This week in Humanities grade 8 students spent a considerable amount of time watching this advertisement from Apple:
We didn’t watch this because their teacher is a huge fan of Apple (though I am), but rather as an introduction to our new topic, propaganda.
Propaganda: Communication that seeks to persuade by influencing the audience’s attitudes and emotions.
This advert, like everything else Apple produces for television and internet viewing, is an effective example of propaganda. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It’s simple. And it tells the viewer virtually nothing about the product.
First, we listened to the advert. Then we watched it with the sound muted. Then we watched it again in total and the students made lists of important words and images in the advert. Words like “powerful”, “simple”, and “transform”–in propaganda these are called glittering generalities–inspire a feeling about the iPad Air, while giving away no details or information.
In propaganda, knowledge just gets in the way. It’s all about the feeling.
Check out this poster, produced in the USA during World War One:
Quite graphically, this poster implores young men to join the military and fight Germany, depicted here as the “mad brute”, coming for the fair-skinned women of America. Again, this poster is meant to inspire a feeling–here, using the propaganda technique known as name-calling–that the producers know is much more powerful than knowledge.
Sure, they could list an assortment of reasons why men should join, or throw out some statistics about the war and Germany. But could that ever be as effective as this image?
Over the next few weeks we’ll be examining a wide range of propaganda–from adverts to politics to war to public service announcements to speeches. I hope in the end our students are more savvy about the media messages that infiltrate their lives on a daily basis.