bush campaign had specifically, and inexplicably, demanded that the Presidential Debate Commission bar pool TV cameras from taking rear shots of the candidates during any debates. Fox TV, the first pool camera for debate one, ignored the rule and put two cameras behind the candidates to provide establishing shots.
Photos depicting the bulge and speculating on just what it might be (a medical device, a radio receiver?) began circulating widely around the Internet, and several special blog sites were established to discuss them. The suspicion that Bush had been getting cues or answers in his ear was bolstered by his strange behavior in that first debate, which included several uncomfortably long pauses before and during his answers. On one occasion, he burst out angrily with "Now let me finish!" at a time when nobody was interrupting him and his warning light was not flashing. Images of visibly bulging backs from earlier Bush appearances began circulating, along with reports of prior incidents that suggested Bush might have been receiving hidden cues (London Guardian, 10/8/04).
Finally, on October 8, this reporter ran an investigative report about the bulge in the online magazine Salon, following up with a second report (10/13/04)—an interview with an executive of a firm that makes wireless cueing devices that link to hidden earpieces—that suggested that Bush was likely to have been improperly receiving secret help during the debates.
At that point, Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who works on photo imaging for NASA’s various space probes and currently is part of a photo enhancement team for the Cassini Saturn space probe, entered the picture. Nelson recounts that after seeing the Salon story on the bulge, professional curiosity prompted him to apply his skills at photo enhancement to a digital image he took from a videotape of the first debate. He says that when he saw the results of his efforts, which clearly revealed a significant T-shaped object in the middle of Bush’s back and a wire running up and over his shoulder, he realized it was an important story.
After first offering it unsuccessfully to his local paper, the Pasadena Star-News, and then, with equal lack of success, to the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh, where he had gone to college, he offered it to the Los Angeles Times. (In all his media contacts, Nelson says, he offered the use of his enhanced photos free of charge.) "About three weeks before the election, I gave the photos to the L.A. Times’ Eric Slater, who shopped them around the paper," recalls Nelson. "After four days, in which they never got back to me, I went to the New York Times."
Contradictory explanations
The Times was at first very interested, Nelson reports. There was, after all, clearly good reason to investigate the issue. The White House and Bush/ Cheney campaign had initially mocked the bulge story when it had run in Salon, first attributing it to "doctored" photos circulating on the Internet (New York Times, 10/9/04), and later claiming that the bulge, so noticeable in video images, was the result of a "badly tailored suit" (New York Times, 10/18/04). Bush himself contradicted this White House and campaign line when he told ABC’s Charles Gibson (Good Morning America, 10/26/04) that the bulge was the result of his wearing a "poorly tailored shirt" to the debate.
Now Nelson’s photos—the result of his applying the same enhancement techniques to the debate pictures that he uses to clarify photo images from space probes—rendered all these official if mutually contradictory explanations obviously false. (A November 4, 2004 report in the Washington paper The Hill, citing an unidentified source in the Secret Service, claimed that the bulge was caused by a bulletproof vest worn by Bush during the debates, though this had been specifically denied by the White House and by Bush himself—New York Times, 10/9/04. In any event, no known vests have rear protuberances resembling the image discovered by Nelson.)
Times science writer William Broad, as well as reporters Andrew Revkin and John Schwartz, got to work on the story, according to Nelson, and produced a story that he says they assured him was scheduled to run the week of October 25. "It got pushed back because of the explosives story," he says, first to Wednesday, and then to Thursday, October 28. That would still have been five days ahead of Election Day.
An indication of the seriousness with which the story was being pursued is provided by an email Schwartz sent to Nelson on October 26—one of a string of back-and-forth emails between Schwartz and Nelson. It read:
Hey there, Dr. Nelson—this story is shaping up very nicely, but my_editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you’ll hold tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get our story out there.
Please call me with any concerns that you might have about this, and thanks again for letting us tell your story.
But on October 28, the article was not in the paper. After learning from the reporters working on the story that their article had been killed the night before by senior editors, Nelson eventually sent his photographic evidence of presidential cheating to Salon magazine, which ran the photos as the magazine’s lead item on October 29. That same day, Nelson received the following email from the Times’ Schwartz:
Congratulations on getting the story into Salon. It’s already all over the Web in every blog I’ve seen this morning. I’m sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you, but I’m very happy to see your story getting out there.
Best wishes,
John
Not exactly the kind of message you’d expect a reporter to send to a "nut."
"The bar is raised higher"
In fact, Schwartz, Revkin and Broad, using Nelson’s photographic evidence as their starting point, had made a major effort to put together the story of presidential debate misconduct and deception. Among those called in the course of their reporting, in addition to Nelson, who says he received numerous calls and emails from the team, were Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, who was asked to vouch for Nelson’s professional credentials; Bush/Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman (information about this call was provided by a journalist at the Times); and Jim Atkinson, an owner of a spyware and debugging company in Gloucester, Mass., called Granite Island Group.
"The Times reporters called me a number of times on this story," confirms Atkinson. "I was able to identify the object Nelson highlighted definitively as a magnetic cueing device that uses a wire yoke around the neck to communicate with a hidden earpiece—the kind of thing that is used routinely now by music performers, actors, reporters—and by politicians."
He adds, "The Times reporters called me repeatedly. They were absolutely going after this story aggressively, though at one point they told me they were concerned that their editors were going to kill it."
Efforts to learn more about the history and fate of this story at the New York Times met for weeks with official silence. Several inquiries were made by phone and email to Times public editor Daniel Okrent over a period of three weeks, eliciting one response—an email from his assistant asking for the names of Extra!’s sources at the Times. He was not provided with the sources, but was given the names of the three reporters who worked on the piece, which had been disclosed by Dr. Nelson. (At deadline time, Okrent did finally call, and promised to seek the answer to the story’s fate. A week later, at press time, he had yet to do so.)
One clue as to what happened at the Times is provided by a final email message sent by Times reporter Schwartz to Nelson, who had written to Schwartz to alert him that he had gone on to analyze photos of Bush’s back in the subsequent two debates. Schwartz wrote:
Subject: Re: reanalysis of debate images more convincing than before
Dear Dr. Nelson,
Thanks for sticking with me on this. I don’t know what might convince them—and the bar is raised higher the closer we are to the election, because they don’t want to seem to be springing something at the last moment—but I will bring this up with my bosses.
"Voters have a right to know"
Ironically, however, on November 1, the New York Times ran a story by reporters Jacques Steinberg and David Carr, titled "Media Timing and the October Surprise." The Times had been taking considerable heat from conservatives and from the Bush campaign for running the Al-Qaqaa story, an investigative piece critical of Iraq War leadership—and thus damaging to Bush’s election campaign—so close to Election Day.
While the thrust of this article was a justification for the Times’ decision to run the controversial missing-explosives story a week ahead of the election, executive editor Bill Keller added a comment about the seemingly hypothetical issue of running a damaging story about a candidate as close as two days ahead of the voting:
I can’t say categorically you should not publish an article damaging to a candidate in the last days before an election. . . . If you learned a day or two before the election that a candidate had lied about some essential qualification for the job—his health or criminal record—and there’s no real doubt and you’ve given the candidate a chance to respond and the response doesn’t cast doubt on the story, do you publish it? Yes. Voters certainly have a right to know that.
Oddly, though, despite Keller’s having taken such a position, the Times apparently chose not to run the Nelson pictures story on the grounds of proximity to Election Day. Even more oddly, despite the fact that the Times had thoroughly researched and reported Nelson’s story before deciding not to run it—even after the story had run in both Salon and Mother Jones—the Times still ducked (and continues to duck) the whole bulge story itself, ignoring an important issue that it knew to be factually substantiated.
No mention of the Bush bulge was made in either the Times or the Washington Post between October 29 and Election Day—aside from a one-line mention in a New York Times Magazine essay by Matt Bai (10/31/04) that used the Bulgegate story as an example of the paranoia of "political conspiracists":
A rumor that the president somehow cheated in the televised debates—was that a wire under his jacket? was he listening to Karl Rove on a microscopic earpiece?—flies across the Internet and takes hold in dark corners of the public imagination.
The only subsequent reference to the bulge was a light post-election piece by Times Washington reporter Elizabeth Bumiller (11/8/04), who cited the anonymously sourced Hill story saying the bulge was body armor (an odd decision by the Times, which officially frowns on unidentified sources even for its own pieces). She reported that the White House tailor was miffed at having earlier been blamed for the bulge by the White House.
“A lot of hoops”
While the New York Times seems to have been the only newspaper to write an investigative story on the Bush bulge and then kill it, it was not the only paper to duck the story about the bulge and its dramatic confirmation and delineation by Nelson. In addition to the L. A. Times and the two local papers that showed no interest, Nelson says that the same day he learned that his story had been killed at the Times, October 28, he received a phone call from Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, famous for his investigative reports on Watergate. "Woodward said he’d heard the Times had killed the story and asked me if I could send the photos to him," says Nelson.
The JPL scientist did so immediately, via email, noting that he had also been in touch with Salon magazine. He says Woodward then sent his photographs over to a photo analyst at the paper to check them for authenticity, which Nelson says was confirmed.
A day later, realizing time was getting short, Nelson called Woodward back. Recalls Nelson: "He told me, 'Look, I’m going to have to go through a lot of hoops to get this story published. You’re already talking to Salon. Why don’t you work with them?'" (Several emails to Woodward asking him about Nelson's account have gone unanswered.)
At that point Nelson, despairing of getting the pictures in a major publication, went with the online magazine Salon. This reporter subsequently asked Nelson to do a similar photo analysis of digital images of Bush’s back taken from the tapes of the second and third presidential debates. The resulting photos, which also clearly show the cueing device and magnetic loop harness under his jacket on both occasions, were posted, together with Nelson’s images from the first debate, on the news website of Mother Jones magazine (10/30/04).
What should affect elections?
Ben Bagdikian, retired dean of U.C. Berkeley's journalism school, held Woodward's current position at the Washington Post during the time of the Pentagon Papers. Informed of the fate of the bulge story and Nelson's photos at the three newspapers, he said:
I cannot imagine a paper I worked for turning down a story like this before an election. This was credible photographic evidence not about breaking the rules, but of a total lack of integrity on the part of the president, evidence that he'd cheated in the debate, and also of a lack of confidence in his ability on the part of his campaign. I'm shocked to hear top management decided not to run such a story.
Could the last-minute decision by the New York Times not to run the Nelson photos story, or the decision by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times not even to pursue it, have affected the outcome of the recent presidential race? There is no question that if such a story had run in any one of those major venues, instead of just in two online publications, Bulgegate would have been a major issue in the waning days of the campaign.
Given that exit polls show many who voted for Bush around the country listed "moral values" as a big factor in their decision, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some would have changed their minds had evidence been presented in the nation’s biggest and most influential newspapers that Bush had been dishonest.
"Cheating on a debate should affect an election," says Bagdikian. "The decision not to let people know this story could affect the history of the United States."
Investigative journalist Dave Lindorff is a regular columnist for CounterPunch. His latest book is This Can’t Be Happening: Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press). His writings can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Spiking the Bush Bulge Story:
Confirmed
As Extra! went to press, New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent posted a message on his website (12/21/04) confirming that his paper had, in fact, killed a story about the device under George W. Bush’s suit. Here is the text of Okrent’s message:
President Bush and the Jacket Bulge
Online discussion of the famous bulge on President Bush’s back at the first presidential debate hasn’t stopped. One reporter (Dave Lindorff of Salon.com) asserted that the Times had a story in the works about a NASA scientist who had done a careful study of the graphic evidence, but it was spiked by the paper’s top editors sometime during the week before the election. Many readers have asked me for an explanation.
