" It is obviously true that most bomber pilots are no better and no worse than other men. The majority of them given a can of petrol and told to pour it over a child of three and ignite it, would probably disobey the order. Yet, put a decent man in an airplane a few hundred feet above a village and he will, without compunction, drop high explosives and napalm and inflict appalling pain and injury on men, women, and children. The distance between him and the people he is bombing makes them into an impersonal target, no longer human beings like himself with whom he can identify." (Anthony Storr: Human Aggression, 1968)
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"What is a mass medium today? A TV program? That, too, surely. But let's try to imagine a not imaginary situation. A firm produces polo shirts with an alligator on them and it advertises them (a traditional phenomenon). A generation begins to wear the polo shirts. Each consumer of the polo shirt advertises, via the alligator on his chest, this brand of polo shirt (just as every owner of a Toyota is an advertiser, unpaid and paying, of the Toyota line and the model he drives). A TV broadcast, to be faithful to reality, shows some young people wearing the alligator polo shirt. The young (and the old) see the TV broadcast and buy more alligator polo shirts because they have "the young look.
"Where is the mass medium? Is it the newspaper advertisement, is it the TV broadcast, is it the polo shirt? Here we have not one but two, three, perhaps more mass media, acting through different channels. The media have multiplied, but some of them act as media of media, or in other words media squared. And at this point who is sending the message? The manufacturer of the polo shirt? its wearer? the person who talks about it on the TV screen? Who is the producer of the ideology? Because it's a question of ideology: You have only to analyze the implications of the phenomenon, what the polo-shirt manufacturer wants to say, and what its wearer wants to say, and the person who talks about it. But according to the channel under consideration, in a certain sense the meaning of the message changes, and perhaps also its ideological weight. There is no longer Authority, all on its own (and how consoling it was!). Shall we perhaps identify with Authority the designer who had the idea of inventing a new polo-shirt design, or the manufacturer (perhaps in the provinces) who decided to sell it, and to sell it on a wide scale, to make money, as is only right, and to avoid having to fire his employees? Or those who legitimately agree to wear it, and to advertise an image of youth and heedlessness, or happiness? Or the TV director, who to characterize a generation has one of his young actors wear the polo shirts? Or the singer, who, to cover his expenses, agrees to sponsor the polo shirt? All are in it, and all are outside it: Power is elusive, and there is no longer any telling where the "plan" comes from, and therefore it cannot be criticized with the traditional criticism of intentions..." (Umberto Eco, "The Multiplication of Media", 01983)
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most of the images in this video come from the "McLuhan's Wake" documentary.
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Spiral of silence, Innis and McLuhan and Medium Theory sa May Tamang Balitaby k4iqey553 views
Thanks
Professoranton 10 months ago
aaah.
Mr5883dk 10 months ago
Pattern recognition.
IllPropaganda 10 months ago