Since the days of the antiquity, when Spartan generals wrote instructions to their subordinates about influencing the attitudes of conquered peoples, propaganda has been a part of the fabric of human societies. From Martin Luther’s famous tracts against the Catholic Church to the Nazi’s ubiquitous posters in pre-WWII Germany, propaganda has shaped the way people feel about the most important issues of the day.<\/p>\n
In our modern society, the most obvious example of propaganda is the multi-billion dollar, highly sophisticated advertising industry.<\/p>\n
Example: Just before the break I presented Grade 8 with two different views of the iPad. The first was a a product description and review<\/a> from a respected tech website. It’s extremely comprehensive and informative; everything you’d ever need to know about the device can be found in these pages. How did the students react to the article? “It’s long…a bit boring…a lot of info…it’s ok.” And so on.<\/p>\n Then I showed them this: a 30-second advertisement<\/a> for the iPad 2. Beautifully made and intentionally vague, the ad is designed to make the viewer feel<\/em> something about the iPad. And the students? Well, they felt great. They just loved it and are genuinely more interested in the ABIS iPad program (click here<\/a> for more info on that).<\/p>\n Why? How can a short TV spot that contains virtually no concrete information be more effective than a well-researched, thorough article? Well, put simply, the advertisement is propaganda at its best: short, visual, emotionally appealing.<\/p>\n Grade 8 is currently in the middle of a unit all about propaganda. Thus far we’ve discussed the most prevalent techniques used in propaganda campaigns (“jump on the bandwagon” and “either\/or fallacy” for example) and looked at how teens are targeted by propaganda, particularly by those products they so love to buy.<\/p>\n Now we’re on to famous historical and contemporary examples (the cult of Kim Jong-Il, anyone?) before I ask the students to design their own campaign of propaganda. What will they “sell” and who will be their target audience? Check back later to see what they come up with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the days of the antiquity, when Spartan generals wrote instructions to their subordinates about influencing the attitudes of conquered peoples, propaganda has been a part of the fabric of human societies. From Martin Luther’s famous tracts against the Catholic Church to the Nazi’s ubiquitous posters in pre-WWII Germany, propaganda has shaped the way people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,23,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grade-8","category-humanities","category-grades"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abisoman.com\/broadcaster\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}