I checked into Lindorff’s assertion, and he’s right. The story’s life at the Times began with a tip from the NASA scientist, Robert Nelson, to reporter Bill Broad. Soon his colleagues on the science desk, John Schwartz and Andrew Revkin, took on the bulk of the reporting. Science editor Laura Chang presented the story at the daily news meeting but, like many other stories, it did not make the cut. According to executive editor Bill Keller, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death."
Revkin, for one, wished it had run. Here’s what he told me in an e-mail message:
I can appreciate the broader factors weighing on the paper’s top editors, particularly that close to the election. But personally, I think that Nelson’s assertions did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. Here was a veteran government scientist, whose decades-long career revolves around interpreting imagery like features of Mars, who decided to say very publicly that, without reservation, he was convinced there was something under a president’s jacket when the White House said there was nothing. He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line (not to mention his job) in doing so and certainly with little prospect that he might gain something as a result—except, as he put it, his preserved integrity.
Revkin also told me that before Nelson called Broad, he had approached other media outlets as well. None—until Salon—published anything on Nelson’s analysis. "I’d certainly choose [Nelson’s] opinion over that of a tailor," Revkin concluded, referring to news reports that cited the man who makes the president’s suits. "Hard to believe that so many in the media chose the tailor, even in coverage after the election."
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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2012
i'm posting this in two threads: here because the New Traditionalist movement is based so substantively on reconditioning perspective, capturing the perception of americans by whatever means are necessary.
and in the thread The Rise of Rove's Republic since that is the larger aim of the massive effort to reshape american perspective.
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just part of the plan to get to the Rover Republiic
The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement
by Eric Heubeck
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Introduction
This essay does not include a theoretical justification for, or even a definition of, a traditionalist (i.e., culturally conservative) society. Other writers have already done this with far more skill and erudition than I would be able to. For the sake of this essay, I will assume that the reader is already familiar with and sympathizes with the goal of a traditionalist society at some level.
However, none of those traditionalist thinkers, or anyone influenced by traditionalist thought, has made any serious attempt to directly put his ideas into practice. The unspoken assumption seems to be that if enough time is spent improving our intellectual sophistication and honing our arguments, our ideas will win more and more converts due simply to their irresistible appeal, and by some mysterious mechanism which no one has ever chosen to explain, our society will slowly but surely learn to cherish traditionalist values.
This way of thinking must be categorically rejected.
This essay is based on the belief that the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance. Far more important is the energy and dedication of the idea's promoters--in other words, the individuals composing a social or political movement. The cultural conservative movement in particular has paid next to no attention to the qualities of the people working in the movement, and the relation of such qualities to the achievement of our goals. At least part of the reason for our failure must be attributed to insufficient interest by traditionalists in organization, the personal development of activists, and--most importantly--action and engagement in the world. The conservative movement has suffered, in other words, from a lack of follow-through on its most meaningful ideas.
The Problem--An Overreliance on Political Activism
The conservative movement is defensive, defeatist, depressed, and apologetic. It lacks self-confidence, virility, energy, intensity, vigor, aggressiveness, vitality, and a firm belief in the rightness of its cause. This is because conservatives have failed to devote the proper amount of energy to developing an alternative cultural world-view opposed to the dominant leftist one. They have instead devoted much of their energy to electing sympathetic politicians and lobbying the government to pass or overturn particular laws.
There are two problems with this strategy. The first and more obvious is that it is exceedingly and progressively more difficult to exert political influence when the cultural assumptions underlying those political goals are being steadily eroded by the popular culture, if no serious attempt to retard or reverse that erosion is ever made.
Secondly, an overreliance on political change seems to reinforce the very politicization of society that conservatives often bemoan, by ratifying the notion that an individual's personal happiness is inextricably bound up in the activity (or inactivity) of government. While government is certainly intrusive and plays too large a role in our society, the government is not totalitarian. There are plenty of opportunities to make our society more culturally conservative, and our lives richer and fuller, apart from political change, but conservatives have shown very little interest in pursuing those opportunities. They have shown far more interest in expanding political freedom than in seeing that Americans make good use of the freedom they already have, and as a result, they have succeeded in neither. The lack of interest in the latter goal is curious, since freedom for its own sake has never been a conservative goal, at least in theory.
The result of this misplaced focus is a society that increasingly does not recognize culturally conservative views, and is gradually coming to despise them. The Left has long understood that nothing can be achieved politically unless and until one can capture the imagination of the people--and imaginations are seldom captured by policy wonks on C-SPAN. They understand that a governing regime must acquire moral legitimacy before it can win the consent of the people, and all governments, particularly one such as ours, require some level of consent to govern.
The relatively recent successes of New Left ideas in law and legislation have only been made possible because their proponents were able to capture the cultural institutions--e.g., the media, academia, publishing houses, advertising agencies, Hollywood--some years earlier. Conservatives have by and large surrendered all of these institutions to the Left, with any opposition being limited to assorted muffled complaints and pathetic appeals for fairness.???? Meanwhile, conservatives dedicate themselves to political activism all the more furiously in the hope that it can compensate for their weakness in the non-political sectors of society. This effort must be dismissed as hopeless and self-delusional.
Conservatives must honestly assess the predicament that we are in. We must understand that the American people are no longer on our side, at least not reliably so, and they will be less so as time goes on. But more worrisome still is the fact that conservatives themselves often no longer understand or support a truly culturally conservative vision of America. Being conservative has come to mean nothing more nuanced than holding the belief that every man has the inalienable right to make as much money as he possibly can. True traditionalist conservatives are now seen as oddities in the movement who must be tolerated, or even silenced in order that the movement appear credible in the eyes of the leftist guardians of good taste.
To sum up, the basic problem confronting us is that those who are familiar with the theoretical underpinnings of conservatism are not particularly interested in putting their ideas into practice, and those who are engaged in activism are not well-read and are obsessed with public policy matters. Those who think do not act, and those who act do not think. If this continues, the conservative movement will cease to exist in every way but name.
A New Direction
The dire predicament in which we find ourselves demands a drastic change in strategy by cultural conservatives. It is becoming increasingly clear that we must heed Paul Weyrich's call for a tactical retreat from the fields of political battle--not totally or permanently, but until such time as we can confidently proclaim that traditionalists are a force to be reckoned with in the wider society. Without this, any offensives using political means are doomed to failure. They are therefore a waste of our people's time, money, and energy, and for that reason should not even be attempted. We will never succeed in taking over political structures until we can convince the American people that we can be trusted to take them over, and to do that we must win the people over culturally--by defining how man ought to act, how he ought to perceive the world around him, and what it means to live the good life. Political arrangements can only be formed after these fundamental questions have been answered.
Once this basic belief is accepted, our next task is to develop the means by which it can be put into practice. We must, as Mr. Weyrich has suggested, develop a network of parallel cultural institutions existing side-by-side with the dominant leftist cultural institutions. The building and promotion of these institutions will require the development of a movement that will not merely reform the existing post-war conservative movement, but will in fact be forced to supersede it--if it is to succeed at all--because it will pursue a very different strategy and be premised on a very different view of its role in society.
Our movement--which we will call the New Traditionalist movement--will not seek to immediately replace the dominant culture. A retreat will allow us to regroup and find our bearings. The overemphasis on effecting change through political activism has left us disoriented, distracted, and overly prone to accept the cultural assumptions of the Left. But this tactical retreat will ultimately lead to strategic victory.
A central mission of this movement is to advance a true traditionalist counter-culture based on virtue, excellence, and self-discipline. The New Traditionalists will not be exclusively Christians, but many of them inevitably will be. What binds the New Traditionalists is a belief that each individual has a duty to obey a higher law than his own will and appetite. New Traditionalists reject the materialism, hedonism, consumerism, egoism, and the cult of self-actualization which permeate modern life. We share a willingness to face reality and repudiate ideology--i.e., a set of beliefs that bear no relation to how people really think and how people really live.
(alright, it's taking too long to do the emphasis here but please be sure to read the rest since it constitutes the plan of action)
Still Engaged--But Outside of Politics
It must be emphasized that this new movement will not be "disengaged" from the wider society, only "differently engaged." We are, quite simply, replacing political activism with cultural activism as the center of our focus. And while the visibility of the new movement will be less pronounced than the existing (political) conservative movement in the short term, the seeds that we now sow will have dramatic repercussions over the long term. We have the capacity to fundamentally transform the face of American culture in the 21st century by following a different path, one built on the aggressive dissemination of our cultural values, rather than the idle hope that enough of our cultural values still remain in the body of the American people to carry us on to a few more isolated electoral victories.
We will never stop being engaged in the wider culture. We will not "hunker down" and wait for the storm to blow over. Our strategy will be to bleed this corrupt culture dry. We will pick off the most intelligent and creative individuals in our society, the individuals who help give credibility to the current regime. To do this, we will promote a set of beliefs more compelling than that of our opponents. We will launch a movement with more energy and more intensity than our opponents are capable of summoning. When the choice is made clear, the people--cultural elites and non-cultural elites alike--will vote with their feet by either joining or patronizing our institutions and abandoning those of the Left, and the reigning leftist regime will collapse from lack of support.
Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions.
We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.
We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. For example, we could have every member of the movement put a bumper sticker on his car that says something to the effect of "Public Education is Rotten; Homeschool Your Kids." This will change nobody's mind immediately; no one will choose to stop sending his children to public schools immediately after seeing such a bumper sticker; but it will raise awareness and consciousness that there is a problem. Most of all, it will contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. We need this if we hope to start picking people off and bringing them over to our side. We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture.
In terms of our long term prospects, because we will be seen as a purely defensive movement, not interested in imposing our views on anyone, only interested in being left alone, we will surely gain the sympathy of the public. The dominant culture will see its life-force being sapped, and it will grow terrified. It will do whatever it takes to destroy its assailant. This will lead to the perception that the dominant leftist culture is empty, hollow, desperate, and has lost its mandate to rule, because its only basis for authority is coercion, much like the communist East Bloc. Sympathy from the American people will increase as our opponents try to persecute us, which means our strength will increase at an accelerating rate due to more defections--and the enemy will collapse as a result.
Remaining Importance of Defensive Politics
We must stay involved in the political arena. We do not expect to make any gains through politics. But as our movement grows, the Left will become increasingly likely to try to use the powers of the state to squelch our movement, using whatever pretext they are able to invent. We will need to stay engaged in politics for purely defensive purposes. But all hope for long-term restoration must lie with the new movement. Our only involvement in the political process should be designed to more effectively accomplish secession from, and perhaps eventually, a widespread influence over, the wider culture.
We have repeatedly shot ourselves in the foot by expecting too much from the Republican Party. Of course, New Traditionalists should not defend the Republican Party when it pushes legislation that makes the government more intrusive than it currently is. But we should not sacrifice a united front by trying to badger the Republican Party into doing what it is incapable of doing. That is a waste of the political capital of the party and the time and energy of our people, simply for the sake of "fighting the good fight."
New Traditionalists and Libertarians
There are operational libertarians and there are ontological libertarians. There is nothing in this movement that an operational libertarian would find objectionable. It does not seek to replace an intrusive leftist state with an intrusive traditionalist state. Moreover, the likelihood that this movement would result in a libertarian society is far higher than the likelihood of any strategy succeeding that self-identified libertarians are advocating, because this movement does not promote a direct confrontation with the state, but a sort of "weaning off," or a "walking away" from the state. The state will lose its power when people no longer feel they need it, and only then. Our goal should be to teach the cultural elite, and all people, to find meaning in their lives outside of politics. If they do, perhaps they will leave the rest of us alone.
