A different approach on brainwashing...

[Carpathian]

http://dieoff.org/page24.htm

Please read the above linked article; its extremly interesting and i hope we can have a discussion about it here.

When i was younger i thought that brainwashing was done in a “hocus-pocus” way… through stuff like hypnosis and other misterious ways.

I haven’t watched TV in 4 years now… I did take some time to watch the World Cup last month but appart from the comercials shown at half-time i haven’t seen any comercials in about 4 years.

I also didn’t use/need/want a mobile phone until recently… and in the past 4 years i feel i was never influenced into buying a product or holding a political view.
However i can see TV induced behaviour all around me.
For example many TV comercials here about a type of beer were presenting a sign to do with your hands when you want another beer (their product) in a bar.
The thing is still considered as “cool” and i see people showing the sign in bars aswell.

Then the stuff about women in the article i think everyone here agrees that it is 100% true.
Women are sexually oppresed and manipulated to think that they’re ugly and other women are beautiful; so they must spend a shitload of money to money “the product”.

This i’ve experienced myself; a long time ago when i was about 12~13.
There was some comercial on TV about some type of special backpacks and it showed “cool kids” wearing the backpacks having loads of fun and being admired and the kids who didn’t have a “cool backpack” were sad and lonely.

I immediatly asked for such a backpack and my mother bought me one.
Still… the “coolness” didn’t catch on as i’m so interested in philosophy…

Now before you go on and claim that article is bogus… take some time and rationaly think of the things it says and what you know from your own observations.

[someoneisatthedoor]

Carpathian,

Just out of interest, why did you bring this up here? This is essentially a social sciences article and set of debates. I’m not complaining, just wondering.

@Carpathian

http://dieoff.org/page24.htm

Please read the above linked article; its extremly interesting and i hope we can have a discussion about it here.

You see - this is how to try to engender a discussion - a link, a request, an offering of opinion. While I’m about to (predictably) disagree with everything Carpathian is saying, at least he knows how to inspire argument.

When i was younger i thought that brainwashing was done in a “hocus-pocus” way… through stuff like hypnosis and other misterious ways.

I didn’t know that there was a rigorous and/or scientific notion of ‘brainwashing’. I don’t think that there is. Or ever has been.

I haven’t watched TV in 4 years now…

Which would make you completely unqualified to talk about it

I did take some time to watch the World Cup last month but appart from the comercials shown at half-time i haven’t seen any comercials in about 4 years.

Which would make you completely unqualified to talk about commercials.

I also didn’t use/need/want a mobile phone until recently… and in the past 4 years i feel i was never influenced into buying a product or holding a political view.

Perhaps not by TV adverts, but the influence is there in many other things. Notice that there are no adverts for books on the TV, yet there are millions of adverts (called ‘reviews’, but they are adverts) throughout the pages of magazines and newspapers. Do you not experience any mainstream media of any kind? If so, then I’d applaud your discipline, but wonder why you were going to such extremes. I consume loads of mass media, more than almost anyone else that I know, yet I don’t buy brand-name products as much as most people who consume less mass media.

However i can see TV induced behaviour all around me.

In the work of Andy Warhol, for example…

For example many TV comercials here about a type of beer were presenting a sign to do with your hands when you want another beer (their product) in a bar.
The thing is still considered as “cool” and i see people showing the sign in bars aswell.

So? Is this so bad - an advert inventing a relatively new communicative gesture? I would have thought that you’d applaud this evolution of language…

Then the stuff about women in the article i think everyone here agrees that it is 100% true.

It’s tosh, for a lot of women. Women are encouraged to feel inadequate (as are men, but there isn’t a huge industry to bang on about that) by adverts in order that the product presents itself as a temporary alleviation of the symptom of feeling inadequate. But women aren’t just idiotic slaves. Some are, as are some men. Plenty do not cow to the advertiser’s call…

Women are sexually oppresed and manipulated to think that they’re ugly and other women are beautiful; so they must spend a shitload of money to money “the product”.

From my knowledge (both biblical and observed) of women, they aren’t sexually oppressed. Some may be sexually repressed, but that’s a very different thing.

