If you’ve never had a chance to hear how the public relations industry in this country began, and how we got to where we’re at (e.g. much of modern “news” reporting is simply paid-for advertising by PR companies), take a look at what I believe is one of the very best presentations on the subject. In “The Century of Self,” Adam Curtis illustrates how the American father of PR, Edward Bernays, employed his uncle Sigmund Freud’s ideas in the US in the 1920s to change the way decisions are wrought at all levels of society. It’s one of the few times you’ll hear about the idea of “the mass-manipulation of public opinion” that is actually informed by a great deal of research and historical standing rather than self-satisfying, conspiratorial assertion. The series also speaks much to the nature of non-obvious propaganda that infuses American discussions of lifestyle, war rhetoric, etc. All four-parts of the riveting series can be watched immediately via Google Video.The Century of Self, Part 1

The Century of Self, Part 1 If you’ve never had a chance to hear how the public relations industry in this country began, and how we got to where we’re at (e.g. much of modern “news” reporting is simply paid-for advertising by PR companies), take a look at what I believe is one of the very best presentations on the subject. In “The Century of Self,” Adam Curtis illustrates how the American father of PR, Edward Bernays, employed his uncle Sigmund Freud’s ideas in the US in the 1920s to change the way decisions are wrought at all levels of society. It’s one of the few times you’ll hear about the idea of “the mass-manipulation of public opinion” that is actually informed by a great deal of research and historical standing rather than self-satisfying, conspiratorial assertion. The series also speaks much to the nature of non-obvious propaganda that infuses American discussions of lifestyle, war rhetoric, etc. All four-parts of the riveting series can be watched immediately via Google Video.

1) The recession is hitting Black college grads harder than it is hitting White college grads. I guess post-racial America will have to wait.

Via Andrew Sullivan

2) A recent study found that those who pray\ regularly are less likely to drink than those who simply focus on “good thoughts.” Three cheers for ritual! Via Big Questions Online.

3) A study summarized in Miller-McCune People with symptoms of Type-II diabetes are less inclined to “forgive others” than those without.

Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating work on moral psychology has gotten a lot of buzz in the blogosphere….even from me. Here’s the crux of Haidt’s work in his own words:

From a review of the anthropological and evolutionary literatures, Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls “coalitional psychology”); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others. …

My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure people’s endorsement of these five foundations. In every sample we’ve looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservatives—it’s not just about Gilligan’s care and Kohlberg’s justice. It’s also about Durkheim’s issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.

Controversial work to say the least. I think this says something about why culture and national security issues seem to work better in turning out conservative voters in the US. Issues like Iran, Gay Rights and Mosque building work better with a group that has more “moral buttons” that can be pushed. It’s an interesting way of reframing the whole “What’s the Matter with Kansas” trope.

If you want to find out where you sit on the moral specturm, go to Haidt’s et. al’s site, yourmorals.org.

Yes Magazine points to a whimsical example of the power of collective intelligence. The website Fallen Fruit identifies locations in Los Angeles where you can find public fruit, or fruit trees that are hanging over private property into public space.

While this isn’t earth shattering social change, it highlights the potential for the web to strenghten social networks. The site organizers conduct “fruit jams” based on the information they gather from “the crowd.” It would be an interesting research question to highlight which types of cities encourage and build upon these types of crowdsourcing initiatives to create denser social networks for its residents.

I’d like to highlight an extraordinary book, now two decades old, which I’m currently working through with my public affairs classes. It’s one of those books that, in my opinion, draws conclusions so sound and far-reaching for social and political life that I’m surprised I only stumbled upon it in a secondary source chapter in teaching communication theory several years ago. W. Barnett Pearce’s Communication and the Human Condition is an opus of insights into the communicative problems that wrack our planet, surveying the academic and professional convergences that have only begun to address what types of communication might be suited to humanity’s future. Despite our incredible technological and scientific advances, Pearce outlines how our evolutionary understandings of communication have remained at woefully underdeveloped (even premodern) levels, targeting particularly deleterious forms of communication that we see in everyday life (via chapters on monocultural, ethnocentric, modernistic, and neotraditional communication). The book finishes with a call to “the practicality of cosmopolitan communication,” based in many case studies that illustrate what forms of discourse might bring out the rich diversity in our different ways of being human, while retaining the tolerant coexistence necessary to any society. Overall, I would put Communication and the Human Condition on my top five list of books outlining the mindboggling complexities of human communication and action; if understood by more practitioners across the spheres of business, government, media etc., it could almost certainly create more equitable and informed institutions and practices.