But the New Traditionalist movement must be willing to lose allies among the libertarians we brought on board the post-war conservative coalition. While our movement is not anti-freedom, and the practical effect of our ultimate ascendancy to political power (should that happen) would be an increase in political freedom for Americans, we choose not to make a fetish of political freedom. We recognize that there are other freedoms besides political freedom--such as the freedom not to be subjected to a barrage of cultural decadence at every turn. In fact, it could be argued that this is a more important freedom, because popular culture is considerably more pervasive than the hand of government in most people's lives.
The ontological libertarians make their arguments in terms that the perfectly happy life is a life free from all restraint. The use of these arguments has been a convenient way to achieve some of the short-term goals of conservatives, because this argument is presented in ontological terms acceptable to the Left--but it has been disastrous to American society. It was an alluring temptation that should have been resisted. It has reaffirmed the world-view of the leftist, which holds the unbridled ego at its center. We have undermined the foundation of any resistance to the Left based on the promotion of a fundamentally different world-view. This devil's bargain has therefore helped to perpetuate the decimation of traditional American culture, with its accumulated wisdom and mores and traditions of self-restraint, which is the basis for any hope of a truly workable political freedom.
Libertarians must make their arguments in terms of the moral benefits of freedom, and not in terms of the glories of nihilism, if we can consider them allies and not opponents. As cultural activism becomes more important to our movement, and political activism less so, we may find that we have less and less in common with many libertarians whose philosophical foundations are not sound.
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
We must create a countervailing force that is just as adept as the Left at intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism but are not ideologically committed, such as Hollywood celebrities, multinational corporations, and university administrators. We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. They must understand that there is some sort of cost involved in taking a "controversial" stand--although positions cannot honestly be labeled "controversial" if conservatives are unable to mount a meaningful opposition. Perhaps once we are able to mount such an opposition, we will be able to take some of the trendiness out of leftist cultural activism, because lukewarm advocates of leftist causes will be forced to actually get their hands dirty. Support of leftist causes will no longer be the path of least resistance.
Some Basic Premises
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
We must perform a brutally honest analysis of what motivates human beings. We must understand what makes them tick, whether that motivation is attractive or not. We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes. For example, it is important to emphasize that the alternative counter-culture must be just that--alternative. It must be different from anything people are familiar with. It is a basic fact that an us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider mentality is a very strong motivation in human life. For better or for worse, this has to be recognized and taken advantage of for the good of the movement.
Moreover, the New Traditionalists must be interested in learning about sociology, social psychology, and the dynamics of social change. We must study examples of dissident and counter-cultural groups that succeeded in ascending to dominance--we must learn from them.
We must recognize the world as it is, not as we may like it to be; but we must never let this line of thinking descend into cynicism.
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
We will apply a scientific analysis to every problem. We will be results-oriented rather than good intentions-oriented. Making a good-faith effort and being ideologically sound will be less important than advancing the goals of the movement. We must learn to be more self-critical. Our efforts should be less haphazard, less prone to fits and starts, and they should make better use of accumulated knowledge and past errors.
We must not get hung up on the evils of our opponents. We can only control our own actions and responses. We must stop whining when we see an example of leftist double-standards and hypocrisy and accept reality as it exists. The only question to be asked is, what are we going to do about it? We must learn to change our own thinking and our own behavior. We must always operate based on this cardinal principle: Leftists are never morally responsible for the evil they commit; but we as conservatives are morally responsible for not having done more to prevent them from committing that evil. We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents.
This is not to discount the importance of reminding ourselves on a regular basis why we ought to hate leftist ideology, in order to keep ourselves motivated to better fight it. But we must be aware that this is what we are doing as we do it--such propaganda must be seen as a catalyst for action, not a substitute for action. We must always understand exactly why we do what we do as we do it, and why our opponents do what they do. We must stop operating according to self-delusion and wishful thinking. Good intentions and good effort count for nothing.
The new movement must learn never to be satisfied with the way things are. We must ask a long series of "whys" to understand how we arrived at our current condition and what must be done to change it. For example, if a fight is winnable, why have we not won it? If it is not, why are we not diverting our efforts elsewhere?
We must always recognize and anticipate the strategy of our opponents. There is no excuse for ever being surprised by the ferocity or ingenuity of their attacks.
One especially naive belief held by most conservatives (at least as betrayed by their actions) that seems to have real staying power is that ideas have a way of disseminating themselves. In many conservative publications, for example, it is unclear who the intended audience is. Articles tend to cover old ground and rehash old arguments, which is pointless if the intended readership is made up of conservative activists who are already familiar with them. But if the intended audience is made up of people who do not already agree, they most likely will not be reading such a specialized publication, but rather reading a newspaper or watching television news, or more likely, they will not follow public affairs at all.
What the activists instead need is a better understanding of how the current situation has arisen and how to coordinate strategy, so they will be prepared to take action in the real world. For instance, they need to know more about the history of the Left than any leftist. They need to be able to beat a leftist in any debate. They need to be able to make him look utterly foolish. They need, in other words, to become hyper-intellectual--this will make them more self-confident, and with self-confidence, they will have the power to prevail. But the conservative movement is not properly preparing its activists to do what needs to be done. They are instead tossing random opinions into the circulation of national discourse, and merely hoping for the best.
Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses
We will initially operate according to the belief that it is more important to win over the elites (or create a new, better one) than to build up a mass movement. Furthermore, it is more important to have a few impassioned members than a large number of largely indifferent members. The amount of energy, élan, and self-assurance that we are able to inculcate in the leaders of our movement will ultimately determine its success or failure.
The new movement must be, in part, exclusive and elite. It must not be afraid to pass along a body of knowledge that is not readily accessible to and understandable by everyone. The strong appeal of a feeling of exclusivity and superiority will give our members a reason to endure the slings and arrows of popular disapproval.
The New Traditionalist movement will appeal to the masses, but not immediately. The ideas of the masses never come from the masses. To the extent that the masses are more conservative than the elites, this is primarily because the masses have a long collective memory, and they still value the beliefs articulated by a long-lost elite. The conservative instincts of the American people will continue to erode unless a new elite is formed to refresh that memory.
We must recognize that literature and philosophy do not appeal to the masses. This is why we must develop ways to spread our philosophy using non-rational means--especially the moving image.
Value of Art and Images
We must place a high value on art, because the most important thing any movement can do is capture the imagination of the people. One must give them dreams and ideals that have been put in terms they can understand, and that touch their hearts, as opposed to their rational minds. If we cannot capture the imaginations of our members, then we cannot expect our members to make great sacrifices for us. There must be a common repository of books and movies that everyone in our movement is familiar with and inspired by, so anyone can quote a line that will be recognized by everyone else. Young people already do this, only with the wrong movies, songs, and other products of popular culture.
We have the example of schoolboys studying Homer in Ancient Greece. No Greek would be considered properly educated without an intimate familiarity with Homer. This taught Greeks what their ideals should be, how they should act, and gave them a common base of reference which united them as members of a society. The films Braveheart and Gladiator are possible examples from current popular culture that could serve a similar, but clearly more limited function.
There is no medium more conducive to propagandistic purposes than the moving image, and our movement must learn to make use of this medium. A skillfully produced motion picture or television documentary has tremendous persuasive power. It has the power to bypass not only the old prejudices that have been assiduously cultivated by the Left over the past few decades, but also the innate skepticism of the viewer, the resistance to new ideas. Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
The visual image allows us to illustrate our beliefs and arguments to our members and others in highly compelling terms--we will be able to show all the examples of cultural decadence, irrationality and disingenuousness in public debate, combined with our commentary, selectively edited and arranged for maximum impact. It avoids the vagueness and generalizations that tend to characterize many conservative arguments. It also allows us to show what we think is right about our current culture--examples from movies or television that we as cultural conservatives support and are excited by. The large amount of capital needed for involvement in this medium is hard to come by, and those with the most creativity and skills in this area are by and large not cultural conservatives--but these hurdles must be overcome sooner or later.
Value of the Tangible Versus the Abstract
This movement will understand that it is not enough to talk in abstractions only. We need to offer clear examples whenever possible. And the ideas must be lived by our members if they are ever to be actualized in the wider society. The power of example is far greater than the power of exhortation. This is a cardinal premise of the new movement.
An excessive amount of intellectualization divorced from application in the real world is a kind of escape from reality, or the creation of a virtual reality. Thinking becomes tired, static, and inward-looking. People become more interested in creating mental utopias than in having a real impact on society. Scholars become mere pedants; ideas are no longer creative and vital.
Ideas interest us only insofar as they offer a guide to action. There is a place in society for abstract, academic discussion. This is not that place.
Movement Must Be Based on the Transmission of Ideas, Not Their Creation
This movement is not about the creation of ideas, it is about the transmission and dissemination of ideas. Intellectual cultural conservatism already exists, but it is largely unknown. As it finds its audience, intellectual cultural conservatism will become more creative and will respond to the challenges of the present. The creators of the future will find their inspiration from the great ideas of the past. We maintain that the dearth of new creative thought grounded in conservative sensibilities is due to a disconnection from the great ideas of the past, because those ideas have not been given life and relevance. The New Traditionalist movement will be a revolution in organization, not ideas, but the results will be equally, if not more dramatic.
The ideas that form the basis of the new movement have been well articulated by people who value theory but not action. It will be the job of the New Traditionalist movement to transmit these ideas to a more action-oriented elite, and through them, to the masses. An action-oriented elite is necessary to force people to confront ideas they would otherwise not be exposed to. Ideas do not automatically have consequences. They do not have an impact in direct proportion to the truth they contain. They have an impact only insofar as adherents of those ideas are willing to take measures to propagate those ideas.
New Traditionalists Must Be More Culturally Sophisticated
The new movement cannot be seen as a movement of rubes, or knee-jerk yahoos, or surly malcontents. We must make it clear that we are seceding from popular culture not because we are unable to cope with modern life, but because we are superior to modern life. We understand popular culture--we get it--we simply find it empty and meaningless.
We may reject the culture of our opponents, but we must never fear it. We must understand the appeal of popular culture before we can hope to draw people away from it. People will not take us seriously until they are convinced we have taken the time to understand its appeal. We need the perspective to be able to compare our current culture with culture at its best, so we not only know when popular culture falls short, but also when it, on occasion, provides examples of culture at its best.
It Is in the Movement's Self-Interest to Improve the Quality of Its Membership
We have a dearth of human material that shares our traditionalist values. These people must be created in our own institutions. They must be given a refuge as their nascent beliefs are coming into fruition. They must be sheltered and protected. Improving the quality of the people who make up the new movement will be a primary concern.
The new movement must understand that it is not enough to wait for people to come to us. Conservatives now seem to feel that the success a conservative activist can achieve in the conservative movement is his own business, merely a matter of building a career. This view must be categorically rejected. It is in the interest of the New Traditionalist movement that every member be given the support to reach his maximum potential. It is imperative that every member be made to feel more confident about his beliefs and abilities, because the movement as a whole suffers from a lack of confidence. Furthermore, there must be a place for people who do not work in the movement for a salary. The New Traditionalist movement is a cause, not a business.
The new movement will promote discipline and loyalty and self-sacrifice. Advancing one's personal interests by harming the interests of the movement will never be overlooked or forgotten. Modern conservatism has an intolerable tolerance for backstabbers and traitors--it reflects a movement that lacks the self-confidence to demand victory for itself, and to ostracize individuals who interfere with the realization of our goals. I do not refer to genuine differences of opinion. This is not a totalitarian movement. I refer to "conservatives" who feel tempted to denounce other conservatives merely to gain the approval of the cultural elite, or for personal gain.