This i’ve experienced myself; a long time ago when i was about 12~13.
There was some comercial on TV about some type of special backpacks and it showed “cool kids” wearing the backpacks having loads of fun and being admired and the kids who didn’t have a “cool backpack” were sad and lonely.

I immediatly asked for such a backpack and my mother bought me one.
Still… the “coolness” didn’t catch on

That’s because your desire for the object was cheap, as was the process you had to go through to get it (ask - wait a bit - receive). Hence the satisfaction derived from it was also cheap.

as i’m so interested in philosophy…

Philosophy can be just as cheap. Look at this place - all this philosophy, for free…
(not strictly free if you consider all the time and effort the posters, staff, admin and so on put into this place).

Now before you go on and claim that article is bogus… take some time and rationaly

Sorry, you’ve lost me again. What was that last word?

think of the things it says and what you know from your own observations.

Okay, I will.

@the article

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. . . . In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
—George Orwell, 1984

I’m a big fan of Orwell, but he wouldn’t have endorsed this article, so putting a citation from him at the top is just arrogant.

"The fact that TV is a source not actively or critically attended to was made dramatically evident in the late 1960s by an experiment that rocked the world of political and product advertising and forever changed the ways in which the television medium would be used. The results of the experiment still reverberate through the industry long after its somewhat primitive methods have been perfected.

I beg to bloody differ - I watch TV in an extremely active and critical manner, just like I read a book, a magazine, a piece of art, a play, a movie…

Indeed, the presence of museums devoted to TV (I’ve been to national media museums in two countries, and I’m aware of others) prove, not just demonstrate, but prove that it is not only possible to view TV critically, but that we’ve institutionalised the practices of doing so. So, the whole hypothesis of the article is refuted.

"In November 1969, a researcher named Herbert Krugman, who later became manager of public-opinion research at General Electric headquarters in Connecticut,

Because it’s not like any bastard liars ever became high-ranking members of General Electric, oh no…

decided to try to discover what goes on physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He elicited the co-operation of a twenty-two-year-old secretary

i.e. a dumb broad who was paid to sit still, keep her mouth shut and be stupid so that he could ‘prove’ his hypothesis (for one person, in limited circumstances).

and taped a single electrode to the back of her head. The wire from this electrode connected to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer.

None of which is relevant, and is only included to make the article sound authoritative. Funny, Carpathian, for someone so sensitive to being manipulated by mass media you’ve got little ability to see how an article is ‘brainwashing’ you.

"Flicking on the TV, Krugman began monitoring the brain-waves of the subject What he found through repeated trials was that within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness.

Better known as ‘the imagination’. Yeah, TV’s awful, it makes you use your imagination to daydream and thereby entertain yourself. Awful contraption, throw it out of the window and sit down like a good like Christian, I mean, bourgeois student, and read a centre-left mainstream newspaper.

Note that no mention is made of showing the subject different sorts of TV shows. Only someone who is trying to prove one conclusion regarding all TV, regardless of quality, would have such a blase attitude and make such blanket judgements. This isn’t reasonable, nor is it remotely scientific.

I say that the moderators should remove this thread from the Natural Sciences forum, for the ‘science’ mentioned is clearly pseudoscience done by malicious propagandists. I’m sure Carpathian will agree.

When Krugman’s subject turned to reading through a magazine, beta waves reappeared, indicating that conscious and alert attentiveness had replaced the daydreaming state.

The only distinction made is between watching TV and reading a magazine. This is such a poor method of testing the purported conclusion, and is typical of much of what I’ve read about neuroscience. This ‘experiment’ proves absolutely nothing.

"What surprised Krugman, who had set out to test some McLuhanesque hypotheses about the nature of TV-viewing, was how rapidly the alpha-state emerged. Further research revealed that the brain’s left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person is watching TV. This tuning-out allows the right hemisphere of the brain, which processes information emotionally and noncritically, to function unimpeded.

This is just bullshit. The whole left-brain, right-brain thing has been shown to be a myth (as you’d expect of any such simplistic division of the mind).

‘It appears,’ wrote Krugman in a report of his findings, ‘that the mode of response to television is more or less constant and very different from the response to print. That is, the basic electrical response of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to content difference… [Television is] a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.’

