Successive revolutions in technology, coupled with an emergence of new global communities, have created a rapidly evolving communication system of news and media that reflects and influences nearly every aspect of collective society today.

This includes the way we develop and maintain personal relationships, form communities, create and disseminate news, experience culture, and govern ourselves at all levels.

In the second installment of our series, we take a look at how the emergence of globalization and a rapid development of technology in the last decade have allowed news companies to consolidate information to be transmitted on a world scale.

SERIES | Before reading this article, we recommend you become familiar with the first installment in this series, Analysing Mass Media: Fear & Manipulation, where we discuss various basic techniques used by the media to create and influence public opinion.

CREATING A ‘GLOBAL VILLAGE’

In 1960, the concept of a ‘Global Village’ was propagated by Canadian theorist, Marshall Mcluham.

According to Mcluham, the world was beginning to theoretically shrink in the 20th century due to advancements in fields of science and technology, as these mechanisms allowed a ‘simplifying’ or ‘unifying’ of world affairs into ‘one village’ through the use of electronic media.

As discussed in our first piece, the age of information has allowed the average citizen a way to identify techniques developed and continuously used by media outlets all over the world to create and manipulate public opinion in the modern era.

These methods of programming now transcend nations and borders, as a once diverse media landscape has been replaced by a centralized monopoly of information transmitters, simulating a collective representation of reality to the masses.

This was a vision that many, such as Mcluham and others, predicted would become reality as the century progressed, observing the early effects of a world quickly becoming systemized by think-tanks and corporate interests.

Mcluham developed this concept during the ‘Cold War’, which was an important era where a new world of open communication and exchange would begin – known as “globalization” – where sovereign nation-states became more powerless and irrelevant with the development of new mediums of connectivity.

In this complex era, we can observe that individual countries are no longer the sole or dominant player in this context, since transnational transactions (or events) occur on subnational, national, and supranational levels, all driven by advancements in technology.

Mass media, the propaganda wing of government, would also expand in conjunction with the surrounding world, allowing broadcasters to change their tactics from a national to a borderless, unrestricted worldwide setting.

But how was this new era of communication so widely accepted, so quickly? Let’s explore a complex history of group psychology and early experiments in medium delivery.

GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMAN MIND

The 20th century gave rise to a new ‘systemized version of society’ that saw the introduction of concepts such as modern education, the development of central banking systems, and the interconnectivity of nation-states through various contracted trade agreements.

A key notion of this new emerging society was an increasing centralisation of information and perception, and a new found understanding of the human mind. Both concepts were underlined at the time by early group psychology analysis and later mind control studies.

One example, the Asche Experiment, was instrumental in understanding how the individual mind works when put into a group setting.

The study, conducted by Solomon Asche during the 1950s, revealed the degree to which a person’s own opinions are influenced by those of groups. Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.

The study would pin participants, usually 6 or 7, in a series of common knowledge questions. Unbeknownst to one of the participants, the remaining individuals in the room were actors, who would soon all begin to answer incorrectly after a short period of time.

The experiment found over 35% of participants conformed to most of the group’s answers, despite them being incorrect. It also found over 75% of participants answered a wrong question at one point in the experiment.

These studies and observations, dating back to the work of authors such as Gabriel Tarde and Gustave le Bon, would lead modern scholars such as Edward Bernays to gain an understanding of how people received information on a collective basis.

Bernays would highlight the need of information as a tool of mass influence in his famous 1928 work, Propaganda:

“The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”

“Like its wartime prototype, the post-war propaganda drive was an immense success, as it persuaded not just businessmen but journalists and politicians that “the manufacture of consent,” in Walter Lippmann’s famous phrase, was a necessity throughout the public sphere.”

“In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

This emergence of news organisations as a public relations tool was soon realised as a network of (now) multinational corporations, driven by the same entities that had established most of modern society, consolidated their power and reach in this industry, including the systematic takeover of Australian media by Rupert Murdoch and the Fairfax family.

The language of politics soon became the language of news, and a system of fear-driven, digital projections of the world would soon replace the ‘real’ as society had always knew it, allowing public perception to be easily manipulated in the modern world.