New Traditionalists Must Concentrate on Students and Young Adults
The new movement will inevitably be geared toward children and young adults, especially their education. We will accomplish the goal of retaking our country only when large numbers of young people are educated outside of the indoctrinating environment of many public and private schools, universities, and of course, the popular culture. At this point in their lives, many of their ideas are still in the formative stage, the more so the younger they are. Furthermore, young adults (of college age and above) should be given a large role in the organization of the New Traditionalist movement, as many older people, because of work and family life, simply do not have the time to devote to reading, discussion, and action (and all three are equally important). They also often lack the necessary energy, enthusiasm, and idealism that is prevalent in youth. However, retirees could also make a valuable contribution to the movement.
College students must be a key audience for our movement, since they are free of excessive time commitments and they find themselves in an environment that (theoretically) encourages activism and exposure to new ideas. We should consider creating alternative fraternities where traditionalists can live, interact with each other, learn from each other, socialize with each other. New Traditionalist fraternities can help replicate lifestyles from the past--emulate "civilized" behavior from the past--by discussing traditionalist ideas, literature, and art, and then acting based on what has been learned. Members of the fraternities and collegiate study groups should build each other up in every possible way: in terms of public speaking skills, debating skills, physical fitness, intellect, manners, aesthetic sense. It is imperative that our ideas be lived and not merely discussed.
It is not enough to say that conservative philosophy is more sensible than that of the Left. If we leave it at that, we will only attract "sensible" people to our movement. But "sensible" people do not go to the barricades, they do not make great sacrifices for a movement. And the experience of the conservative movement has shown this to be the case. We need more people with fire in the belly, and we need a message that attracts those kinds of people. As Plato said, "madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human." We should keep this in mind if we expect our people to make superhuman sacrifices for the movement.
Ground Zero of the New Traditionalist Movement: The Study Group
What Are Study Groups?
The study groups will develop a cadre of scholar warriors. They are the vanguard of a counter-cultural movement. Study groups are the basis of all short-term activity.
Study groups will be imperative because they will be the means by which we combine thought and action. Members will be asked to read relatively difficult or abstract works of political and social philosophy. They will then be asked to come up with examples from our current society that might illustrate some principles contained therein.
(we create our own reality while you in the reality-based community are left to judicious study of our results)
This will not be a movement of talkers. Participants will be expected to engage in tangible, constructive activity. They will be asked often what precisely they have done for the good of the movement. The new movement will not, unlike much of modern conservatism, be a spectator sport.
Study groups, as their name implies, will be engaged in the intensive study of culture and ideas, but the understanding achieved through that study will be applied in the form of action. Action is defined as either 1) the subversion of leftist-controlled institutions, or 2) the creation of our own institutions of civil society, whose sole purpose is outreach to, and the conversion of, non-traditionalists. Action is partly designed to lead to direct results in society, mostly as a way to build up the qualities of the membership. A membership that never acts is useless, because it does not become more capable, and does not learn from its mistakes. Furthermore, action in the world encourages the identification of the member with, and dedication to the group.
For example, we will go to public lectures given by leftists and ask them "impolite" and highly critical questions. We must, of course, be fully prepared beforehand for these sorts of excursions, and we must also be prepared to embarrass ourselves, especially at first.
Money for the new movement will come primarily from the membership at first, because very few foundations will be willing to support us initially. As our movement grows, even if more funding comes from foundations, requirements for personal contributions must remain high to make people believe they are personally invested in this movement. Again, members cannot be allowed to think of themselves as spectators in this movement.
Study Groups Will Cultivate Civilized Values
The coming battle for the hearts and minds of Americans is ultimately a battle between civilization and barbarism. The fight between civilization and barbarism is a fight that takes place in society at large, as well as in the heart of each individual.
Civilization means, in part, the mores and inherited traditions that encourage self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, as well as an appreciation for objective truth, in a way that is sustainable and in harmony with our essential human nature. It is concerned with the health of society as an organism and as the body responsible for perpetuating those traditions. It is the opposite of barbarism, which means obeying one's lowest instincts and drives; barbarism means fidelity solely to oneself, not to an enlightened social code worked out over centuries, representing the accumulated wisdom of generations of men and women. Albert Jay Nock defines culture at its best as "lucidity of mind, intellectual curiosity and hospitality, largeness of temper, objectivity, the finest sense of social life, of manners, of beauty." And this view of culture is clearly incompatible with pure egoism.
This is also the opposite of a society produced by ideology. Ideology is a substitute for genuine thought, and it is the opposite of all true civilization. A central goal of the movement will be the destruction of ideology in whatever form it takes. It will not strive for its replacement with a "traditionalist ideology," because such a thing is a contradiction in terms.
The study groups, and through them, the New Traditionalist movement as a whole, will be the means by which the goals of civilization, high standards, and cultural refinement are injected back into society. We have claimed the prerogative to be obnoxious when the occasion demands it. Furthermore, we recognize that refinement and obnoxious behavior can conflict. A rule of reason will mediate. Means should not be allowed to compromise ends, but talk of ends is moot if there are no traditionalists in existence to pursue those ends.
Study groups will provide an opportunity to discuss movies and books and other cultural products that reflect the values of this society and those of societies separated from ours by time or place. Study groups will rediscover and disseminate our conservative heritage. They will share examples of the conservative ethos at work today, perhaps even unbeknownst to the creator of the work. From there, the long-term objective will be to encourage the creation of new works of art that self-consciously reflect the values of the New Traditionalist movement. We operate according to the belief that current popular culture is distinctly uninspiring, and a great people ought to be able to find inspiration in its culture.
Study Groups Will Provide a Communal Experience
Modern conservatism is excessively individualistic. We must find meaning as part of an organization with shared values. For example, it is not enough for a conservative writer to watch a movie, write up a good review in a magazine, encourage other people to watch it, and expect that to form the basis for a movement that is able to stand up to the dominant culture. We must watch movies together. We must feel part of the group as we watch it. And we must then discuss that movie as a group.
Study groups should engage in charitable activities, partly to build esprit de corps, partly to create positive feelings about our group in the minds of the public, partly to create an alternative to government solutions. Study groups together with other organs of the movement should provide everything that a person could want in terms of social interaction, with the exception of the workplace and the church (although churches will in some cases be allied with the movement).
We must recognize that bonding with others in one's generation or society is the means by which values are strengthened and perpetuated. It is vitally important that we bond in such a way that the values perpetuated are our own.
Book Clubs Lay the Groundwork for Study Groups
The movement should imitate the communist distinction between party members and fellow travelers. Study groups will require high levels of dedication, discipline, and self-sacrifice. Those who are unable to perform will be asked to leave. But it would be unwise to send the signal that there is no place in the movement for people who are otherwise sympathetic to our message. They will be considered allies, but they will not be accorded the status of movement leaders.
Based on this premise, the book club is designed to be the organ of the New Traditionalist movement that is most accessible to outsiders. The book club will be open to all interested individuals, and will be responsible for introducing its members to traditionalist ways of thinking. The level of commitment required of book club members will be much lower than that required of study group members.
The study group will recruit mainly from the book club. Members of the book club will discuss ideas at a lower level of intellectual sophistication than the study group. Once the study groups have been firmly established and have arrived at an adequate level of intellectual sophistication, the leaders of the study group will be responsible for choosing the books or other cultural products that will be discussed in the book club, and drawing up the agenda and list of discussion questions for each meeting.
Acceptance by Fellow New Traditionalists More Important than Acceptance by Wider Society
The members of the New Traditionalists must make public affirmation of their identification with the new movement. They must seek approval for their actions from other New Traditionalists, and not from the wider society. It is unrealistic to assume that very many mortal human beings will be able to withstand in isolation the vitriol and hatred that our movement's program will engender. Culture wars generally seem to inspire higher emotions than verbal wars over economics, foreign policy, etc., because they address the most fundamental questions of what matters in life. Our people must learn to have contempt and scorn for the wider society, and reject it in all ways. This will never happen so long as our people seek accommodation with it.
It is important that we form fully well-rounded people who feel that they are lacking nothing that the dominant leftist culture can offer them. For example, sports leagues will be included for young people in the intermediate stage, in order to bring in people who might not otherwise be interested in joining. It is important that there be something for everyone, that there be a place for all kinds of different people. Not all members will be intellectuals, although intellectuals will instigate the new movement.
Final Thoughts
Even if We Lose, We Still Win
Even if our views do not become the dominant views in society at any point in the near future, this must not be seen as a defeat. At least we will have offered many Americans another choice, a refuge from the dominant culture, and a way to at least live a reasonably decent and pleasant life in the midst of rampant social corruption. We will provide people with access to the best civilization has produced--literature, philosophy, and art. We will be a godsend to those who want to raise themselves up, makes themselves more than what they are. Popular culture now acts as a giant narcotic, offering an escape from the difficulty and hard work of realizing our higher selves. Our movement's intention is to break that addiction for as many individuals as possible.
Discussion Lists Have Little Value -- Action Is More Important
We must be careful not to overtheorize, or wait until we have everything thought out perfectly before we start to take action. Action is the most important element at first, because much of learning is evolutionary, and one of the best ways to learn is by making mistakes in the real world--but, of course, there is never any excuse for making the same mistake twice.
Conservatives have an excessive tolerance for incessant talking. The discussion list based on this essay will only involve as much discussion as it takes to form the philosophical basis for local study groups in various parts of the country, and the list will then coordinate the agendas of the study groups. Study groups will be in charge of conducting actual activities. Study groups must form the primary venue for the transmission of ideas, because a discussion list cannot lead to action. Again, the basis of our movement is the integration of thought and action. Neither one is more important than the other.
We should expect some infighting and sectarianism in our movement at first, as we try to decide what exactly we think should be the basis of our movement--precisely which cultural values we are fighting for. This should not worry us especially, because over time, as we engage each other, as well as the wider society, an equilibrium will be achieved, and a balance will be struck between the competing goals of unity and size in our movement.
The Next Step
The reader will have noticed that this essay contains no evidence. It is not concerned with converting anyone to a certain way of thinking. However, certain people will find that its arguments resonate with them, and express beliefs they have long held on an inchoate level. These are the people who will provide the critical mass to begin the organization of the new movement.
If you are sympathetic to the basic premises set forth in this essay, I welcome your questions and criticisms in order to better clarify my positions and my thoughts on the direction the New Traditionalists must take, particularly in the initial stages. Please contact me at eheubeck@freecongress.org. I would particularly like to invite your participation if you would be willing to organize a book club in your hometown. And I especially encourage you to send the link to this page to anyone who you think might be interested in any of the ideas contained in the essay.
We have a lot of work to do. Let's get started.
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If you would like to make a submission to a discussion list based on this essay, send an e-mail to ntp.list@freecongress.org. Please include your first name and town, and specify whether you would like your e-mail address included in the posting.
obviously i DID eventually give up on emphasizing text, sorry, just was taking too long
Note too that the inspiration to post this came from a dkos diary
UPDATE! GOPUSA is A Shill for Rove/Bush
http://web.archive.org/web/20010713152425/...ditionalist.htm
and in the thread The Rise of Rove's Republic since that is the larger aim of the massive effort to reshape american perspective.