David Dylan Thomas questions the popular assertion that Internet content will be stored forever:

We assume that formats like .jpg (that picture of you doing a kegstand) or .mp3 (that ill-advised phone message you left at 3am) or — I won’t even pick a video format since they change every week — will be here forever because they’ve been around as long as we can remember consumer-friendly digital information. But the odds that your Facebook page will still be here in ten years — or will be readable in ten years — while not terrible, probably aren’t as good as you think.

His larger point is that digital information has to be stored somewhere. Old information often has to be converted at a cost. While reasonably current information has a value to market researchers, of what value is a 10-year old Facebook update? Perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, we’ll store our own information, but there’s some reason to question the notion that someone benevolent force out there will keep track of our digital lives for us for free.

I made appointments to get shots and malaria meds for the trip.  I think of the anthropologist who does work in Haiti but felt helpless after the earthquake because he didn’t have medical skills to care for the injured.  I wonder how many Haitians don’t have access to medical care and public health measures to prevent disease.  This is part of my First World privilege.

The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone.  I recorded a slew of news shows and specials but haven’t watched them yet.

I heard about Dominicans helping Haitians.  They share one island and the disaster brought them together.

Last, I’m reading the incredible book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit.  The essayist and social critic wrote the book before the horrors of the January earthquake in Haiti, but the response of the people makes her point, that people don’t turn on each other in dire circumstances, but engage in community, solidarity, and agency.

I made appointments to get shots and malaria meds for the trip.  I think of the anthropologist who does work in Haiti but felt helpless after the earthquake because he didn’t have medical skills to care for the injured.  I wonder how many Haitians don’t have access to medical care and public health measures to prevent disease.  This is part of my First World privilege.

The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone.  I recorded a slew of news shows and specials but haven’t watched them yet.

I heard about Dominicans helping Haitians.  They share one island and the disaster brought them together.

Last, I’m reading the incredible book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit.  The essayist and social critic wrote the book before the horrors of the January earthquake in Haiti, but the response of the people makes her point, that people don’t turn on each other in dire circumstances, but engage in community, solidarity, and agency.

The New York Times Bits blog invites a number of readers to “unthether” themselves from technology for a period of time and to create a video of their experience. Reactions to this mini-exercise ran the gamut:

For Jenn Monroe, 40, giving up the Internet and phone led to a desire to purge other technologies from her life.

“I didn’t want to open my computer at all, even though that wasn’t part of the deal,” she said. “I avoided the microwave, which was also sort of strange and surprising to me.”

But for many, finding the right balance can be hard. James Cornell, 18, spent his day away from his cellphone feeling jittery, and he worried that he was annoying people by not responding to them. John Stark, 46, told his friends that he wouldn’t be responding to text messages, expecting them to call him on the phone if they needed to communicate. They sent text messages to his wife instead, asking her to relay information to him.

I know I have to make it a point to turn the computer off when I’m with my six year old. The instant gratification of a tweet or an e-mail is hard to resist. But then again, so is television, food, a good novel, smoking, etc. The need to distract ourselves from our daily lives does not begin and end with the Internet. The distraction might be more visceral on-line, but couldn’t we say the same thing about radio, print, phonographs, etc. I worry about this “Google is making us stupid” meme, popularized by Nick Carr’s Atlantic article, is producing a whole set of articles and books that don’t really advance our understanding of the effect of technology on our lives. Imagine an article called “is alcohol making me drunk”? or “is food making me fat”? You couldn’t. It’s more complicated than that. The point isn’t that the medium has no effect on humans, it’s that those effects are nuanced and contextual.