EPISODE · Mar 24, 2015
We Are Being Programmed (Part 3): The Lab
from Mic Check Radio · host Occupy the Media Collective
We are all affected by it...call it advertising, propaganda, programming, social engineering, psychological operations, or whatever other term could be applied. The act of a force outside of your mind trying to convince you to do something. In the third episode we play a couple of clips of commercial radio from the 1940's, then we enter 'The Lab'. Once sound film is perfected (more or less), Hollywood productions are now the great laboratory of for propagandists experimentation. Any good propagandist would look at the sheer numbers, up to 90 million moviegoers each week, and start drooling at the possibilities. One homogenized audio/video message seen in just one week by 90 million people?! This had never been an option in all of human history before motion pictures with sound were invented. Brave new world. American politics took notice of the potential for reaching so many people with one homogenized message and took action. Those white men in power in Washington D.C. started hanging out with those other white men in power in Hollywood...a lot. This is the moment when American politics had to first, and evermore, deal with what they will look like to the public. People in politics/industry quickly figured out how to sell the image needed to get citizens/consumers to choose their product. Oh, and then WWII started and the Golden Age of Propaganda was about to begin. [Click to Listen]
What this episode covers
We are all affected by it...call it advertising, propaganda, programming, social engineering, psychological operations, or whatever other term could be applied. The act of a force outside of your mind trying to convince you to do something. In the third episode we play a couple of clips of commercial radio from the 1940's, then we enter 'The Lab'. Once sound film is perfected (more or less), Hollywood productions are now the great laboratory of for propagandists experimentation. Any good propagandist would look at the sheer numbers, up to 90 million moviegoers each week, and start drooling at the possibilities. One homogenized audio/video message seen in just one week by 90 million people?! This had never been an option in all of human history before motion pictures with sound were invented. Brave new world. American politics took notice of the potential for reaching so many people with one homogenized message and took action. Those white men in power in Washington D.C. started hanging out with those other white men in power in Hollywood...a lot. This is the moment when American politics had to first, and evermore, deal with what they will look like to the public. People in politics/industry quickly figured out how to sell the image needed to get citizens/consumers to choose their product. Oh, and then WWII started and the Golden Age of Propaganda was about to begin. [Click to Listen]
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We Are Being Programmed (Part 3): The Lab
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