3/?/09 the new snakeoil

3/?/09

As I watched the feud unfold between John Stewart and Jim Cramer it was interesting to hear the Daily Show host use a word that we have discussed at length in class. “We are both snake oil salesman, the only difference is people know what im selling” John said. Poor Jim Cramer sat there throughout the whole interview looking like he was going to cry. I think that Jon Stewart is one of the great minds of out times, and like I have said in class before, comedians are really the true documentors of history. For all network news claims of being “truthful” and “unbiased”, comedians are the ones who don’t apologize for their opinions, and their audiences are testaments to the psyche and opinion of the public. It was interesting to think about the concept that snake-oil has transcended the material scam to become synonymous with a scam that is perpetrated by people in the public sphere. The new snake-oil salesmen are the Bill O’rielys and Jim Cramers and Jon Stewarts. This means that their audience is much more massive than the original door-to-door snake oil salesman, but for some reason their accountability has not caught up yet.

4/2/09 creating propaganda

4/2/09

I was surprised how hard it is to creat a piece of propaganda. I guess it is one of those things that seems so effortless when it is done by people who really know what they’re doing. I kept trying to think about the techniques we learned in class and apply them, but my idea (showing the subjectivity of the word patriot by pasting the head of a “terrorist” onto the body of a colonial militiaman) didn’t exactly lend itself to the dangling comparative or superlative swindle. I think that propaganda is more easily applied to simple issues. Or maybe propaganda just simplifies issues, deduces them to easily conceivable ideas, which in a way is an injustice in itself. 

4/13/09 group collaboration project

4/13/09

For our group collaboration project, me and my group were going to film a kind of commercial. We were going to go to a Starbucks and film one of the group members trying to order a coffee but getting confused by the inexplicably foreign named sizes, then have the same person go to Fennario, a locally owned coffee and tobacco shop that exclusively sells fairly traded coffee and show the difference in atmosphere as well as understandability of the menu. Well we didn’t even get to film in starbucks, because apparently you cant film in a corporate store. The “barista” suggested that we film in Sprazzo, a coffee place across the street that has had a “closed for business” sign on the door for the past two years. “I think you already put them out of business” I said. They looked at me with blank stares and as we were leaving I kind of felt guilty. Corporations are so ingrained in out culture and so widespread that you cant really blame individual employees. Its not like they are physically going to peru or Colombia or wherever and enslaving the people that live there. It’s just a shame that more people don’t know what is really going on. 

Dr. Seuss

Stumbleupon is this great website where basically you hit a button and it finds really cool websites based on what you like and dislike. I typed in the keyword propoganda the other day and what came up were some vintage propaganda cartoons from world war I. Some of the illustrations looked really familiar and i realized that i had seen really similar cartoons before. Thats when i realized that they were done by Theodor Seuss Giesel a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. I think it is pretty interesting that a man who was once responsible for propogating stereotypes about other countries to further a war agenda is the most well known childrens author in America. I think it is also interesting that the people who were enticed by the cartoon propaganda were being enticed by a guy who wrote childrens books where the main character was a cat that wore a top hat. Also, that Dr. Seuss's later work, like that Butter Battle Book one, denounced war.

Chapter 4

Something struck me while reading the beginning part of chapter four about the UFO cult. Actually it was one word: Proselytizing. I had never seen the word and i looked it up. Basically it is the practice of conversion, or trying to convert people to an ideology. The more i thought about it, it occurred to me that almost all fundmental ideological movements share this one commonality. From evangelical christians to fundamentalist muslims to UFO cults, it seems that prosyletizing is being utilized as a form of propoganda. Not only does it promote the image of the group to those outside ("Look at all these people joinin! They cant all be wrong!"), but it also goes a long way in keeping the already converted steadfast in their beleifs. There must be some sort of rationalizing effect in being able to bring a new person in to an group with such preposterous beleifs. I can imagine it also goes a long way in reinforcing the notion that the person doing the converting is "on the right track" or "spreading the good word". But then again there must be a certain type of person that is more apt to proselytize as well as a certain type of person that wants to per proselytized.

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 1-3

It seems that there is an underlying theme about all of the deception strategies listed in chapers 1 through 3 of Unspun: all of these techniques work because the general public is basically incompetent and incapable of coming to their own conclusions. Whether this is true or not is arguable, but in a way, irrelevant. What matters more is how we came to be this way. We were once a race of people who evolved from neanderthals to create vast empires and complex schools of thought, and now, now we buy snake oil because we beleive it will cure aging. It seems that there is a massive campaign of distraction underway to dumb down society and make them into mindless consumers. I dont want to come off as some conspiracy theorist, but we did not do this too ourselves. There has to be an agenda being perpetrated by someone somewhere to make us this submissive mass that eats whatever is fed to us.