Using case studies and exercises, this innovative study poses challenging questions
Living in a saturated media environment, we are crowded from all sides by persuasive messages and information. ...Advice, promotion and propaganda form a spectrum of persuasion - and everywhere we see it performed in its full theatricality, complete with actors, scripts, props and costumes.
Based on enduring rhetorical principles, these persuasive techniques and the psychology behind them have become increasingly sophisticated during the 'age of persuasion', a century of applied research in advertising, advocacy, public relations, mass entertainment and social control.Media, Persuasion, and Propagandaguides the reader through the many varieties of persuasion and its performance, exploring the protocols of rhetoric unique to the medium, from orality and print to film and digital images. Using case studies and exercises, this innovative study poses challenging questions:
How do individuals and organisations exert influence to build communities and networks?What role do media play in communicating persuasive messages?How do we use recent discoveries in cognitive science to promote a cause, advocate social change or market ideas and products?How do we defend ourselves against manipulation and undue influence, and when does persuasion turn into propaganda?
Key Features
Uses global examples and case studies to define the spectrum of persuasion, from promotion to propagandaExamines the performance of propaganda, from orality to new mediaIncludes exercises in each chapter to reinforce the key themes and promote discussion
Compelling Images Soules, Marshall
Media, Persuasion and Propaganda,
02/2015
Book Chapter
In 1890, Danish-American police reporter Jacob Riis publishedHow the Other Half Lives, an exposé of New York City tenement life. This early example of muckraking journalism relied on photographs, ...drawings and graphic descriptions to reveal the appalling living conditions among immigrants vulnerable to wealthy tenement owners. New photographic flash technology using magnesium powder allowed Riis to illuminate the dark recesses of slum living conditions, often revealing images of children in squalid surroundings. While his reporting was designed to ‘speak directly to people’s hearts’ (Pascal 2005: 87), he was convinced that disclosing the facts would lead to outrage and subsequent
Propaganda and War Soules, Marshall
Media, Persuasion and Propaganda,
02/2015
Book Chapter
Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a ...democracy, or a fascistic dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. This is easy: All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
Performing Propaganda Soules, Marshall
Media, Persuasion and Propaganda,
02/2015
Book Chapter
A prince … must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion ...to frighten wolves … But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler … (Machiavelli 1532 1997: Chapter 18; Bok 1978 1979: 143)
In this final chapter, we explore the double standards of deception and lying – deception used for self-defence, subterfuge and art – and the performance of propaganda as
If we could tell a film, then why make a film?
(This Is Not A Film2011)
Since the mid-nineteenth century, global culture has produced a flood of images through photography, print, film, television, ...digital video, the internet and mobile computing. Frames and screens are everywhere. Digital networks and storage media have accelerated image production and distribution and shifted the balance of production toward ‘amateurs’. Manovich says inThe Language of New Media(2001) that visual culture is progressively replacing print culture; increasingly, messages are delivered as ‘audiovisual moving image sequences, rather than as text’. As people become more conversant
Advertising and consumer culture flourish under capitalism. Advertising promotes capitalism’s benefits, and its art and language express capitalism’s values and promises. In 1904, German sociologist ...Max Weber visited the United States to study the Protestant work ethic and ‘rational’ capitalism at its source. Weber distinguishes between ‘traditional’ capitalism – practiced throughout history by diverse cultures involved in buying, selling, trading and plundering (‘booty’ capitalism) – and rational capitalism, based on Protestant beliefs and attitudes. For Weber, the clearest expression of rational capitalism came from Benjamin Franklin, whose homespun sayings express a philosophy of work, wealth and ethics: ‘Time is money’;
Psychology of Influence Soules, Marshall
Media, Persuasion and Propaganda,
02/2015
Book Chapter
Since the mid-1800s, capitalist societies have provided a mass market laboratory for marketers, advertisers, publicists, politicians and propagandists to test their persuasive powers. Market ...research, surveys, focus groups, clinical experiments, studies of spending habits and trends and data analysis have all contributed to our understanding of motivation and behaviour in the material world and in the broader context of human culture. Robert Cialdini’s applied approach to persuasion provides a core focus for this chapter. Cialdini emphasises that uncertainty and ambiguity are key elements in persuasion psychology. They provide openings for creative – possibly misleading – communication, again reminding us of
In March 1914, a women’s suffragist named Mary Richardson smuggled a small axe into the National Gallery in London. She found Diego Velázquez’sThe Rokeby Venus(c. 1650) and managed to break the glass ...and slash the canvas, before being restrained and arrested. At her trial, Richardson said she wanted to draw attention to Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike in London’s Holloway Prison (Clark 1997: 28). Her action was not isolated. British suffragists had used disruptive means before, but Richardson’s vandalism still resonates for contemporary audiences familiar with the agitprop theatrics of the Guerrilla Girls, Femen and Pussy Riot. While her