QUOTE
and note, this guy DOES understand how to execute change on a massive scale. he recognizes the problem we on the left now face, the need for getting the fire in the belly that goes beyond intellectualization and gets us to the barricades, as he puts it for conservatives
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just part of the plan to get to the Rover Republiic
The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement
by Eric Heubeck
QUOTE
Introduction
The Problem--An Overreliance on Political Activism
A New Direction
Still Engaged--But Outside of Politics
Remaining Importance of Defensive Politics
New Traditionalists and Libertarians
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
Some Basic Premises
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses
Value of Art and Images
Value of the Tangible Versus the Abstract
Movement Must Be Based on the Transmission of Ideas, Not Their Creation
New Traditionalists Must Be More Culturally Sophisticated
It Is in the Movement's Self-Interest to Improve the Quality of Its Membership
New Traditionalists Must Concentrate on Students and Young Adults
The Movement Must Be Willing to Appear Obnoxious
Ground Zero of the New Traditionalist Movement: The Study Group
What Are Study Groups?
Study Groups Will Cultivate Civilized Values
Study Groups Will Provide a Communal Experience
Book Clubs Lay the Groundwork for Study Groups
Acceptance by Fellow New Traditionalists More Important than Acceptance by Wider Society
Final Thoughts
Even if We Lose, We Still Win
Discussion Lists Have Little Value--Action Is More Important
The Next Step
The Problem--An Overreliance on Political Activism
A New Direction
Still Engaged--But Outside of Politics
Remaining Importance of Defensive Politics
New Traditionalists and Libertarians
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
Some Basic Premises
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses
Value of Art and Images
Value of the Tangible Versus the Abstract
Movement Must Be Based on the Transmission of Ideas, Not Their Creation
New Traditionalists Must Be More Culturally Sophisticated
It Is in the Movement's Self-Interest to Improve the Quality of Its Membership
New Traditionalists Must Concentrate on Students and Young Adults
The Movement Must Be Willing to Appear Obnoxious
Ground Zero of the New Traditionalist Movement: The Study Group
What Are Study Groups?
Study Groups Will Cultivate Civilized Values
Study Groups Will Provide a Communal Experience
Book Clubs Lay the Groundwork for Study Groups
Acceptance by Fellow New Traditionalists More Important than Acceptance by Wider Society
Final Thoughts
Even if We Lose, We Still Win
Discussion Lists Have Little Value--Action Is More Important
The Next Step
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Introduction
This essay does not include a theoretical justification for, or even a definition of, a traditionalist (i.e., culturally conservative) society. Other writers have already done this with far more skill and erudition than I would be able to. For the sake of this essay, I will assume that the reader is already familiar with and sympathizes with the goal of a traditionalist society at some level.
However, none of those traditionalist thinkers, or anyone influenced by traditionalist thought, has made any serious attempt to directly put his ideas into practice. The unspoken assumption seems to be that if enough time is spent improving our intellectual sophistication and honing our arguments, our ideas will win more and more converts due simply to their irresistible appeal, and by some mysterious mechanism which no one has ever chosen to explain, our society will slowly but surely learn to cherish traditionalist values.
This way of thinking must be categorically rejected.
This essay is based on the belief that the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance. Far more important is the energy and dedication of the idea's promoters--in other words, the individuals composing a social or political movement. The cultural conservative movement in particular has paid next to no attention to the qualities of the people working in the movement, and the relation of such qualities to the achievement of our goals. At least part of the reason for our failure must be attributed to insufficient interest by traditionalists in organization, the personal development of activists, and--most importantly--action and engagement in the world. The conservative movement has suffered, in other words, from a lack of follow-through on its most meaningful ideas.
The Problem--An Overreliance on Political Activism
The conservative movement is defensive, defeatist, depressed, and apologetic. It lacks self-confidence, virility, energy, intensity, vigor, aggressiveness, vitality, and a firm belief in the rightness of its cause. This is because conservatives have failed to devote the proper amount of energy to developing an alternative cultural world-view opposed to the dominant leftist one. They have instead devoted much of their energy to electing sympathetic politicians and lobbying the government to pass or overturn particular laws.
There are two problems with this strategy. The first and more obvious is that it is exceedingly and progressively more difficult to exert political influence when the cultural assumptions underlying those political goals are being steadily eroded by the popular culture, if no serious attempt to retard or reverse that erosion is ever made.
Secondly, an overreliance on political change seems to reinforce the very politicization of society that conservatives often bemoan, by ratifying the notion that an individual's personal happiness is inextricably bound up in the activity (or inactivity) of government. While government is certainly intrusive and plays too large a role in our society, the government is not totalitarian. There are plenty of opportunities to make our society more culturally conservative, and our lives richer and fuller, apart from political change, but conservatives have shown very little interest in pursuing those opportunities. They have shown far more interest in expanding political freedom than in seeing that Americans make good use of the freedom they already have, and as a result, they have succeeded in neither. The lack of interest in the latter goal is curious, since freedom for its own sake has never been a conservative goal, at least in theory.
The result of this misplaced focus is a society that increasingly does not recognize culturally conservative views, and is gradually coming to despise them. The Left has long understood that nothing can be achieved politically unless and until one can capture the imagination of the people--and imaginations are seldom captured by policy wonks on C-SPAN. They understand that a governing regime must acquire moral legitimacy before it can win the consent of the people, and all governments, particularly one such as ours, require some level of consent to govern.
The relatively recent successes of New Left ideas in law and legislation have only been made possible because their proponents were able to capture the cultural institutions--e.g., the media, academia, publishing houses, advertising agencies, Hollywood--some years earlier. Conservatives have by and large surrendered all of these institutions to the Left, with any opposition being limited to assorted muffled complaints and pathetic appeals for fairness.???? Meanwhile, conservatives dedicate themselves to political activism all the more furiously in the hope that it can compensate for their weakness in the non-political sectors of society. This effort must be dismissed as hopeless and self-delusional.
Conservatives must honestly assess the predicament that we are in. We must understand that the American people are no longer on our side, at least not reliably so, and they will be less so as time goes on. But more worrisome still is the fact that conservatives themselves often no longer understand or support a truly culturally conservative vision of America. Being conservative has come to mean nothing more nuanced than holding the belief that every man has the inalienable right to make as much money as he possibly can. True traditionalist conservatives are now seen as oddities in the movement who must be tolerated, or even silenced in order that the movement appear credible in the eyes of the leftist guardians of good taste.
To sum up, the basic problem confronting us is that those who are familiar with the theoretical underpinnings of conservatism are not particularly interested in putting their ideas into practice, and those who are engaged in activism are not well-read and are obsessed with public policy matters. Those who think do not act, and those who act do not think. If this continues, the conservative movement will cease to exist in every way but name.
A New Direction
The dire predicament in which we find ourselves demands a drastic change in strategy by cultural conservatives. It is becoming increasingly clear that we must heed Paul Weyrich's call for a tactical retreat from the fields of political battle--not totally or permanently, but until such time as we can confidently proclaim that traditionalists are a force to be reckoned with in the wider society. Without this, any offensives using political means are doomed to failure. They are therefore a waste of our people's time, money, and energy, and for that reason should not even be attempted. We will never succeed in taking over political structures until we can convince the American people that we can be trusted to take them over, and to do that we must win the people over culturally--by defining how man ought to act, how he ought to perceive the world around him, and what it means to live the good life. Political arrangements can only be formed after these fundamental questions have been answered.
Once this basic belief is accepted, our next task is to develop the means by which it can be put into practice. We must, as Mr. Weyrich has suggested, develop a network of parallel cultural institutions existing side-by-side with the dominant leftist cultural institutions. The building and promotion of these institutions will require the development of a movement that will not merely reform the existing post-war conservative movement, but will in fact be forced to supersede it--if it is to succeed at all--because it will pursue a very different strategy and be premised on a very different view of its role in society.
Our movement--which we will call the New Traditionalist movement--will not seek to immediately replace the dominant culture. A retreat will allow us to regroup and find our bearings. The overemphasis on effecting change through political activism has left us disoriented, distracted, and overly prone to accept the cultural assumptions of the Left. But this tactical retreat will ultimately lead to strategic victory.
A central mission of this movement is to advance a true traditionalist counter-culture based on virtue, excellence, and self-discipline. The New Traditionalists will not be exclusively Christians, but many of them inevitably will be. What binds the New Traditionalists is a belief that each individual has a duty to obey a higher law than his own will and appetite. New Traditionalists reject the materialism, hedonism, consumerism, egoism, and the cult of self-actualization which permeate modern life. We share a willingness to face reality and repudiate ideology--i.e., a set of beliefs that bear no relation to how people really think and how people really live.
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There will be three main stages in the unfolding of this movement. The first stage will be devoted to the development of a highly motivated elite able to coordinate future activities. The second stage will be devoted to the development of institutions designed to make an impact on the wider elite and a relatively small minority of the masses. The third stage will involve changing the overall character of American popular culture.
(alright, it's taking too long to do the emphasis here but please be sure to read the rest since it constitutes the plan of action)
Still Engaged--But Outside of Politics
It must be emphasized that this new movement will not be "disengaged" from the wider society, only "differently engaged." We are, quite simply, replacing political activism with cultural activism as the center of our focus. And while the visibility of the new movement will be less pronounced than the existing (political) conservative movement in the short term, the seeds that we now sow will have dramatic repercussions over the long term. We have the capacity to fundamentally transform the face of American culture in the 21st century by following a different path, one built on the aggressive dissemination of our cultural values, rather than the idle hope that enough of our cultural values still remain in the body of the American people to carry us on to a few more isolated electoral victories.
We will never stop being engaged in the wider culture. We will not "hunker down" and wait for the storm to blow over. Our strategy will be to bleed this corrupt culture dry. We will pick off the most intelligent and creative individuals in our society, the individuals who help give credibility to the current regime. To do this, we will promote a set of beliefs more compelling than that of our opponents. We will launch a movement with more energy and more intensity than our opponents are capable of summoning. When the choice is made clear, the people--cultural elites and non-cultural elites alike--will vote with their feet by either joining or patronizing our institutions and abandoning those of the Left, and the reigning leftist regime will collapse from lack of support.
Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions.
We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.
We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. For example, we could have every member of the movement put a bumper sticker on his car that says something to the effect of "Public Education is Rotten; Homeschool Your Kids." This will change nobody's mind immediately; no one will choose to stop sending his children to public schools immediately after seeing such a bumper sticker; but it will raise awareness and consciousness that there is a problem. Most of all, it will contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. We need this if we hope to start picking people off and bringing them over to our side. We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture.
In terms of our long term prospects, because we will be seen as a purely defensive movement, not interested in imposing our views on anyone, only interested in being left alone, we will surely gain the sympathy of the public. The dominant culture will see its life-force being sapped, and it will grow terrified. It will do whatever it takes to destroy its assailant. This will lead to the perception that the dominant leftist culture is empty, hollow, desperate, and has lost its mandate to rule, because its only basis for authority is coercion, much like the communist East Bloc. Sympathy from the American people will increase as our opponents try to persecute us, which means our strength will increase at an accelerating rate due to more defections--and the enemy will collapse as a result.
Remaining Importance of Defensive Politics
We must stay involved in the political arena. We do not expect to make any gains through politics. But as our movement grows, the Left will become increasingly likely to try to use the powers of the state to squelch our movement, using whatever pretext they are able to invent. We will need to stay engaged in politics for purely defensive purposes. But all hope for long-term restoration must lie with the new movement. Our only involvement in the political process should be designed to more effectively accomplish secession from, and perhaps eventually, a widespread influence over, the wider culture.
We have repeatedly shot ourselves in the foot by expecting too much from the Republican Party. Of course, New Traditionalists should not defend the Republican Party when it pushes legislation that makes the government more intrusive than it currently is. But we should not sacrifice a united front by trying to badger the Republican Party into doing what it is incapable of doing. That is a waste of the political capital of the party and the time and energy of our people, simply for the sake of "fighting the good fight."
