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INFORMATION CONTROL FoR SOCIAL MANIPULATION CONTROL INFORMATION SOCIAL FOR MANIPULATION The news and entertainment we consume, and thus our thoughts and opinions, are shaped not just by the media and entertainment corporations but by governments, their agencies and the military-industrial complex. It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas in disguise. — Joseph Goebbels he United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. We are bom- barded daily with thousands upon thousands of images and sounds designed to get our attention, entertain and inform us of everything from shoes to food to celebritydom to political ideology. It's been estimated that the average American is exposed to more than 3,000 advertisements every day, but on top of that there are the news programs, sitcoms, films, radio and other forms of media that we choose to con- sume. All of this works to shape our opinions of the world, and a great deal of time, effort and money is spent to guide our opinions down particular avenues. This used to be called propaganda. Today, with the negative, Nazi-esque connotation which comes with that word, euphemisms such as misinformation, disinformation, image consulting, political consulting, news consulting, advertising, infomercials, public relations, damage control and the art of spin have taken its place in the English lexicon, all but concealing its true nature and omnipresence. And omnipresent it is. The industries that deal with information control—in both the commercial and governmental sectors—work with hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Uninformed, ignorant masses are far easier to manipulate than educated, thinking masses. We have to ask: Who has the information? How is it being distributed? How is it contextualised? Corporations and governments have spent many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars researching how best to influence the people. Much of this information is kept secret from the public (in the case of corporate research, it is their private property), and what is known has come from the more recent work done by scholars around the world— work that is dramatically underfunded by comparison. So, the information available to the average citizen—including the aforementioned academic scholars—is radically less than that which is available to the producers of media or information campaigns (i.e., advertising agencies, public relations firms, political consultants, etc.). However, an important fact that is known is that the human brain processes different mediums in different ways. Written and spoken words are put through a type of decoding process, wherein the brain deciphers the words and the sentence structure in order to inter- pret properly what it is reading/hearing. In this process, both the conscious and uncon- scious mind go through an internal debate, comparing what it's interpreting with what it already knows to be true. With the image, however, the brain instantly processes it as truth, which means infor- mation presented in a visual format has a much greater impact on the unconscious. Over long periods of time, recurring imagery has a built-up effect on the viewer, which allows for unconsciously conceived notions of truth to manifest as though from nowhere. Naturally, then, whoever has control over the mediums of communication has a tremen- dous amount of power over the populations who consume it. (Note: In no way is this paper intended to convince readers of any particular conspiracy theory but, rather, to present a collection of facts—all of which are readily available to the public—and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.) [The full article with references is available at http://www.nexusmagazine.com. Ed.] by David B. Deserano, MS © 2003 NEXUS = 11 Email: fortytwoent@yahoo.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com