EOTO reaction: Propaganda

 Propaganda is “the dissemination of information” such as “facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies” in order to “influence public opinion. Deliberateness and relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas”. You may think that propaganda came around during the time of World War II but in reality, it has been around since the very beginning. Propaganda is still extremely present to this day in many different areas.

    Propaganda can be found today in magazines, social media, radios, television, the newspaper, and even advertisements. Although it is easy to say that the sole purpose of propaganda is to persuade the intended audience, it is commonly overlooked that there are very clear informative aspects to propaganda. Considering that propaganda is both persuasive and informative it is understandable by at the time of war it because the most increasingly popular. As I mentioned before, most people know this term solely because of World War II when there extensive Nazi propaganda that encouraged Germans to get involved in the war, and more exclusively democracy. Besides seeing Nazi propaganda, here in the United States, we also saw the strategic persuasion plan that encouraged citizens to help during the hard time, whether that be enlisting in the army, getting women more involved in the factories/ working, or just being more patriotic and a stable support system. 

 

    Propaganda may seem like a very simple concept, just persuade your audience to do something, but there are actually 7 different types of propaganda. The 7 different types include name calling, glittering personalities, transfer, testimonial, plain, card stacking, and bandwagon. The first type, name calling, is very self-explanatory in that the persuasion being used it to draw the viewers to your side rather than your competitor through calling out the competitions name, giving them a bad name, or hinting at their name. The second type, glittering personalities/ generalities uses fancy and or “good feeling” words in order to persuade you to do what they want or buy their product. Next is transfer propaganda which uses their persuasion to “transfer” either a good or a bad feeling to the viewer. A great example of transfer propaganda would be to call a fragrance “very American”, which essentially transfers the feeling of being a good American into the viewer’s mind. Testimonial propaganda refers to the use of a credible or very well-known source to persuade. A great example of testimonial would be the use of a celebrity in an advertisement on television. Next is plain propaganda which has become very popular over the years through social media. Plain propaganda uses the viewing of “real” people testing “real” products and seeing the great benefit that comes from it. The sixth type of propaganda is card-stacking, meaning the persuasion technique involves only telling the good information about the product or idea and not explaining the bad parts. Lastly, we have the bandwagon, which is probably the most common. Band wagoning in propaganda is using the idea that if everything likes something or is doing something you should want to too.