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interesting chronical of the transition of public relations
PR! A social history of spin is written by Stuart Ewen and gives an in-depth insight into the transition of public relations within the corporate business world. It starts off with an interview with famous public relations founder, Edward Bernays. Ewen is a talented writer, he is easy to read and also personal in his tone which appeals to the reader. The interview with Bernays grabs the readers’ attention as it gives a reflection of one of the most acknowledged men in public relations history. It describes the man’s attitude to the field of public relations perfectly; “public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself” and gives the reader a chance to learn first hand opinions from such an authority within public relations.
Stuart Ewen incorporates both past and present in this book, as he describes his own efforts of doing public relations by creating a stunt in a school to engineer a journalist’s opinion who was writing an article on that particular lesson. This chapter again highlights the personal tone he is reflecting to the reader, as it gives an insight into his own view of PR, as well as the founding public relations leaders’ opinions of it within the rest of the book.
PR is generally associated with the corporate world within Ewen’s writing, from the muckraking journalists highlighting the corruption of the businesses, to the latter businesses changing their image to appeal to that of the ‘middle- class’ opinionated public of America. He focuses on the transition from the 1920’s and the influence of Bernays, to the more industrial and corporate 20th century where big businesses were expanding. He highlights their need to mould opinion of the public sphere and increase their profits and image using public relations. Ewen also gives an informative reflection of how public relations aid conflicting political views and the role it has on a democratic society. He covers all the social aspects of PR and tells the story of how it has become a lucrative career within political and corporate life today.
Ewen’s writing becomes quite intense as the book furthers, and less informal from the personal chapters seen previously. He gives a descriptive analysis of the corporate world, and uses theoretical sources to reflect the unsettled business environment within the 19th and 20th century. It makes the reader need to concentrate fully in order to understand the depth of how much public relations has shaped society and grown from being the role of ‘muckraking’ journalists.
In conclusion it a succinct and well written book that focuses on all aspects of the growth of public relations within the industrious and political world. It gives an insight using previously confidential sources like the interview with Bernays, and shows the change from the public relations previously practiced to how it is today.
A compelling reflection on the first half of a devastating century
Niall Ferguson writes in the introduction to this book that 'as I tried to write an adequate sequel to my earlier book about the First World War [I came] to appreciate just how un-illuminating it would be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to 1945 - yet another book focused on the now familiar collisions of armies, navies and air forces.'
The result of such thought was War of the World, which actually just about covers the whole of the 20th century in terms of an ongoing conflict. It still focuses on the Second World War, but provides the reader with a unique account of the conflicts leading up to it between 1900 and 1939, even suggesting that the Second World War in fact started in Asia in 1937, or even in Manchuria in 1931.
The thing thats so compelling about this account over others is its approach to the subject of war. Although a few chapters concentrate like other books on the policies of Hitler, Chamberlain and Churchill, Ferguson's detail lies instead in the changing face of Europe - the border skirmishes before, during and after the First World War, and the pogroms and other purges that took place across Eastern Europe. It also chronicles the economic rise and fall of the first thirty years of the 20th century.
Ferguson doesnt really offer any opinion and doesnt focus on accounts of suffering or heroism - instead he plainly states the facts and statistics of the era. Although this makes the book far tougher to read than other accounts, its frank, clinical analysis of economic inbalances, racial purge and grapples for power at country borders forces you towards the crushing reality that the Second World War was pretty much inevitable, and it forces you to realise that humanity seems to naturally resort to war within its very nature.
The book has its faults - it probably tries to cover too much, and therefore makes tough reading. Theres a lot of statistical comparison that is probably unneccessary, but it would be hard to judge what to remove because it all works towards a larger picture of why the war broke out.
The main disturbing thing I took from this book is that, by Ferguson's account, the first signs of global dispute at the beginning of the 20th century - economic crises, terrorist actions, border disputes in smaller countries - have already turned up in the 21st, which would suggest that history is about to repeat itself.
