From WIKIPEDIA – Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German scholar who also became known as a diarist. His journals, published in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic. Well known works include Lingua Tertii Imperii, … [Read more…]
Charles H. Loeb defied the American military’s denials and propaganda to show how deadly radiation from the strike on Hiroshima sickened and killed. In the New York Times today is an account of the work of Charles Loeb, an American war correspondent in the Pacific in World War II.
The Guardian published the contents of a speech by Cohen: In a speech last night at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Facebook and other social media platforms for enabling the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation. The speech was striking in its sincerity – Baron Cohen appeared as … [Read more…]
In the New York Review of Books, this essay Real Americans by Joseph O’Neill is noteworthy. O’Neill reviews two books, This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta. O’Neill delivers a fine essay covering many points of the current state in … [Read more…]
View From the Valley Telecom Internet Tech Leaders Dismayed by Weaponization of Social MediaBy Tekla S. Perry Posted 14 Nov 2017 | 15:00 GMT IEEE SPECTRUM The tech industry can’t hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized. That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in … [Read more…]
From the Guardian – Wednesday 15 November 2017 The inventor of the world wide web remains an optimist but sees a ‘nasty wind’ blowing amid concerns over advertising, net neutrality and fake news Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a “nasty storm” of … [Read more…]
Jill Lapore hits the nail on the head in her comment in the June 5, 2017 New Yorker “The Strategy of Truth.” Trump and Ailes
Today, it is apparent that advertising’s roots in propaganda are resurfacing, we can now add the term analytics under the propaganda heading. These new and highly devious suites of techniques are becoming key to swaying hundreds of millions of people who use social media and who are unprotected from targeted advertising during their internet sessions. Persuasion is part and … [Read more…]
I’ve loaded excerpts from John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, Jacques Ellul’s “The Technological Society” and Gary Panter’s very original “Rozztox Manifesto” to stimulate some thinking about advertising and its effects on modern culture. The use of the techniques of propaganda to sell products, ideas, and ways of life, we’ve allowed ourselves to be manipulated by … [Read more…]