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PART I: Media Intents, Capabilities, Practices and Origins Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. Val What was ultimately learned from all this was that in order to adequately persuade a population to do something, whether to go to war or buy a hamburger, one needed to appeal to them on levels of which they are unconscious. (Chomsky, 1991, pp. 7-10, 17-18; Chomsky & Barsamian, 2000, pp. 151-152; Boihem & Emmanouilides, 1996) — Voltaire BT ne ae cece serene samy San ay 1) The radio, the computer and the Internet are all products of the military. The radio was invented in the mid-1890s and its first 5) It's been noted that "violence is to a dictatorship, what sale was to the British War Office in 1896 during the Boer War, propaganda is to a democracy", and the Nazis used both. Joseph and three years later to the US Navy. During World War I, the Goebbels, appointed Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and United States put all commercial, amateur and military (except for Propaganda on March 14, 1933, combined the press, radio, film, the Army's) radio equipment under the control of the Navy—a theatre and propaganda into a single, large-scale organisation and monopoly pursued immediately after the war, as well. considered the media as "a piano...in the hands of the The first operational electronic computer, Colossus, was built government", on which the government could play. Although as a part of the ULTRA project for the British Department of monotony may set in if all means reported the same information, Communication in the Foreign Office, to assist in the decoding of | he developed a theory that the media should be "uniform in intercepted Nazi transmissions. The first electronic digital com- principles" but "polyform in nuances". This is a concept that has puter, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), carried over to our media today. came out of a relationship between The Moore School of Although we have a tremendous amount of magazines and Electrical Engineering at the newspapers available to us, most of them University of Pennsylvania and the are from "highly centralized outlets Ballistics Research Lab operated by that proffer a remarkably homogenized the Army Ordnance Department at the Fear is a powerful means for fare. News services for dailies Aberdeen Proving Ground in throughout the entire nation are Aberdeen, Maryland. It was "designed establishing social control provided by the Associated Press...the ery te tation of tas | __gver a population, Nw Yo Tn and (te Za Arg tables". and the negative effects of and several foreign wire services like hen grandparent of the Internet was media on its consumers Reuters. The ideological viewpoints of e ARPAnet, which came about in . . these news conduits are pretty much 1969. The Defense Advanced are doing just that... the same, 'marked by a prefabricated Research Projects Agency (DARPA) standardization of news which is of the Department of Defense wished constricting and frightening’." to create a communications infrastruc- (Neale et al., 1992; Reuth, 1993, p. ture for the US military that could sur- 174; Parenti, 1986, pp. 30-31) vive a nuclear attack. "Many of the best attributes of the Internet—including its architecture, technology and gestalt—are 6) Fear is a powerful means for establishing social control over a the children of this military prototype." population, and the negative effects of media on its consumers are (Sussman, 1997, pp. 87, 89, 90; Slater, 1987, pp. 16-17; Stern, doing just that, for it's been widely established for decades that 1981, pp. 1, 15; Reid, 1997, p. xx) regular viewers of violent films and/or television Programming aftan dan Fear is a powerful means for establishing social control es part eee over a population, and the negative effects of media on its consumers 6) Fear is a powerful means for establishing social control over a population, and the negative effects of media on its consumers are doing just that, for it's been widely established for decades that regular viewers of violent films and/or television programming often look upon the world as being much more frightening, dan- gerous and violent than those who view the same media in much less quantity or not at all. The same, by the way, is also true of regular viewers of the evening news. Furthermore, "psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that children in some parts of America are more frightened [about the world] than children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland"; this may very well have to do with the fact that some of the most violent programming on TV are cartoons aimed at very young children. The potential con- sequences of this are staggering. A generation brought up to fear the world may be willing to do unhealthy things in order to pro- tect themselves from things that aren't there, such as a readiness to sacrifice their basic civil liberties for a false sense of security. (Jhally & Dinozzi, 1994; Pipher, 1994) 2) At the outset of World War I in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) had to devise a way to convince the primarily pacifistic American public (still reeling from the effects of the Civil War) to want to send their boys thousands of miles away to fight a war that didn't involve them. President Wilson came up with the Committee of Public Information, also known as the Creel Commission. Made up of cartoonists, writers, editors, publishers and others whose profession was to convey information to the masses (including Edward Bernays, father of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and an important theorist of liberal democracy), within a year they were able to turn the American people into a fervent anti-German population. This exceedingly positive result caught the attention of two groups in particular. One was the intellectual community who saw these new propaganda techniques (and it was openly called propaganda at the time, as there wasn't a negative connotation to that word until the Nazis used many of the same techniques years later) as a general means by which they could control the population on a regular basis. The other group comprised business leaders, who saw a new window to increase their sales by turning the American people into a population of consumers. 13) It's very difficult for a human being to kill a member of their own species; they have to be manipulated to do so. It has been estimated that during World War II, when individual riflemen were left to their own devices only 15-20% of them would fire their weapon at an exposed enemy target. This was blamed primarily upon the training they received in which they would practise shooting at a bull's-eye. Of course, bull's-eyes don't appear on the battlefield, and after the war the military switched 12 + NEXUS are doing just that... www.nexusmagazi ne.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2004