New Traditionalists and Libertarians
There are operational libertarians and there are ontological libertarians. There is nothing in this movement that an operational libertarian would find objectionable. It does not seek to replace an intrusive leftist state with an intrusive traditionalist state. Moreover, the likelihood that this movement would result in a libertarian society is far higher than the likelihood of any strategy succeeding that self-identified libertarians are advocating, because this movement does not promote a direct confrontation with the state, but a sort of "weaning off," or a "walking away" from the state. The state will lose its power when people no longer feel they need it, and only then. Our goal should be to teach the cultural elite, and all people, to find meaning in their lives outside of politics. If they do, perhaps they will leave the rest of us alone.
But the New Traditionalist movement must be willing to lose allies among the libertarians we brought on board the post-war conservative coalition. While our movement is not anti-freedom, and the practical effect of our ultimate ascendancy to political power (should that happen) would be an increase in political freedom for Americans, we choose not to make a fetish of political freedom. We recognize that there are other freedoms besides political freedom--such as the freedom not to be subjected to a barrage of cultural decadence at every turn. In fact, it could be argued that this is a more important freedom, because popular culture is considerably more pervasive than the hand of government in most people's lives.
The ontological libertarians make their arguments in terms that the perfectly happy life is a life free from all restraint. The use of these arguments has been a convenient way to achieve some of the short-term goals of conservatives, because this argument is presented in ontological terms acceptable to the Left--but it has been disastrous to American society. It was an alluring temptation that should have been resisted. It has reaffirmed the world-view of the leftist, which holds the unbridled ego at its center. We have undermined the foundation of any resistance to the Left based on the promotion of a fundamentally different world-view. This devil's bargain has therefore helped to perpetuate the decimation of traditional American culture, with its accumulated wisdom and mores and traditions of self-restraint, which is the basis for any hope of a truly workable political freedom.
Libertarians must make their arguments in terms of the moral benefits of freedom, and not in terms of the glories of nihilism, if we can consider them allies and not opponents. As cultural activism becomes more important to our movement, and political activism less so, we may find that we have less and less in common with many libertarians whose philosophical foundations are not sound.
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
We must create a countervailing force that is just as adept as the Left at intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism but are not ideologically committed, such as Hollywood celebrities, multinational corporations, and university administrators. We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. They must understand that there is some sort of cost involved in taking a "controversial" stand--although positions cannot honestly be labeled "controversial" if conservatives are unable to mount a meaningful opposition. Perhaps once we are able to mount such an opposition, we will be able to take some of the trendiness out of leftist cultural activism, because lukewarm advocates of leftist causes will be forced to actually get their hands dirty. Support of leftist causes will no longer be the path of least resistance.
Some Basic Premises
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
We must perform a brutally honest analysis of what motivates human beings. We must understand what makes them tick, whether that motivation is attractive or not. We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes. For example, it is important to emphasize that the alternative counter-culture must be just that--alternative. It must be different from anything people are familiar with. It is a basic fact that an us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider mentality is a very strong motivation in human life. For better or for worse, this has to be recognized and taken advantage of for the good of the movement.
Moreover, the New Traditionalists must be interested in learning about sociology, social psychology, and the dynamics of social change. We must study examples of dissident and counter-cultural groups that succeeded in ascending to dominance--we must learn from them.
We must recognize the world as it is, not as we may like it to be; but we must never let this line of thinking descend into cynicism.
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
We will apply a scientific analysis to every problem. We will be results-oriented rather than good intentions-oriented. Making a good-faith effort and being ideologically sound will be less important than advancing the goals of the movement. We must learn to be more self-critical. Our efforts should be less haphazard, less prone to fits and starts, and they should make better use of accumulated knowledge and past errors.
We must not get hung up on the evils of our opponents. We can only control our own actions and responses. We must stop whining when we see an example of leftist double-standards and hypocrisy and accept reality as it exists. The only question to be asked is, what are we going to do about it? We must learn to change our own thinking and our own behavior. We must always operate based on this cardinal principle: Leftists are never morally responsible for the evil they commit; but we as conservatives are morally responsible for not having done more to prevent them from committing that evil. We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents.
This is not to discount the importance of reminding ourselves on a regular basis why we ought to hate leftist ideology, in order to keep ourselves motivated to better fight it. But we must be aware that this is what we are doing as we do it--such propaganda must be seen as a catalyst for action, not a substitute for action. We must always understand exactly why we do what we do as we do it, and why our opponents do what they do. We must stop operating according to self-delusion and wishful thinking. Good intentions and good effort count for nothing.
The new movement must learn never to be satisfied with the way things are. We must ask a long series of "whys" to understand how we arrived at our current condition and what must be done to change it. For example, if a fight is winnable, why have we not won it? If it is not, why are we not diverting our efforts elsewhere?
We must always recognize and anticipate the strategy of our opponents. There is no excuse for ever being surprised by the ferocity or ingenuity of their attacks.
One especially naive belief held by most conservatives (at least as betrayed by their actions) that seems to have real staying power is that ideas have a way of disseminating themselves. In many conservative publications, for example, it is unclear who the intended audience is. Articles tend to cover old ground and rehash old arguments, which is pointless if the intended readership is made up of conservative activists who are already familiar with them. But if the intended audience is made up of people who do not already agree, they most likely will not be reading such a specialized publication, but rather reading a newspaper or watching television news, or more likely, they will not follow public affairs at all.
What the activists instead need is a better understanding of how the current situation has arisen and how to coordinate strategy, so they will be prepared to take action in the real world. For instance, they need to know more about the history of the Left than any leftist. They need to be able to beat a leftist in any debate. They need to be able to make him look utterly foolish. They need, in other words, to become hyper-intellectual--this will make them more self-confident, and with self-confidence, they will have the power to prevail. But the conservative movement is not properly preparing its activists to do what needs to be done. They are instead tossing random opinions into the circulation of national discourse, and merely hoping for the best.
Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses
We will initially operate according to the belief that it is more important to win over the elites (or create a new, better one) than to build up a mass movement. Furthermore, it is more important to have a few impassioned members than a large number of largely indifferent members. The amount of energy, élan, and self-assurance that we are able to inculcate in the leaders of our movement will ultimately determine its success or failure.
The new movement must be, in part, exclusive and elite. It must not be afraid to pass along a body of knowledge that is not readily accessible to and understandable by everyone. The strong appeal of a feeling of exclusivity and superiority will give our members a reason to endure the slings and arrows of popular disapproval.
The New Traditionalist movement will appeal to the masses, but not immediately. The ideas of the masses never come from the masses. To the extent that the masses are more conservative than the elites, this is primarily because the masses have a long collective memory, and they still value the beliefs articulated by a long-lost elite. The conservative instincts of the American people will continue to erode unless a new elite is formed to refresh that memory.
We must recognize that literature and philosophy do not appeal to the masses. This is why we must develop ways to spread our philosophy using non-rational means--especially the moving image.
Value of Art and Images
We must place a high value on art, because the most important thing any movement can do is capture the imagination of the people. One must give them dreams and ideals that have been put in terms they can understand, and that touch their hearts, as opposed to their rational minds. If we cannot capture the imaginations of our members, then we cannot expect our members to make great sacrifices for us. There must be a common repository of books and movies that everyone in our movement is familiar with and inspired by, so anyone can quote a line that will be recognized by everyone else. Young people already do this, only with the wrong movies, songs, and other products of popular culture.
We have the example of schoolboys studying Homer in Ancient Greece. No Greek would be considered properly educated without an intimate familiarity with Homer. This taught Greeks what their ideals should be, how they should act, and gave them a common base of reference which united them as members of a society. The films Braveheart and Gladiator are possible examples from current popular culture that could serve a similar, but clearly more limited function.
There is no medium more conducive to propagandistic purposes than the moving image, and our movement must learn to make use of this medium. A skillfully produced motion picture or television documentary has tremendous persuasive power. It has the power to bypass not only the old prejudices that have been assiduously cultivated by the Left over the past few decades, but also the innate skepticism of the viewer, the resistance to new ideas. Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
The visual image allows us to illustrate our beliefs and arguments to our members and others in highly compelling terms--we will be able to show all the examples of cultural decadence, irrationality and disingenuousness in public debate, combined with our commentary, selectively edited and arranged for maximum impact. It avoids the vagueness and generalizations that tend to characterize many conservative arguments. It also allows us to show what we think is right about our current culture--examples from movies or television that we as cultural conservatives support and are excited by. The large amount of capital needed for involvement in this medium is hard to come by, and those with the most creativity and skills in this area are by and large not cultural conservatives--but these hurdles must be overcome sooner or later.
Value of the Tangible Versus the Abstract
This movement will understand that it is not enough to talk in abstractions only. We need to offer clear examples whenever possible. And the ideas must be lived by our members if they are ever to be actualized in the wider society. The power of example is far greater than the power of exhortation. This is a cardinal premise of the new movement.
An excessive amount of intellectualization divorced from application in the real world is a kind of escape from reality, or the creation of a virtual reality. Thinking becomes tired, static, and inward-looking. People become more interested in creating mental utopias than in having a real impact on society. Scholars become mere pedants; ideas are no longer creative and vital.
Ideas interest us only insofar as they offer a guide to action. There is a place in society for abstract, academic discussion. This is not that place.
Movement Must Be Based on the Transmission of Ideas, Not Their Creation
This movement is not about the creation of ideas, it is about the transmission and dissemination of ideas. Intellectual cultural conservatism already exists, but it is largely unknown. As it finds its audience, intellectual cultural conservatism will become more creative and will respond to the challenges of the present. The creators of the future will find their inspiration from the great ideas of the past. We maintain that the dearth of new creative thought grounded in conservative sensibilities is due to a disconnection from the great ideas of the past, because those ideas have not been given life and relevance. The New Traditionalist movement will be a revolution in organization, not ideas, but the results will be equally, if not more dramatic.
The ideas that form the basis of the new movement have been well articulated by people who value theory but not action. It will be the job of the New Traditionalist movement to transmit these ideas to a more action-oriented elite, and through them, to the masses. An action-oriented elite is necessary to force people to confront ideas they would otherwise not be exposed to. Ideas do not automatically have consequences. They do not have an impact in direct proportion to the truth they contain. They have an impact only insofar as adherents of those ideas are willing to take measures to propagate those ideas.
New Traditionalists Must Be More Culturally Sophisticated
The new movement cannot be seen as a movement of rubes, or knee-jerk yahoos, or surly malcontents. We must make it clear that we are seceding from popular culture not because we are unable to cope with modern life, but because we are superior to modern life. We understand popular culture--we get it--we simply find it empty and meaningless.
We may reject the culture of our opponents, but we must never fear it. We must understand the appeal of popular culture before we can hope to draw people away from it. People will not take us seriously until they are convinced we have taken the time to understand its appeal. We need the perspective to be able to compare our current culture with culture at its best, so we not only know when popular culture falls short, but also when it, on occasion, provides examples of culture at its best.
It Is in the Movement's Self-Interest to Improve the Quality of Its Membership
We have a dearth of human material that shares our traditionalist values. These people must be created in our own institutions. They must be given a refuge as their nascent beliefs are coming into fruition. They must be sheltered and protected. Improving the quality of the people who make up the new movement will be a primary concern.
The new movement must understand that it is not enough to wait for people to come to us. Conservatives now seem to feel that the success a conservative activist can achieve in the conservative movement is his own business, merely a matter of building a career. This view must be categorically rejected. It is in the interest of the New Traditionalist movement that every member be given the support to reach his maximum potential. It is imperative that every member be made to feel more confident about his beliefs and abilities, because the movement as a whole suffers from a lack of confidence. Furthermore, there must be a place for people who do not work in the movement for a salary. The New Traditionalist movement is a cause, not a business.