Author Jean Baudrillard explored the new power of this medium in his 1972 book, Requiem for the Media:

“It is not as vehicles of content, but in their form and very operation, that media induce a social relation; and this is not an exploitative relation: it involves the abstraction, separation, and abolition of exchange itself. The media are not co-efficients, but effectors of ideology.

Reciprocally, ideology does not exist in some place apart, as the discourse of the dominant class, before it is channeled through the media. Media ideology functions at the level of form, at the level of the separation it establishes.”

“The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication – this is what characterizes them. If one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange), we must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission-reception of a message.

Now, the totality of the existing architecture of the media founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevents response, making all processes of exchange impossible”.

This concept is key in understanding just how the mainstream media operates today. Millions of people are programmed messages on a daily basis, disguised as ‘communication’, when the very essence of communication involves an exchange of messages and responses.

Indeed, as Baudrillard points out, Bernays and others before him had now found a way to deliver tailored messages of propaganda, understanding how the human mind reacts in a group setting, to a mass audience receiving the same messages (disguised as ‘news’) at once.

DIRECT METHODS OF MESSAGING

One prominent method of delivery that emerged shortly after the works of Bernays during an early period of media expansion was the hypodermic needle model, which is a model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.

It is a theory that was widely used in the early days of radio and television, and has seen resurgence in popular mediums with continued development of technology in recent times.

The concept explored the notion that people were assumed to be uniformly controlled by their biologically ‘based instincts’, showing they reacted more or less uniformly to whatever ‘stimuli’ came along at any given time.

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As demonstrated in our first piece in this series, emotional influence can be used as an extremely powerful tool, and people will react if they feel they a situation will affect them directly – even if this isn’t the case.

This concept, coupled with underpinned modes and systems such as agenda-setting theory and availability heuristic, attempt to describe the phenomenon associated with collective reactions to media stimuli.

An early famous incident often cited as an example for the hypodermic needle model was the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, and the subsequent reaction of panic among its America audience at the time.

In this example, according to the official story, broadcaster Orson Welles caused a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds” – in a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.

People reacted to the serious nature, and lack of advertisements during the broadcast, as a sign that this was a legitimate delivery of a particular message. The event was a social experiment by the public to see how people would react to a new method of fear-induced propaganda, in anticipation of the upcoming WWII broadcast.

These theories were first developed and popularized in the 1930s, and study on this topic would path the way for future forms of media that incorporated the “magic bullet of direct influence”, including events such as the Moon Landing, Nazi and war propaganda, and the development of Hollywood.

This technique is now widely used once again in a modern era of media, as new modes of data and information collection have emerged, allowing for directed tailoring of messages and advertisements.

This central theory, formed in part by observations of studies of the human mind, was key in forming the foundation for what we understand as modern media practices, and allowed authors like Bernays to develop systems of delivery to be used in programming the masses.

But where was this drive coming from? And by who?

INFLUENCE BY THE ESTABLISHMENT

Once media and crowd psychology studies were popularized and incorporated into media broadcasting prior to World War II, including the example above, governments across the world begin a tactical effort to structure these techniques as humanity entered the ‘Golden Age’.

One such example of a structured effort at influencing emerging mass media includes Operation Mockingbird, which was a large-scale program ran by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1950s, that attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes.

According to a Rolling Stone magazine article published in 1977, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein wrote:

“By 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw most of the media network, which had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies.”

According to the report, usual operations by the CIA were to place reports, developed from provided intelligence, with cooperating or unwitting reporters.

Those reports would be repeated or cited by the recipient reporters and would then, in turn, be cited throughout the media wire services.

The Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, concluded in their final report on the Watergate Scandal in April 1976, that the CIA has longstanding ties with media networks on a global level:

“The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda.

These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”

This was one of the earliest public examples of direct influence by government institutions in the delivery of public information to the masses, and would set a precedent for other widespread cases.

The premise revealed was this: The press is not an independent entity, as most were led to believe at the time. Government, or more so the powers that established ‘governance’, indeed had widespread control over the flow of information that formed a large perception of society by mass media.

Much of the understanding of human perception was developed by the same entities, or those closely associated to them, as was the case with Bernays and others. This means mass media can only be seen as a tool developed to deliver simulated messages as a result, making it the largest manifested example of human mind control.

