On 10 Nov 2016, at 17.11, Joshua Braun <jabraun@journ.umass.edu> wrote:
Maybe this would also be a good time to bring discussions of pre-internet media and technology and their role in the years before WW2, or even earlier dangerous times, and to compare this to social media etc today?
I'd recommend J. Michael Sproul's article, "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm," which gives a great overview of the changing nature of mediated political speech in the pre-WWII era, as well as how critical and academic treatments of it evolved over time.
This gives info on how much was invested in making sure the post-war world was not peaceful and safe: http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/94BRgl2.html Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 by Christopher Simpson Oxford University Press, 1994. 204 pp. For example, the US Air Force provided at least half of the budget of the Bureau of Social Science Research in the 1950s. Military contracts supported studies at this Bureau such as the vulnerabilities of Eastern European peoples for the purposes of psychological warfare and comparisons of the effectiveness of "drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques during interrogation of prisoners." https://archive.org/details/For_The_Record_78_Interview_with_Christopher_Sim... https://archive.org/details/For_The_Record_93_The_Science_of_Coercion_II_Int... dss David Stodolsky, PhD Institute for Social Informatics Tornskadestien 2, st. th., DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark dss@socialinformatics.org Skype/Twitter: davidstodolsky