The new movement will promote discipline and loyalty and self-sacrifice. Advancing one's personal interests by harming the interests of the movement will never be overlooked or forgotten. Modern conservatism has an intolerable tolerance for backstabbers and traitors--it reflects a movement that lacks the self-confidence to demand victory for itself, and to ostracize individuals who interfere with the realization of our goals. I do not refer to genuine differences of opinion. This is not a totalitarian movement. I refer to "conservatives" who feel tempted to denounce other conservatives merely to gain the approval of the cultural elite, or for personal gain.
New Traditionalists Must Concentrate on Students and Young Adults
The new movement will inevitably be geared toward children and young adults, especially their education. We will accomplish the goal of retaking our country only when large numbers of young people are educated outside of the indoctrinating environment of many public and private schools, universities, and of course, the popular culture. At this point in their lives, many of their ideas are still in the formative stage, the more so the younger they are. Furthermore, young adults (of college age and above) should be given a large role in the organization of the New Traditionalist movement, as many older people, because of work and family life, simply do not have the time to devote to reading, discussion, and action (and all three are equally important). They also often lack the necessary energy, enthusiasm, and idealism that is prevalent in youth. However, retirees could also make a valuable contribution to the movement.
College students must be a key audience for our movement, since they are free of excessive time commitments and they find themselves in an environment that (theoretically) encourages activism and exposure to new ideas. We should consider creating alternative fraternities where traditionalists can live, interact with each other, learn from each other, socialize with each other. New Traditionalist fraternities can help replicate lifestyles from the past--emulate "civilized" behavior from the past--by discussing traditionalist ideas, literature, and art, and then acting based on what has been learned. Members of the fraternities and collegiate study groups should build each other up in every possible way: in terms of public speaking skills, debating skills, physical fitness, intellect, manners, aesthetic sense. It is imperative that our ideas be lived and not merely discussed.
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A basic problem is that most bright, creative, dynamic, energetic young people with leadership skills become leftists, and this is why most student leaders--who eventually become the leaders of society--tend to be leftists. New Traditionalist fraternities and collegiate study groups can help reverse that tendency.
i love that paragraph!
i love that paragraph!
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The Movement Must Be Willing to Appear Obnoxious
Our movement must be highly provocative. The thing we have most to fear is that we will be ignored.
Cultural conservatives must understand the predicament we are in. We must be willing to take measures that perhaps we would be unwilling to take under different, more ideal circumstances. We will have standards--we will never try to justify dishonesty, destruction of the personal reputation of our opponents, cheating, assault, etc., in the service of victory for our movement. However, we will not consider ourselves above appearing "unseemly" or surrendering some our personal dignity. We must be willing to shake people out of their complacency--which means being obnoxious if the situation requires it--because given the fact that the dominant leftist culture is safely ensconced, complacency only serves the interests of our opponents.
Our movement must be highly provocative. The thing we have most to fear is that we will be ignored.
Cultural conservatives must understand the predicament we are in. We must be willing to take measures that perhaps we would be unwilling to take under different, more ideal circumstances. We will have standards--we will never try to justify dishonesty, destruction of the personal reputation of our opponents, cheating, assault, etc., in the service of victory for our movement. However, we will not consider ourselves above appearing "unseemly" or surrendering some our personal dignity. We must be willing to shake people out of their complacency--which means being obnoxious if the situation requires it--because given the fact that the dominant leftist culture is safely ensconced, complacency only serves the interests of our opponents.
It is not enough to say that conservative philosophy is more sensible than that of the Left. If we leave it at that, we will only attract "sensible" people to our movement. But "sensible" people do not go to the barricades, they do not make great sacrifices for a movement. And the experience of the conservative movement has shown this to be the case. We need more people with fire in the belly, and we need a message that attracts those kinds of people. As Plato said, "madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human." We should keep this in mind if we expect our people to make superhuman sacrifices for the movement.
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We must reframe this struggle as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil. And we must be prepared to explain why this is so. We must provide the evidence needed to prove this using images and simple terms. Putting the debate in terms of mere freedom, the "leave us alone" mentality, does not inspire apocalyptic fervor.
Some will argue that "conservatives" do not believe in apocalyptic fervor. The reader should simply ask himself, is he happy with the state of cultural conservatism in this country? If not, does he think it likely that conditions will improve in the future by operating according to the current rules? And if not, is he willing to witness the death of true civilization in this country so that conservatism will not suffer the ungentlemanly taint of "fervor"? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, this movement will not appeal to the reader.
Some will argue that "conservatives" do not believe in apocalyptic fervor. The reader should simply ask himself, is he happy with the state of cultural conservatism in this country? If not, does he think it likely that conditions will improve in the future by operating according to the current rules? And if not, is he willing to witness the death of true civilization in this country so that conservatism will not suffer the ungentlemanly taint of "fervor"? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, this movement will not appeal to the reader.
Ground Zero of the New Traditionalist Movement: The Study Group
What Are Study Groups?
The study groups will develop a cadre of scholar warriors. They are the vanguard of a counter-cultural movement. Study groups are the basis of all short-term activity.
Study groups will be imperative because they will be the means by which we combine thought and action. Members will be asked to read relatively difficult or abstract works of political and social philosophy. They will then be asked to come up with examples from our current society that might illustrate some principles contained therein.
(we create our own reality while you in the reality-based community are left to judicious study of our results)
This will not be a movement of talkers. Participants will be expected to engage in tangible, constructive activity. They will be asked often what precisely they have done for the good of the movement. The new movement will not, unlike much of modern conservatism, be a spectator sport.
Study groups, as their name implies, will be engaged in the intensive study of culture and ideas, but the understanding achieved through that study will be applied in the form of action. Action is defined as either 1) the subversion of leftist-controlled institutions, or 2) the creation of our own institutions of civil society, whose sole purpose is outreach to, and the conversion of, non-traditionalists. Action is partly designed to lead to direct results in society, mostly as a way to build up the qualities of the membership. A membership that never acts is useless, because it does not become more capable, and does not learn from its mistakes. Furthermore, action in the world encourages the identification of the member with, and dedication to the group.
For example, we will go to public lectures given by leftists and ask them "impolite" and highly critical questions. We must, of course, be fully prepared beforehand for these sorts of excursions, and we must also be prepared to embarrass ourselves, especially at first.
Money for the new movement will come primarily from the membership at first, because very few foundations will be willing to support us initially. As our movement grows, even if more funding comes from foundations, requirements for personal contributions must remain high to make people believe they are personally invested in this movement. Again, members cannot be allowed to think of themselves as spectators in this movement.
Study Groups Will Cultivate Civilized Values
The coming battle for the hearts and minds of Americans is ultimately a battle between civilization and barbarism. The fight between civilization and barbarism is a fight that takes place in society at large, as well as in the heart of each individual.
Civilization means, in part, the mores and inherited traditions that encourage self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, as well as an appreciation for objective truth, in a way that is sustainable and in harmony with our essential human nature. It is concerned with the health of society as an organism and as the body responsible for perpetuating those traditions. It is the opposite of barbarism, which means obeying one's lowest instincts and drives; barbarism means fidelity solely to oneself, not to an enlightened social code worked out over centuries, representing the accumulated wisdom of generations of men and women. Albert Jay Nock defines culture at its best as "lucidity of mind, intellectual curiosity and hospitality, largeness of temper, objectivity, the finest sense of social life, of manners, of beauty." And this view of culture is clearly incompatible with pure egoism.
This is also the opposite of a society produced by ideology. Ideology is a substitute for genuine thought, and it is the opposite of all true civilization. A central goal of the movement will be the destruction of ideology in whatever form it takes. It will not strive for its replacement with a "traditionalist ideology," because such a thing is a contradiction in terms.
The study groups, and through them, the New Traditionalist movement as a whole, will be the means by which the goals of civilization, high standards, and cultural refinement are injected back into society. We have claimed the prerogative to be obnoxious when the occasion demands it. Furthermore, we recognize that refinement and obnoxious behavior can conflict. A rule of reason will mediate. Means should not be allowed to compromise ends, but talk of ends is moot if there are no traditionalists in existence to pursue those ends.
Study groups will provide an opportunity to discuss movies and books and other cultural products that reflect the values of this society and those of societies separated from ours by time or place. Study groups will rediscover and disseminate our conservative heritage. They will share examples of the conservative ethos at work today, perhaps even unbeknownst to the creator of the work. From there, the long-term objective will be to encourage the creation of new works of art that self-consciously reflect the values of the New Traditionalist movement. We operate according to the belief that current popular culture is distinctly uninspiring, and a great people ought to be able to find inspiration in its culture.
Study Groups Will Provide a Communal Experience
Modern conservatism is excessively individualistic. We must find meaning as part of an organization with shared values. For example, it is not enough for a conservative writer to watch a movie, write up a good review in a magazine, encourage other people to watch it, and expect that to form the basis for a movement that is able to stand up to the dominant culture. We must watch movies together. We must feel part of the group as we watch it. And we must then discuss that movie as a group.
Study groups should engage in charitable activities, partly to build esprit de corps, partly to create positive feelings about our group in the minds of the public, partly to create an alternative to government solutions. Study groups together with other organs of the movement should provide everything that a person could want in terms of social interaction, with the exception of the workplace and the church (although churches will in some cases be allied with the movement).
We must recognize that bonding with others in one's generation or society is the means by which values are strengthened and perpetuated. It is vitally important that we bond in such a way that the values perpetuated are our own.
Book Clubs Lay the Groundwork for Study Groups
The movement should imitate the communist distinction between party members and fellow travelers. Study groups will require high levels of dedication, discipline, and self-sacrifice. Those who are unable to perform will be asked to leave. But it would be unwise to send the signal that there is no place in the movement for people who are otherwise sympathetic to our message. They will be considered allies, but they will not be accorded the status of movement leaders.
Based on this premise, the book club is designed to be the organ of the New Traditionalist movement that is most accessible to outsiders. The book club will be open to all interested individuals, and will be responsible for introducing its members to traditionalist ways of thinking. The level of commitment required of book club members will be much lower than that required of study group members.
The study group will recruit mainly from the book club. Members of the book club will discuss ideas at a lower level of intellectual sophistication than the study group. Once the study groups have been firmly established and have arrived at an adequate level of intellectual sophistication, the leaders of the study group will be responsible for choosing the books or other cultural products that will be discussed in the book club, and drawing up the agenda and list of discussion questions for each meeting.
Acceptance by Fellow New Traditionalists More Important than Acceptance by Wider Society
The members of the New Traditionalists must make public affirmation of their identification with the new movement. They must seek approval for their actions from other New Traditionalists, and not from the wider society. It is unrealistic to assume that very many mortal human beings will be able to withstand in isolation the vitriol and hatred that our movement's program will engender. Culture wars generally seem to inspire higher emotions than verbal wars over economics, foreign policy, etc., because they address the most fundamental questions of what matters in life. Our people must learn to have contempt and scorn for the wider society, and reject it in all ways. This will never happen so long as our people seek accommodation with it.
It is important that we form fully well-rounded people who feel that they are lacking nothing that the dominant leftist culture can offer them. For example, sports leagues will be included for young people in the intermediate stage, in order to bring in people who might not otherwise be interested in joining. It is important that there be something for everyone, that there be a place for all kinds of different people. Not all members will be intellectuals, although intellectuals will instigate the new movement.