All communications media transmit huge quantities of information that is not consciously thought through at the time. Again, this is irrelevant and shoddy.

“Soon, dozens of agencies were engaged in their own research into the television-brain phenomenon and its implications. The findings led to a complete overhaul in the theories, techniques, and practices that had structured the advertising industry and, to an extent, the entire television industry. The key phrase in Krugman’s findings was that TV transmits ‘information not thought about at the time of exposure.’” [p.p. 69-70]

Wow, advertisers took until the 1970s to realise that they could use the subconscious to influence customers? I’ve been led to believe that it was some decades earlier than that…

"As Herbert Krugman noted in the research that transformed the industry, we do not consciously or rationally attend to the material resonating with our unconscious depths at the time of transmission. Later, however, when we encounter a store display, or a real-life situation like one in an ad, or a name on a ballot that conjures up our television experience of the candidate, a wealth of associations is triggered. Schwartz explains: ‘The function of a display in the store is to recall the consumer’s experience of the product in the commercial… You don’t ask for a product: The product asks for you! That is, a person’s recall of a commercial is evoked by the product itself, visible on a shelf or island display, interacting with the stored data in his brain.’ Just as in Julian Jaynes’s ancient cultures, where the internally heard speech of the gods was prompted by props like the corpse of a chieftain or a statue, so, too, our internalized media echoes are triggered by products, props, or situations in the environment.

Wow, like, ground-breaking stuff. But no testing of why some people don’t do this…

“As real-life experience is increasingly replaced by the mediated ‘experience’ of television-viewing, it becomes easy for politicians and market-researchers of all sorts to rely on a base of mediated mass experience that can be evoked by appropriate triggers. The TV ‘world’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them to be their own personal volition arising out of their own desires and needs. In such a situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future, the past, and the present.” [p. 82, Joyce Nelson, THE PERFICT MACHINE; New Society Pub., 1992, 800-253-3605; ISBN 0-86571-235-2 ]

1. all communications are ‘mediated’
2. all communications are self-fulfilling prophecies in the manner described
3. not all TV is bunk

"Women are carefully trained by media to view themselves as inadequate. They are taught that other women—through the purchases of clothes, cosmetics, food, vocations, avocations, education, etc.—are more desirable and feminine than themselves. Her need to constantly reverify her sexual adequacy though the purchase of merchandise becomes an overwhelming preoccupation, profitable for the merchandisers, but potentially disastrous for the individual.

Again, the fact of no attention being paid to why some women don’t behave like this makes the whole thing ludicrous.

Like I said, this is psuedoscience, and has no place in this forum…

[Carpathian]

-_-; i’ll read everything tomorrow~ got stuff to do right now.

[theonefroberg]

I read part of SIATD’s pwnage of the OP and the article. I enjoyed what I read.

I’m not sure I believe that article is entirely factual. I’m dubious of random links people post on blogs and discussion forums.

I am by no means a consumer whore. I admit I do buy brand-name things occasionally, but do not spend massive amounts of money on anything (I’m 17, I don’t HAVE massive amounts of $$$). I feel no compulsion to go out and spend my pitence on uncessesary products either; I like buying food and that’s it. My only motivation to purchase that comes from my stomach.

But I do notice TV has an effect on me. I go to a boarding school 5 days a week during the school year, and when I’m there, I never watch more than 10 minutes of TV a week. I notice I’m highly motivated when I’m at school, and I can focus very clearly and think and write well. But when I’m home on the weekends, I watch TV. And it’s impossible for me to focus on anything, or think coherently after a few minutes in front of the tube. It has a profound distracting effect on me. So I don’t know, I calling the TVs “Idiot Boxes” isn’t entirely groundless. It sure makes me an idiot…

[Carpathian]

I’m not sure I believe that article is entirely factual. I’m dubious of random links people post on blogs and discussion forums.

So am i… trust me… SO AM I … But this article made sense; thats why i posted it here.

