Consider This A Dropped Jewel: The Television & Advertising Bamboozle

“News has become entertainment. Television is the main source of news, and only real purpose of any commercial televison program is to deliver an audience to advertisers.

The programs and the advertisements become indistinguishable, both serving the purpose of massaging the viewer into the mood to consume. If there were no such thing as official U.S. government propaganda, America would still be in the grip of the most powerful propaganda apparatus in human history: the advertising industry. Advertising is not usually thought of as propaganda, because it has no obvious political slant. All the better to brainwash you with. In fact, advertising sells a political ideology as fully developed and as potent as anything...The ideology is consumerism.

There are tow types of propaganda identified by Jacques Ellul, whose book ‘Propaganda’ is a definitive work on the subject. There is propaganda of integration (sociological propaganda) and propaganda of agitation (political propaganda). Advertising is both. It presents a coherent set of values and standards, which serves the purpose of molding (integrating) disparate ‘propagandees’ into a coherent group with shared ideals- in this case, the equation of happiness with consumer products. And it ‘agitates’ its targets into performing specific acts for the benefit of the political system- namely, purchasing things, an act without which industrial capitalism, our political system, would perish.

Conflation of advertising and propaganda spawns USC professors Ian Mitroff’s and Warren Bennis’s book title, ‘The Unreality Industry.’ The advertising and entertainment industries have teamed up to instill America with a culture based upon outright falsehoods and manipulations of fact. We worship celebrities whose public personas bear little relationship to their real identities, then we purchase products designed to make us identify with the artificial celebrities. The process perpetuates until we’re living in a mirage. Or perhaps it’s more like a hologram because the illusion is deliberately created.

What becomes of our own identities in this haze of consumption? We lose them, as we submerge ourselves into the mass culture. Striving to create ourselves in the images presented to us by advertising, we lose touch with reality.” From, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes” By: Jonathan Vankin

Book Excerpt: "The Tipping Point" By: Malcolm Gladwell

"A television is just a talking box. In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter. Educational experts describe televison as 'low involvement.' Television is like a strain of the common cold that can spread like lightening through a population, but only causes a few sniffles and is gone in a day." -From, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference" By: Malcolm Gladwell

Who Writes Your Laws Of Power?

Sometimes I think that the With all of the books on "universal laws" and out of all the great intellects, leaders, and strategists that have spanned the eras (not to mention a one's own intuition); why are some people turning to Robert Greene to give them the "laws of power." I've skimmed his "48 Laws of Power," and decided not to read it fully. It seemed too sinister to me, and I didn't find a lot of it valid.

However, I literally just finished fully reading Robert Greene's "The 33 Strategies of War." Although I didn't agree with a percentage of it, I liked some of the allegories and some of the lessons. I especially liked the first part of the book that applied to self-discipline. [SIDEBAR: I recently took Mr. Greene's most recent tome (a collaboration with 50 cent) out of the library; so I'll see what I think about that rendition of "power rules" soon.]

To quote the author Robert Greene himself, from "The 33 Strategies of War":

"Over the centuries millions upon millions of readers have used Machiavelli's books for invaluable advice on power. But could it possibly be the opposite- that it is Machiavelli who has been using his readers? Scattered through his writings and through his letters to his friends, some of them uncovered centuries after his death, are signs that he pondered deeply the strategy of writing itself and the power he could wield after his death by infiltrating his ideas indirectly and deeply into his readers' minds, transforming them into unwitting disciples of his amoral philosophy."

So, again I ask: "Who writes your laws of power?"

How Much Is Television About Manipulating The Basic Tenets Of Psychology?

I came across this excerpt in a book and it made me think about how effect television, other forms of media, and advertising is in manipulating people's ideas and people's mental associations of images. Psychologists are often used by advertisers and television show creators to help them implement the best way to embed their messages into a viewers mind.

"One of Freud's greatest contributions was a concept called Angstsignal, or signal anxiety, which anticipated some of the most sophisticated contemporary work on implicit memory and unconscious associative networks. Freud's development of the concept grew directly from his groundbreaking understanding of fear and the pervasive ways fear organizes human existence.

Signal anxiety, Freud said describes an unconscious mental function that operates as a kind of early warning system for the psyche. It's what, after you've been burned once, stops you from having to consider consciously the merits of grasping a red-hot poker every time you want to pull it out of a blazing fire. Seeing a red-hot pojer leads to an experience of signal anxiety. It's a straightforward danger signal of the distress that would follow were you to keep grabbing red-hot pokers.