I'm not going to kid about - this is a long, intense, and ultimately pretty depressing read. But I feel it's an important one (although Ferguson still mostly dodges the issue of Western responsibility for the conflict), and it's a particularly good starting point for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of the wars of the twentieth century beyond what they learned in GCSE
Tags: 20th-century history politics war ww2
Fascinating, even a digital eternity later.
Any writing on computers and the internet tends to have a short shelf life. The internet is the fastest evolving form of technology we have, and it doesn’t take long for ideas to become obsolete. Life on the Screen nevertheless makes for a fascinating read, particularly from the perspective of someone who didn’t experience the internet and computer culture at the time Turkle describes and analyses. First published twelve years ago, the world of computers in the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s she discusses is like a mythical epoch of computing history, and is enthralling for that. Her ideas about how modernist and post-modernist ideals clashed over the direction of computer development and their role in shaping how people think are intriguing and help create a context in which it is easier to understand the roots of one’s own philosophical leanings shaped by immersion in the internet age.
Although some of her ideas about the nature of self expression through the freedom that anonymity gives online may seem optimistic or perhaps even naive by today’s more cynical standards, in them we can see the roots of online phenomena we take for granted. The IRC chat room begat the social networking site, the MUD role playing games begat MMOs, the hobbyists and hackers begat the hardcore “power users? of today’s computing culture, and those early “bricoleurs? (or intuitive users)defined the standards of user experiences for which future software would be designed. It’s like a history lesson, and like any good history lesson, it helps you understand the way things are today. In the fast moving online world where just a few years are an eternity, it can be easy to lose track of the origins of ideas. Turkle’s work has managed to avoid becoming obsolete; it is still relevant and definitely worth reading for anyone interested by the philosophy of the digital world.
Tags: history identity internet media-participation philosophy
Essential reading
Stuart Ewen was one of the first US academics to focus a critical eye upon the world of advertising and PR with his publication of ‘Captains of Consciousness’ in 1976. ‘PR! A Social History of Spin’ (1996) is a masterful survey of the subtle shifts in the assumptions made about ‘the public’ and mass communication that underlie developments in corporate public relations. These assumptions have had a radical influence not only on advertising but on a huge range of media forms and institutions, including the popular press, radio, television, cinema, government ‘public information’ campaigns and so on.
Ewen traces the roots of contemporary media theory and advertising practice back to the work of theoretical pioneers such as Edward Bernays, Gustave Le Bon and Walter Lipmann. Examining early PR campaigns - such as that by AT&T persuading a sceptical public of the benefits of a national telephone monopoly, or of the Committee for Public Information’s (CPI) hugely effective propaganda campaign to support the US First World War effort, Ewen shows how the sophisticated use of images, emotional appeals and other techniques for ‘manufacturing consent’ were developed and refined into the armory of marketing and consciousness-shaping strategies at the disposal of the enormous PR industry today. Authoritative, powerfully written and essential reading.
Tags: advertising corporate history media-democracy-power power pr spin
Nothing is real. Or is it?
In this collection of essays, the great Italian man of letters, Umberto Echo, takes a break from writing complex self-referential novels, to muse on the postmodern condition. He visits museums and delights in our love of copies and reconstructions. He uses this basis as a way of delving deeper into the modern psyche: “It suggests that there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy‿ (Eco, 1998: 6).
Like Baudrillard before him, Eco seeks to understand how ‘fakes’ came to replace reality as a prime referent for experience: “The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake’‿ (ibid: 7).
On the media generally, and the advancement of technology, he suggests that, “The mass media are genealogical because, in them, every new invention sets off a chain reaction of inventions, produces a sort of common language. They have no memory because when the chain of imitations has been produced, no one can remember who started it‿ (ibid: 146).
Often witty and insightful, you get the feeling Eco is amused by all of these things, and therefore so should we. Like Baudrillard, but with more warmth.
Tags: capitalism civilisation culture economics history postmodernism
Be good to yourself...
This is the book that caused critics to claim that philosophy is the ‘new rock and roll.’ In an age where bookshops are groaning with self-help manuals, de Botton returns to the origins of modern philosophical ideas and asks writers such as Socrates and Montaigne to help us with modern day problems, such as being unpopular, not having enough money and having a broken heart.
