THE EVOLUTION OF MASS MEDIA: A SURVEY OF MEDIA FROM THE 20 TH CENTURY TO TODAY

1. “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ~ Thomas Jefferson THE EVOLUTION OF MASS MEDIA: A SURVEY OF MEDIA FROM THE 20TH CENTURY TO TODAY Jordan Ansell, Campbell Stevenson, Nick Aubin The Use of Mass Media as Propaganda Protestant Reformation and the Printing Press Hitler’s Success Built on Propaganda Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. --Richard Alan Nelson World War II: Morale Boosting/Draining Propaganda Insurgent Graffiti Propaganda in Iraq From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: A Case Study on the Transformation of Mass Media The Death of the Newspaper Communication, Technology, & Society Vs. • The Medium Is The Message • The written word: from printing to the internet • Interpersonal communication redefined • Imagined Community • New resources with which to define, refine, • and communicate with individual sense of ‘self’ • Boundary of Transmission bear little relationship • to the geographical territory of any given nation state • Internet techno-culture promises to reproduce elements of all • other media / communication techno-cultures which have preceded it In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? • Essential Questions • How did mass media affect the public after these events? • How did the technology of the day influence the ways in which these atrocities were presented to the American public, and the world? • In what ways did the differences in technologies affect the way in which the public received and dealt with the news? • How has the speed of information changed our perceptions of these events? • How did the government use mass media after these attacks? • Technologies of transmission have taken a position of immense power and influence. • Media now gets credit for shaping not only the information we distribute and consume, • but our powers of perception, our political, social, and economic systems, • and our general constructions of truth. “The internet itself has become a box office front-row seats to a rebellion”