Trechos de The Attention Merchants (2016), de Tim Wu.
In August 1914, the British had an able, professional fighting force of just eighty thousand regulars - small enough, the late German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had once joked, to be arrested by the German police.
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Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, [Lord] Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the "first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population."
- - -
The very word "propaganda" originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, "It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent."
- - -
Whether the trick was provoking a sense of duty or subtle fears of German invasion or simply presenting the image of the great man himself, the initial August appeal was extraordinarily successful. Within a month, an astonishing 30,000 men a day were signing up at recruitment offices. By October, over 750,000 had joined the British Army, creating, in two months, an infantry larger than America's current active force. Lord Kitchener now had his army.
[...] Like all effective posters, this one proved nearly impossible to ignore.
Also in the fall, the authorities began to conduct what they called "aggressive open-air propaganda" in the form of massive parades and rallies. One staged in the fall of 1914 in Brighton was perhaps typical. There, the military paraded through the seaside town, with horses dragging giant artillery guns through the streets, and the band whipping up the crowd with martial tunes. The ensuing rally culminated in a stirring speech by Rudyard Kipling, who, deploying rhetoric for its original ancient purpose, played upon deep-seated fears of German domination.
- - -
Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized "cine-motor vans," which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country - the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat. In 1918, on the fourth anniversary of the war, the government would distribute a special, sealed message from the prime minister to be read aloud at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means - at a time when "broadcast" still referred to a crop sowing technique - the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.
Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government's effort so much as its massive scale and organization.15 In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time - movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort - a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls - this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.
Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener's recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener's campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, "The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world."
- - -
The very first country to try out the British propaganda techniques was not one synonymous with mind control, but rather the Land of the Free, which, in 1917, would abandon its neutrality to enter the war. Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.
- - -
Following the British example, [George] Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation's attention. For this, a flood of government communication was necessary, for he understood that "to conduct as well as accommodate this torrent he needed to command every possible sluice, the broader the better." Toward this end there was "no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board - all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms."
Within a year of its founding, Creel's committee had twenty domestic subdivisions, and reported staff of 150,000; it may have been the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history. It did more of everything, faster, channeling the age's spirit of mass production. The committee produced more posters, speeches, pamphlets, press releases than any other entity. [...] In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel's approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.
- - -
Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring "I want YOU for the U.S. Army," for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre.
- - -
Some 700,000 Americans volunteered for the armed forces, even though, unlike the British, the American army, from nearly the beginning, relied on conscription.
- - -
The outlandish success of the British and American propaganda campaigns left their mark on the rest of the century, setting a new standard for what was possible in manipulating the public to adopt a strong viewpoint about a matter where opinion had been divided before. The effect on those who lived through it seemed to depend very much on something deep within one's character. Some who found the experience alarming determined never to let such a thing happen again. Others found the wild success of British and American propagandizing nothing less than inspiring.
Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic.
What Lippmann took from the war - as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion - was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it - the rough "stereotypes" (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured." Hence, as he wrote, "It is no longer possible... to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify."
- - -
That "public opinion" had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy's dependence on it.
Lippmann's orientation was shared by prominent progressives in the American judiciary, who, witnessing the rough treatment of dissenters like [Eugene] Debs, began to think twice about what had been done in the name of progressivism.
- - -
[...] Vienna-born Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Residing in the United States, and just twenty-four at the start of the war, he was making his living as a journalist turned press agent. To create publicity for his clients, Bernays was already employing his uncle's idea of a human nature driven by unconscious desires. During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy. But unlike Lippmann, Bernays drew from the experience a belief in the necessity of enlightened manipulation. Otherwise, he wrote, the public "could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above." As he saw it, "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
But Bernays's real passion was for manipulation on behalf of business interests. As he later recalled, "I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace." He would devote the rest of his influential career as the self-described "father of public relations" to the use of propaganda techniques on behalf of commercial clients. In his words, the wartime triumph had "opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind."
- - -
With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays's enthusiasm.
- - -
Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as "marvelous," praising its simple presentation of "negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood," thereby allowing "no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt." The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better.
Mais:
http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/pressjournalism
http://geschichtspuls.de/art1336-erster-weltkrieg-der-kriegsbeginn-in-der-presse-1
http://www.cndp.fr/fileadmin/La_Presse_pendant_la_guerre_de_1914_1918.pdf
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31086/31086-h/31086-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3317/3317-h/3317-h.htm
- - -
Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, [Lord] Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the "first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population."
