just a Blog in the machine: EOTO Awareness

Introduction

This week's EOTO was different than most. Instead of everyone choosing one example from a broad topic, each group was assigned a different more narrow topic. I was in group 1 and our topic was awareness. I choose to do my presentation on propaganda. My speech is as follows:

Speech

"Hey guys, it's Brad.

Ok, who here, hates this man. If you're not raising your hand right now you're a horrible person. Yes okay everybody in this room hates Hitler, good good. Hitler is the most hated man on the planet, everybody hates Hitler. Buuuuut in the 30's and 40's most Germans loved Hitler. Why? Well it's because Hitler was constantly ensuring everybody thought he was great through his campaign of propaganda.

Propaganda is the spread of information in order to promote a particular belief. So to us, it's very obvious that Hitler was bad. But to the German people at the time, they were brainwashed into believing he was good. Because all of this pro Nazi press was around them everywhere, I mean the Nazis literally had a ministry of propaganda.

And this type of propaganda still exists today. I mean we all know how bad it is to live in North Korea, but everyone there seems to love their glorious leader. So these examples are pretty ridiculous though. All of us here are smart enough to recognize these as propaganda. But this does not mean you are immune to propaganda.

In fact, throughout the course of this presentation I have actually subtly planted propaganda of my own in order to give all of you a biased opinion. That's right, I propagandized you and you didn't even notice. (silent for a second) Okay so I did not do that, I'm not smart enough to know how to propagandize you, BUT for a second there you all believed that I was.

Apple's misleading "super. computer." ad

Ok but seriously lets look at some modern examples of propaganda, because it's not just the government. It's the media for one. Again propaganda is the spread of information in order to promote a particular belief, I don't think news sources like Fox News and CNN are even trying to hide that they do that.

But it's also companies. Again if we're going by this definition then advertising is literally just propaganda. Here's an apple ad, calling the ipad pro a super computer. The ipad pro is not a supercomputer, but it is a computer, and you could describe it as super, so that's how they get away with this blatantly false advertising. Let's look at some other examples.

... So actually I did some research, do any of you all remember during your tour that they said high point has the #1 dorms in the nation. The official HPU website says the dorms are ranked #1 by Niche and the Princeton review, so I did a quick google search and nope! that's just not true! (Princeton Review, Niche)

Okay one more thing to leave you off with. Remember how the Nazi's got everyone in Germany to believe they were great? Yeah well congress saw this, realized how bad it was, and created the Smith Mundt act, which basically said that the U.S. government was not allowed to spread propaganda in our own country, of course we're still allowed to spread U.S. propaganda to other countries but that's beside the point.

65 years later the government's realizes "dang, this anti propaganda law makes it really hard to spread propaganda." So when the NDAA, which is just a yearly bill that just authorizes military programs and activities, it's a bill they sign every year. So before the 2013 one got signed, they just slipped in a little thing that said "oh by the way we're repealing the smith mundt act."

Now it may seem like the government allowing itself to spread propaganda is a bad thing, like when you say it out loud it seems really bad. Buuut it's okay guys don't worry. Because, I looked it up, and the government says it won't use this to spread propaganda, in fact, this website (that is an official website of the government) says it supports this bill because it will allow people across America to hear their "valuable news"! Hooray!"