War, society, inner-political beliefs, the world around you – everything was dictated by what the television and radio wanted you to believe.

As a new world of ‘peace and prosperity’ emerged after World War II, primarily driven by unelected entities such as the United Nations, the lines between individual nations and media began to blur, as the medium now transcended the ground from which it was developed.

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No longer was their opposition, conflicting propaganda or division in delivery methods. In its place was a centralized, filtered version of the world, leaving no trace of an alternate narrative. Perhaps there was never an ‘alternative’ to begin with; perhaps it was all just a show that ultimately lead directly here.

One things is for certain, and that is most of our perception of the world has been completely manufactured by media and Hollywood from this point forward, especially for young children born during this ‘evolution’, as these methods continued to increase through the advancements of television.

Today, media and government have an interconnecting relationship, setting various agendas for delivery that uphold many of the illusions that modern society was founded up. Coupled with a new field of profit-driven technocrats, the stage had now seemingly become set for a personalised, global method of delivering propaganda.

From the false left-right paradigm, to the blueprint of human history, to society and education – almost everything has been moulded by these phantoms of simulated reality.

TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

A significant number of technological changes have taken place since the first industrialization revolution, including in production, distribution and communication, which have in turn, fueled globalization.

Technology has brought about innovation and interaction between nations that weren’t possible before, and has led to inventions that have revolutionized and launched trade, communication and interaction to heights some thought unimaginable just 50 years ago.

Technology was a key driver in the development and expansion of news delivery, as it allowed conveyed messages to be delivered all across the world during the growth of globalism.

In the beginning, newspapers became written, edited and printed at distance, allowing for the simultaneous editions of the same newspaper to be published from different parts of the world.

Next, the emergence of television systems to increase the prominence that radio mediums had successfully achieved for decades. From one update per day, to two, to five – to now an endless supply of 24/7 news.

Couple this with an ever-increasing catalogue of movies, music and other mediums of direct delivery, a mouldable, collective perception of the world was now achievable thanks to technology, as it allowed humans to experience a greater sense of group identification. A ‘global village’.

Example: “This is one small step for Mankind“. Not America.

Radio became increasingly specialised with thematic and sub-thematic stations, and VCR/DVD/Blu-Ray exploded all over the world becoming in many developing countries a major alternative to the official TV broadcasting.

All of this was necessary to morph the real from the simulated, allowing the simulated to replace the real, as Beaudrillard wrote about.

When was the first time you learned about dinosaurs? The shape of the Earth? The history of your species? The world around you?

Chances are it was through some form of media, whether it be the movies as a child, the news as an adult, or social platforms today. This is instead of drawing your own conclusions based upon unfiltered perceptions.

Today, as we enter what experts are calling the “forth industrial revolution” – the age of social media, streaming and augmented reality – the world is now more connected than ever before.

Instantly. 24 hours of the day. 7 days of the week.

People of the world now mentally live in close proximity with one another, as technology allows them to share their joys and sorrows with one another online, in a digital community of simulated identity.

This intensifies both the easily manipulated instincts of the human mind when in a group setting, now a 24/7 global community, and consolidates more power to those delivering the messages – both discussed above.

It used to be a unique thing to draw on experiences of the world in forming beliefs and perceptions, however now collective ‘experience’ is the same. Manufactured beliefs programmed by a centralized authority.

Author George Orwell spoke on this revelation in various essays:

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

So-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.”

Indeed, structured theories of collective psychology developed by governments for domestic media use have now become the basis for various popular global news platforms who use this connectivity to manipulated the public on a mass scale.

The images of war have replaced the images themselves. And there is no opposition to say otherwise; no individual thought outside of programmed reality. This is what Orwell was speaking about.

We continue to see classical techniques in media psychology at work replicated on a worldwide scale with globalization and technology, as opposed to a locally, community-based personalized approach.

The media that creates an experience of a shared global experience, by informing people around the world about “events” that they can share, mostly not relating directly to their own physical reality.

This Matrix of perception is the ultimate goal of mass media.

Stay tuned for Part III where we analyse the History and Agenda of mass media!