- - -
The very word "propaganda" originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, "It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent."
- - -
Whether the trick was provoking a sense of duty or subtle fears of German invasion or simply presenting the image of the great man himself, the initial August appeal was extraordinarily successful. Within a month, an astonishing 30,000 men a day were signing up at recruitment offices. By October, over 750,000 had joined the British Army, creating, in two months, an infantry larger than America's current active force. Lord Kitchener now had his army.
[...] Like all effective posters, this one proved nearly impossible to ignore.
Also in the fall, the authorities began to conduct what they called "aggressive open-air propaganda" in the form of massive parades and rallies. One staged in the fall of 1914 in Brighton was perhaps typical. There, the military paraded through the seaside town, with horses dragging giant artillery guns through the streets, and the band whipping up the crowd with martial tunes. The ensuing rally culminated in a stirring speech by Rudyard Kipling, who, deploying rhetoric for its original ancient purpose, played upon deep-seated fears of German domination.
- - -
Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized "cine-motor vans," which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country - the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat. In 1918, on the fourth anniversary of the war, the government would distribute a special, sealed message from the prime minister to be read aloud at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means - at a time when "broadcast" still referred to a crop sowing technique - the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.
Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government's effort so much as its massive scale and organization.15 In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time - movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort - a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls - this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.
Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener's recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener's campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, "The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world."
- - -
The very first country to try out the British propaganda techniques was not one synonymous with mind control, but rather the Land of the Free, which, in 1917, would abandon its neutrality to enter the war. Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.
- - -
Following the British example, [George] Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation's attention. For this, a flood of government communication was necessary, for he understood that "to conduct as well as accommodate this torrent he needed to command every possible sluice, the broader the better." Toward this end there was "no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board - all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms."
Within a year of its founding, Creel's committee had twenty domestic subdivisions, and reported staff of 150,000; it may have been the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history. It did more of everything, faster, channeling the age's spirit of mass production. The committee produced more posters, speeches, pamphlets, press releases than any other entity. [...] In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel's approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.
- - -
Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring "I want YOU for the U.S. Army," for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre.
- - -
Some 700,000 Americans volunteered for the armed forces, even though, unlike the British, the American army, from nearly the beginning, relied on conscription.
- - -
The outlandish success of the British and American propaganda campaigns left their mark on the rest of the century, setting a new standard for what was possible in manipulating the public to adopt a strong viewpoint about a matter where opinion had been divided before. The effect on those who lived through it seemed to depend very much on something deep within one's character. Some who found the experience alarming determined never to let such a thing happen again. Others found the wild success of British and American propagandizing nothing less than inspiring.
Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic.
What Lippmann took from the war - as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion - was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it - the rough "stereotypes" (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured." Hence, as he wrote, "It is no longer possible... to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify."
- - -
That "public opinion" had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy's dependence on it.
Lippmann's orientation was shared by prominent progressives in the American judiciary, who, witnessing the rough treatment of dissenters like [Eugene] Debs, began to think twice about what had been done in the name of progressivism.
- - -
[...] Vienna-born Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Residing in the United States, and just twenty-four at the start of the war, he was making his living as a journalist turned press agent. To create publicity for his clients, Bernays was already employing his uncle's idea of a human nature driven by unconscious desires. During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy. But unlike Lippmann, Bernays drew from the experience a belief in the necessity of enlightened manipulation. Otherwise, he wrote, the public "could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above." As he saw it, "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
But Bernays's real passion was for manipulation on behalf of business interests. As he later recalled, "I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace." He would devote the rest of his influential career as the self-described "father of public relations" to the use of propaganda techniques on behalf of commercial clients. In his words, the wartime triumph had "opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind."
- - -
With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays's enthusiasm.
- - -
Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as "marvelous," praising its simple presentation of "negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood," thereby allowing "no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt." The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better.
Mais:
http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/pressjournalism
http://geschichtspuls.de/art1336-erster-weltkrieg-der-kriegsbeginn-in-der-presse-1
http://www.cndp.fr/fileadmin/La_Presse_pendant_la_guerre_de_1914_1918.pdf
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31086/31086-h/31086-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3317/3317-h/3317-h.htm