Final Thoughts
Even if We Lose, We Still Win
Even if our views do not become the dominant views in society at any point in the near future, this must not be seen as a defeat. At least we will have offered many Americans another choice, a refuge from the dominant culture, and a way to at least live a reasonably decent and pleasant life in the midst of rampant social corruption. We will provide people with access to the best civilization has produced--literature, philosophy, and art. We will be a godsend to those who want to raise themselves up, makes themselves more than what they are. Popular culture now acts as a giant narcotic, offering an escape from the difficulty and hard work of realizing our higher selves. Our movement's intention is to break that addiction for as many individuals as possible.
Discussion Lists Have Little Value -- Action Is More Important
We must be careful not to overtheorize, or wait until we have everything thought out perfectly before we start to take action. Action is the most important element at first, because much of learning is evolutionary, and one of the best ways to learn is by making mistakes in the real world--but, of course, there is never any excuse for making the same mistake twice.
Conservatives have an excessive tolerance for incessant talking. The discussion list based on this essay will only involve as much discussion as it takes to form the philosophical basis for local study groups in various parts of the country, and the list will then coordinate the agendas of the study groups. Study groups will be in charge of conducting actual activities. Study groups must form the primary venue for the transmission of ideas, because a discussion list cannot lead to action. Again, the basis of our movement is the integration of thought and action. Neither one is more important than the other.
We should expect some infighting and sectarianism in our movement at first, as we try to decide what exactly we think should be the basis of our movement--precisely which cultural values we are fighting for. This should not worry us especially, because over time, as we engage each other, as well as the wider society, an equilibrium will be achieved, and a balance will be struck between the competing goals of unity and size in our movement.
The Next Step
The reader will have noticed that this essay contains no evidence. It is not concerned with converting anyone to a certain way of thinking. However, certain people will find that its arguments resonate with them, and express beliefs they have long held on an inchoate level. These are the people who will provide the critical mass to begin the organization of the new movement.
If you are sympathetic to the basic premises set forth in this essay, I welcome your questions and criticisms in order to better clarify my positions and my thoughts on the direction the New Traditionalists must take, particularly in the initial stages. Please contact me at eheubeck@freecongress.org. I would particularly like to invite your participation if you would be willing to organize a book club in your hometown. And I especially encourage you to send the link to this page to anyone who you think might be interested in any of the ideas contained in the essay.
We have a lot of work to do. Let's get started.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you would like to make a submission to a discussion list based on this essay, send an e-mail to ntp.list@freecongress.org. Please include your first name and town, and specify whether you would like your e-mail address included in the posting.
obviously i DID eventually give up on emphasizing text, sorry, just was taking too long
Note too that the inspiration to post this came from a dkos diary
UPDATE! GOPUSA is A Shill for Rove/Bush
http://web.archive.org/web/20010713152425/...ditionalist.htm
archiving here the excerpt of the just prior post frommy response made on another thread http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ndpost&p=198255
you actually think it as a matter of stupidity that they didn't forcus on the substance?! instead, that they focussed so intently on the planted distraction was no matter of stupidity, i'm sure. hell, if they simply -- as indicated here -- looked at how the 'memogate' story was developed including the fact that it was fed initially from a RW blogger what, within 20 minutes of the beginning of rather's broadcast...
there was NO stupidity involved in the hands that dealt out rather's destruction. it takes careful crafting to accomplish what they did knowing that much of america is conditioned/addicted to swallowing the sensation drug reflexively.
sorry, i don't mean to direct ALL of this at you but to use my response as a means to make a point i keep trying to make: the CONs know they can and must manipulate perception. one manipulative tool is to distract from substance by frenzy, particularly a frenzy that feeds the goal of destroying lefties while simultaneously protecting CONS, kinda beautiful! i think a better sense can be had by my excerpting a recent find here
why broadcast media is so critical to perception-manipulation.
Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
what do lefties tend to do more than to intellectualize. that doesn't work on the emotional level where -- note the same root as -- MOTIVE comes from.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Feb 22 2005, 04:48 PM)
I long said that the media was stupid because it didn't focus on the fact that the content was never debated - the source was debated...
you actually think it as a matter of stupidity that they didn't forcus on the substance?! instead, that they focussed so intently on the planted distraction was no matter of stupidity, i'm sure. hell, if they simply -- as indicated here -- looked at how the 'memogate' story was developed including the fact that it was fed initially from a RW blogger what, within 20 minutes of the beginning of rather's broadcast...
there was NO stupidity involved in the hands that dealt out rather's destruction. it takes careful crafting to accomplish what they did knowing that much of america is conditioned/addicted to swallowing the sensation drug reflexively.
sorry, i don't mean to direct ALL of this at you but to use my response as a means to make a point i keep trying to make: the CONs know they can and must manipulate perception. one manipulative tool is to distract from substance by frenzy, particularly a frenzy that feeds the goal of destroying lefties while simultaneously protecting CONS, kinda beautiful! i think a better sense can be had by my excerpting a recent find here
QUOTE
The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement
by Eric Heubeck
<snip>
This essay is based on the belief that the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance. Far more important is the energy and dedication of the idea's promoters
<snip>
Our strategy will be to bleed this corrupt culture dry. We will pick off the most intelligent and creative individuals in our society, the individuals who help give credibility to the current regime.
<snip>
Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity.
<snip>
We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.
We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs.
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
We must create a countervailing force that is just as adept as the Left at intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism but are not ideologically committed, such as Hollywood celebrities, multinational corporations, and university administrators. We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. They must understand that there is some sort of cost involved in taking a "controversial" stand...
<snip>
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
We must perform a brutally honest analysis of what motivates human beings. We must understand what makes them tick, whether that motivation is attractive or not. We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes. For example, it is important to emphasize that the alternative counter-culture must be just that--alternative. It must be different from anything people are familiar with. It is a basic fact that an us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider mentality is a very strong motivation in human life. For better or for worse, this has to be recognized and taken advantage of for the good of the movement.
Moreover, the New Traditionalists must be interested in learning about sociology, social psychology, and the dynamics of social change. We must study examples of dissident and counter-cultural groups that succeeded in ascending to dominance--we must learn from them.
<snip>
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
We will apply a scientific analysis to every problem. We will be results-oriented rather than good intentions-oriented. Making a good-faith effort and being ideologically sound will be less important than advancing the goals of the movement.
<snip>
We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents...
<snip>
We must recognize that literature and philosophy do not appeal to the masses. This is why we must develop ways to spread our philosophy using non-rational means--especially the moving image.
Value of Art and Images
We must place a high value on art, because the most important thing any movement can do is capture the imagination of the people. One must give them dreams and ideals that have been put in terms they can understand, and that touch their hearts, as opposed to their rational minds. If we cannot capture the imaginations of our members, then we cannot expect our members to make great sacrifices for us.
<snip>
There is no medium more conducive to propagandistic purposes than the moving image, and our movement must learn to make use of this medium. A skillfully produced motion picture or television documentary has tremendous persuasive power. It has the power to bypass not only the old prejudices that have been assiduously cultivated by the Left over the past few decades, but also the innate skepticism of the viewer, the resistance to new ideas. Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
by Eric Heubeck
<snip>
This essay is based on the belief that the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance. Far more important is the energy and dedication of the idea's promoters
<snip>
Our strategy will be to bleed this corrupt culture dry. We will pick off the most intelligent and creative individuals in our society, the individuals who help give credibility to the current regime.
<snip>
Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity.
<snip>
We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.
We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs.
QUOTE
Movement Must Serve as a Force of Social Intimidation in Its Intermediate Stage
We must create a countervailing force that is just as adept as the Left at intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism but are not ideologically committed, such as Hollywood celebrities, multinational corporations, and university administrators. We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. They must understand that there is some sort of cost involved in taking a "controversial" stand...
<snip>
The Movement Must Understand What Motivates Human Beings
We must perform a brutally honest analysis of what motivates human beings. We must understand what makes them tick, whether that motivation is attractive or not. We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes. For example, it is important to emphasize that the alternative counter-culture must be just that--alternative. It must be different from anything people are familiar with. It is a basic fact that an us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider mentality is a very strong motivation in human life. For better or for worse, this has to be recognized and taken advantage of for the good of the movement.
Moreover, the New Traditionalists must be interested in learning about sociology, social psychology, and the dynamics of social change. We must study examples of dissident and counter-cultural groups that succeeded in ascending to dominance--we must learn from them.
<snip>
Good Results More Important than Good Intentions--Naiveté Not Excusable
We will apply a scientific analysis to every problem. We will be results-oriented rather than good intentions-oriented. Making a good-faith effort and being ideologically sound will be less important than advancing the goals of the movement.
<snip>
We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents...
<snip>
We must recognize that literature and philosophy do not appeal to the masses. This is why we must develop ways to spread our philosophy using non-rational means--especially the moving image.
Value of Art and Images
We must place a high value on art, because the most important thing any movement can do is capture the imagination of the people. One must give them dreams and ideals that have been put in terms they can understand, and that touch their hearts, as opposed to their rational minds. If we cannot capture the imaginations of our members, then we cannot expect our members to make great sacrifices for us.
<snip>
There is no medium more conducive to propagandistic purposes than the moving image, and our movement must learn to make use of this medium. A skillfully produced motion picture or television documentary has tremendous persuasive power. It has the power to bypass not only the old prejudices that have been assiduously cultivated by the Left over the past few decades, but also the innate skepticism of the viewer, the resistance to new ideas. Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
why broadcast media is so critical to perception-manipulation.
Rational arguments simply do not have this power, and all arguments made in print tend to appeal to the rational, critical faculties of the mind to a greater or lesser degree.
what do lefties tend to do more than to intellectualize. that doesn't work on the emotional level where -- note the same root as -- MOTIVE comes from.
another archival post
WOW, couldn't get much better a resonance with the manipulate emotions strategy than kos just posted here on the Luntz tactical memo:
it's time we got with the program folks!
WOW, couldn't get much better a resonance with the manipulate emotions strategy than kos just posted here on the Luntz tactical memo:
QUOTE
In his memo on how to manipulate American perception on the economy, right-wing spinmeister Frank Luntz advises conservatives to “resist the temptation’ to use facts and figures about the economy. (You know, all those pesky statistics about lower wages, unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, etc.) Instead, he advises, you can’t go wrong if you continuosly remind people about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “This is the context that explains and justifies why we have $500 billion deficits, why the stock market tanked, why unemployment climbed to 6%.”
Oh, yes, he advises preying on the emotions tied to the terrorist attacks to distract Americans from the truth about the economy, writing, “Much of the public anger can be immediately pacified if they are reminded that we would not be in this situation today if 9/11 had not happened.” It’s also an easy way to get President Bush off the hook: Luntz points out that convincing people that the struggling economy is a consequence of 9/11 (as opposed to, say, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy) will convince people “it is unfair to blame the current political leadership”
Finally, Luntz advises, 9/11 is the perfect way to dodge responsibility for sinking the country in red ink. In a section headed “Without the context of 9-11, you will be blamed for the deficit,” he points out “supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal irresponsibility.” The best way to counter that fact? “The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11.”
Oh, yes, he advises preying on the emotions tied to the terrorist attacks to distract Americans from the truth about the economy, writing, “Much of the public anger can be immediately pacified if they are reminded that we would not be in this situation today if 9/11 had not happened.” It’s also an easy way to get President Bush off the hook: Luntz points out that convincing people that the struggling economy is a consequence of 9/11 (as opposed to, say, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy) will convince people “it is unfair to blame the current political leadership”
Finally, Luntz advises, 9/11 is the perfect way to dodge responsibility for sinking the country in red ink. In a section headed “Without the context of 9-11, you will be blamed for the deficit,” he points out “supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal irresponsibility.” The best way to counter that fact? “The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11.”
it's time we got with the program folks!
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