So I don’t know, I calling the TVs “Idiot Boxes” isn’t entirely groundless. It sure makes me an idiot…

=D>

[theonefroberg]

So I don’t know, I calling the TVs “Idiot Boxes” isn’t entirely groundless. It sure makes me an idiot…

See what TV’s done to me? It’s made me forget how to type right. I ain’t speakin’ no proper english 'cause I done watched too much TV.

[someoneisatthedoor]

@theonefroberg

I read part of SIATD’s pwnage of the OP and the article. I enjoyed what I read.

Thanks.

I’m not sure I believe that article is entirely factual. I’m dubious of random links people post on blogs and discussion forums.

No less reliable than those in books…

I am by no means a consumer whore. I admit I do buy brand-name things occasionally, but do not spend massive amounts of money on anything (I’m 17, I don’t HAVE massive amounts of $$$). I feel no compulsion to go out and spend my pitence on uncessesary products either; I like buying food and that’s it. My only motivation to purchase that comes from my stomach.

Sure, but you don’t engage with mass media very much, so your ‘data’ fits in with the theory. The big question that such theorists cannot answer is how a person like me exists, someone who owns no brand-name clothing, eats predominantly local, inexpensive produce, doesn’t spend much money on things he doesn’t need but spends loads of time watching TV, reading magazines, online articles and so on and is therefore ‘exposed’ to mass media continually.

But I do notice TV has an effect on me. I go to a boarding school 5 days a week during the school year, and when I’m there, I never watch more than 10 minutes of TV a week. I notice I’m highly motivated when I’m at school, and I can focus very clearly and think and write well. But when I’m home on the weekends, I watch TV. And it’s impossible for me to focus on anything, or think coherently after a few minutes in front of the tube.

1. That’s probably because you aren’t used to it.
2. It depends on what you watch - completely overlooked by the article and the ‘scientific’ experiment that proves absolutely nothing

It has a profound distracting effect on me. So I don’t know, I calling the TVs “Idiot Boxes” isn’t entirely groundless. It sure makes me an idiot…

Some people who watch TV are also idiots - which came first, the TV or the Idiot? We’ve had idiots (even village idiots) for centuries. We’ve had TVs for about a century. I think that this proves my point about it depending from person to person and from show to show as to how ‘brainwashing’ a TV set is.

[Kriswest]

Parents start off brainwashing their little darlings, then teachers and sitters and politics,religion and friends and etc… it is only brainwashing if you actually do nothing but, consume according to what you see or hear.

while adverts lie unashamedly it is also just information. saying “Look this is what we are selling, we think it is the best” Unless someone ties your head in one position and forces you to be a potato and absorb repeated crap til you believe it, it is your choice. Folks are sheep, sheep get led or herded. but ,still they can run if they choose.

TV and people have been at war for a long time and people will continue to be gullible and naive. But if you actually have a brain and know how to use it. you have nothing to worry about.

[Gaiaguerrilla]

I think siatd’s response to Carpathian was a little brutal. Certainly allowed, just brutal.

I’m somewheres in between. I get a little worried of parents that shun their children and everyone their children contacts from watching TV. Or the same attitude for internet, heck how about Tamagotchis.

On one hand: Damn it, people are going to see what they want, and I get especially bothered when I see signs on top a tv saying “does Jesus approve of what you’re watching?” Let them watch it.

On the other hand: It’s not exactly a contraption of liberty and free will. Admit it, article or not, TV is a powerful element for brainwashing people.

Overall, technology is taking care of this problem so we don’t need to. People are drawn more to interactive things, get tired of anything repetitive, get picky, and companies are responding. Sure they want to make emotional coercion, and at the same time they can’t keep up with the demand for a new cool. It’s not just nickels and dimes in the special effects. You can’t carry a remote control in your hand for hundreds of channels, and at the same time fairly claim that you’re being controlled by the box that obeys it.

There is deliberate brainwashing going on. Some more grand (sway political opinion) some more trivial (sell soap). Either way, if we protect laws like the first amendment, we will not need to worry. Allow us to watch/read/say what we want. We’re not that mentally fragile, given broad enough access. You can always run to a friend or therapist and ask if you’re being brainwashed.

I believe the masses benefit from casual organizations motivated to control the masses- the same way that boxers learn to fight by sparring with an adversary.