Signal anxiety results from the perception of danger. But it's also about learning to associate one thing with another, often unconsciously." [SIDEBAR: Italics as emphasized in the book.] -From, "Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and The Inexplicable Powers of The Human Mind." By: Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer

Book Excerpt: The Creation Of The FCC Edition

"Signed by the president on June 18, the Communications Act of 1934 created a single seven-member body, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to regulate radio as well as interstate and international telegraph, cable, and telephone services. Although it formally repealed the Radio Act of 1927, the new measure reenacted nearly all the provisions of the earlier legislation, much of it verbatim. The FCC is often described as a New Deal agency, but this is primarily the result of a coincidence of timing. Though the legislation had Roosevelt's signature, the actual substance had [President] Hoover's name wriiten all over it. It was hoover who had presided over the key constitutive choices in broadcasting and broadcast regulation; the 1934 legislation ratified and consolidated these earlier decisions." -From, "The Creation Of The Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications" By: Paul Starr

Book Excerpt: The Birth of American Radio & Radio Politics Edition

"The airwaves in the 1920s were like newly discovered virgin land that attracts colonists eager for adventure, wealth, of the opportunity to build a glorious new civilization. Like many a frontier territory, radio quickly became a battleground of legal claims and political deals, of new industry, dashed hopes, and great business empires. That had always been the course of American settlement whether on the prairie or on the spectrum. Broadcasting, however, was not simply a field of enterprise or an extension of society into a new domain. It promised to change society. The promise of broadcasting, even more than earlier media, was to make culture accessible to all, to enable the electorate to become better informed, to put people instantaneously in touch with the news of the world. Here was a new, buzzing and booming public sphere, an updated means of forming public opinion and public taste appropriately scaled to the age of mass democracy.

Yet, by comparison with the traditional medium of the public sphere- the press- radio suffered from several disabilities. Its entire basis of operation, the radio spectrum, was a scarce resource allocated by the state. As radio developed during the late 1920s and 1930s, control devolved on only a few hands, and the new medium provided less latitude for cultural diversity and political dissent than did print. While the press was increasingly independent of politics, there developed an interdependence between those who held political power(and needed radio) and those who controlled radio (and needed political goodwill). Instead of extending democracy, therefore, radio threatened to distort it. Such was the promise- such were the dangers- as the political framework of broadcasting was established in the period from 1927 to World War II." -From, "The Creation Of The Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications" By: Paul Starr

Consider This A Dropped Jewel: The Effect Of Watching TV Edition

"The world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all about complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definition of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane." -From, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" By: Neil Postman

Consider This A Dropped Jewel: The Game Just Rewinds Edition

Here's some interesting observations and recollections that Quincy Jones made about the music industry in his autobiography:

"But by and large beboppers were artists, proud, sensitive, intelligent people who practiced for hours and didn't want to shuffle and entertain white folks anymore. They said, 'We're artists and want to be treated that way.' You can imagine how that kind of attitude came off in the 40s & 50s- Black men and women talking that way. Forget it. That's why so many turned to drugs.

These were the days when managers would sign an artist, record him, take a million dollar life insurance policy, record him, let the artist tour Vegas, record him again, then smoke him and collect the insurance.

At the first sign of Charlie Parker's jones coming down at a recording session, they'd have him sign away all his composing, publishing, and artist's royalties before they'd let in the dealer so that Bird could shoot up. Monk, Bird, Miles, Basie, nobody knew the business. Most of us sold our songs and publishing rights for peanuts to people who didn't give a s*** about anything but money."

Book Excerpt: The Treachery Of The Music Business Edition

"Let's not beat around the bush: The music industry as commonly known is, from the innermost innards to the outermost exteriors, a murderous international crime syndicate. There's no other way to describe it as accurately. An outgrowth of the chattel slavery system, the music business is just one tentacle of capitalism, a monster that's sole objective is the continuous accumulation of wealth by all evil means im/possible at anyone's/anything's expense. Its very nature is ill-will towards wo/men, dog-eat-dog, the cavewo/man's basic instinct in full-effect for 'modern' times...

Though the music business- which insiders always insist is a business first and foremost- has money as the ends to the means, it is the will of white supremacy, the progenitor of capitalism, which has shaped the structure of music in European domains. This volition redefined the meaning, the purpose, the very qualities of music so much so that it became unrecognizable to the cultures of color subjected to colonization. And the ways we conceive of, perform, listen to and hand down music to generations are warped out of shape and sense. It's more than money, even power. It's the drive to destroy a people's inner/outer worldview. It's the battle of the minds- rather, those with instigated by those without." -From, "Warrior Song" By: Djehuti Wa Kamau