This book this is an excellent introduction to philosophy, that is refreshingly honest and at times, very, very funny – particularly the chapter on Schopenhauer. The chapter on Nietzsche even goes as far as humanising a man often (it seems now wrongly) discredited as a right-wing lunatic. So, de Botton explains quite complex ideas, using contemporary examples and drawing on lots of images and diagrams.
Not a ‘self-help’ book at all, but more of a ‘help-you-to-help-yourself’ book.
Tags: civilisation culture history society truth
"All educators, whether they like it or not, are in the amusement business"
Part two of Simon Callow’s proposed three-part biography of writer, director producer and actor, Orson Welles. This instalment takes us from the post-Citizen Kane hangover, through Welles political wranglings, right up until he left America to begin a self-imposed exile in Europe.
In between these two book-ends, Welles managed to really piss-off Hollywood, spent a lot of time and Hollywood money getting drunk in Brazil, get fired several times, marry and divorce Rita Hayworth, manage to squeeze in an affair with Judy Garland, and write, produce and star in the biggest Broadway disaster of the time, as well as make films like The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai.
Welles’ life was very colourful, and Callow draws upon his own experiences in film and theatre to bring it all vividly to life. This volume is no less thorough than its 1996 predecessor (The Road to Xanadu) which is no mean feat, as other biographers - such as Barbara Leaming and Peter Bogdanovich - found to their cost that Welles’ was a masterful mythologiser of his own life-story.
I hope we don’t have to wait another ten years for the third volume, and The Third Man.
Tags: adaptation author culture history
Techno-utopianism
This book charts the place of hippy counterculture in the development of the utopian view of the communitarian ethos of the Internet, placing Stewart Brand - creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue, itself a counterculture, do-it-yourself bible - at the centre of events.
And as you might expect, it's a pretty utopian view of the story itself.
Working through.
In this - increasingly out of date - creaky polemic, Ellis seeks to mount a robust defence of what he calls 'broadcast television.' For the most part he succeeds, it's just that technology has now overtaken him.
When Ellis wrote this book, TiVo, Sky+ and YouTube did not exist, and people used their mobile phones for phoning each other - imagine that!
Here, Ellis argues that traditional broadcast television serves an important public service, in that it seeks to 'work through' issues in a variety of ways and in a variety of genres until some kind of resolution is reached.
He splits the history of broadcasting into three areas; Scarcity, Availability and now Plenty.
Like Giddens (1997) and Eriksen (2001) Ellis argues that we now have too much media in the era of plenty, and are all suffering from 'time fatigue'.
Instead of damaging traditional broadcast television however, this only serves to further cement its role in our lives, as we reject the multi-channel world for the safety of the schedule, dipping in and out of the digital spectrum for discrete moments of specialist programming.
It's a persuasive argument, but one that looks increasingly fragile with falling audiences for the BBC and particularly ITV and Ch4, the latter two suffering from plummeting advertising revenue as well. In March 2006, Google reported that internet use now outstripped that of television viewing.
So, Ellis' argument has somewhat been overrun by events, but it's still worth a look. Particularly the chapter on 'televisuality.' The section on the history of Channel 4 is good too. But so it should be, Ellis was there.
The Law of Suppression.
A highly detailed and thorough account of the history of media technologies. Winston is particuarly good in defining his terms, especially when writing about the origins of digital media.
He argues, unlike Levinson (2001), that the evolution of media technology is often deliberately hindered by governments, institutions and increasingly, corporations.
For Winston, many media technologies are prevented from being developed for purely commercial gain. This process he calls 'The Law of Suppression.'
So, the reason 'old' media are switching to digital, is a protectionist strategy. It is also an attempt to secure further markets, and maximise profits by introducing new acquisition formats, which would make older ones obsolete, as well as combating piracy.
For example, Winston argues that the CD industry 'suppressed' the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) because you could record onto it (2000: 137).
Tags: history industrialisation market media media-corporations power technology