Second Draft

I'd be interested to see to what levels the art of persuasion may be produced by these revolutions in information technology.

I have already see the manner in which the Left have produced propaganda with their inherited control over world wide media, and I have also seen which side has benefited by this distortion. But propaganda need not be a distortion, it in fact may reinforce a truth and make it appear truer than it really is.

Propaganda that distorts truth, to a certain level, has perpetuated the need for propaganda. Because usually, old WWII propaganda used to aid the war effort stopped after the war ended, because the propaganda's purpose had been fullfilled. That propaganda's purpose was to elevate the good qualities in war and to diminish the bad to nonexistence, but once the war ends then there is no need to elevate the good qualities of something that no longer exists.

Current media propaganda serves the opposite purpose seemingly. They elevate the bad qualities, and diminish to nonexistence the good qualities.

And the method of this propagation is not leaving out the bad parts, it is leaving out the good parts and only reporting on the bad parts. But the thing is, when the war ends, the bad parts will not exist anymore, but the propaganda must continue to produce more bad reports simply to prevent someone from finding out the good that would invalidate the bad.

In WWII, once we found out the bad (Omaha Beach, the tanks sinking, and the casualties), the result is not that such diminishes the good. Which is an advantage to persuasion techniques that emphasize instead of distorts. Because once you emphasize the good without the bad, reporting the bad then actually enhances the public relations of the good.

Another example of the differences in propaganda technique, between emphasis and distortion of the truth, is also in the subject of the truth. If the subject of the propaganda is really true, then you won't need the propaganda permanently, cause it is only a tools to aid in dissimilation of reality. But if the subject of propaganda is actually false, then you require propaganda ad infinitum, or else the whole project will collapse because of being exposed to reality.

Such a collapse is seen in Nazi and Islamic propaganda. Much of their claims of the Master Race and the Jews being the fault of everything, is blatantly not true and is in fact a lie designed to facilitate their destruction and someone else's elevation.

The internet, may produce some other combination than the ones currently in use, I speculate.

For an example of incompetent propaganda, the techique of using the art of persuasion, look at troutsky post above.

He is trying to sarcastically present some refutation or counterpoint. But what he ends up accomplishing is confusing people because he did a double assumption, and usually in propaganda you can't base your technique upon the assumption that your audience is psychic or "in the know". That would defeat the whole purpose of persuasion.

Usually if you are using satire, you present the opposite of what you believe, using stylistic devices to both communicate your disbelief and to also wound the opposing person's viewpoint.

In other words, you make the opponent's viewpoint into a strawman and make fun of it cause it is easily blown over.

But T changes his style from satire to direct viewpoint communication halfway through. Instead of perpetuating the opposite of his viewpoint, he starts communicating his viewpoint as if his viewpoint is the opposite of his own viewpoint, and that is a nice way to confuse the audience. And when the audience is confused, they start to think, and thinking is not what you want if you want to persuade someone. At least thinking that isn't like what you meant for them to have. Cause people who start to think based upon some outside stimulus, becomes then a randomized process that you can't predict.

The media probably knows this, and does not want to confuse the audience. For whatever reason, some of them have begun to think the audience must not be confused because they do not have the intellect to process information correctly. *Shrugs*, I doubt a propaganda machine tries not to confuse people because the people are too stupid to know truth from reality. If there were people like that, you wouldn't need a propaganda machine in the first place. You'd just be able to tell people what they will believe.

Obviously the media doesn't do that, cause everytime they talk about Iraq they don't say "You must tell President Bush to pull out of Iraq and admit his mistakes".

No, they use more subtle methods of persuasion than that. Not that subtle, but subtler than direct thought control.

I hope to see a method of propaganda, a technique of persuasion if you will, that is a sort of hybridization of the two previous techniques. The one we see today in the MSM, an the one we saw before in the MSM in WWII.

But, unlike a normal hybridization, I don't want a mix of the two, I want something totally new.

I want a propaganda philosophy that sets out to expose the truth, but neither diminishes the good nor the bad news to get success. I want a technique of persuasion that allows people to understand the subject (the truth that is propagandized), without requiring omission of truth or distortion of truth.

In other words, I hope for a self-contained self-replicating technique. The beginning looks good, since the website claims to want to give the audience enough information for them to come to the right conclusions. They must be confident of a certain truth, and they will even tell us that in one way or another.

Some people may ask, how can you do propaganda if you tell everyone the truth, about everything. And I would say, what is better than truth at persuading people to believe in it?

Truth is power. And a subtle one at that.