Qualitative Methods Research Proposal

29 April 2013 23:31 in Cultural Conditioning | Permalink

(By no means is this complete, but I have to start someplace)

I.               Introduction.

Intentional propaganda is the systematic propagation of ideas in a deliberate manner in order to encourage or instill a particular attitude or response and it is a broad and infinite subject.  In other words, it is deliberate and intended.  Here I am only concerned with small group propaganda.  While there has been much research done on the larger subject of propaganda in the past and the present, whether military-, media-, political-, or the various aspects of the most common types of public relations-propaganda:  advertising, marketing, and publicity, there has been little research done on small groups and small group propaganda.   In small groups, this occurs intentionally and unintentionally.  In this, I propose to briefly research intentional propaganda as disseminated by large media companies, government, political parties, political candidates, and the like as it filters into small groups where it unintentionally spreads.

Propaganda occurs in the day to day but few consciously notice it.  It is ever present, ever influencing, and officially ignored by our family, friends, and neighbors unless it is by conservatives to discuss the propaganda techniques of the liberals and the liberal press, recognizing the tactics of the “enemy” but never one’s own.  Interestingly, enough it is rarely something that liberals will point to conservatives to definitively accuse.  Propaganda is also rarely noticed in small groups in the real world or in the virtual world of the Internet, No one notices it in their discussions, in their likes, in their fashion and political choices, or even in their decisions influenced by other friends and acquaintances.

While propaganda is a fairly broad term and carries with it a negative connotation in the minds of the general public, the various forms of propaganda that are familiar, briefly mentioned above, are fairly specific and not readily recognized as propaganda.  The history of propaganda in this country was adversarial, used as a war term to describe the negative intents of a military enemy during World War I.  Edward Bernays who was responsible for creating this negative mindset in the minds of the United States Public, decided that that negative intention had to be transformed into something inoccuous by creating new terminology that was unfamiliar to the public.  He therefore transliterated propaganda into Public Relations.  From here, advertising, marketing, publicity, and the like, became its children.  Here, in order to return these derived propagandist concepts to their rightful origin, in order to reorient the public to their real intent, these terms will be hyphenated with their original, i.e. advertising-propaganda, marketing-propaganda, publicity-propaganda, and possible others.  To clarify, advertising-propaganda is a paid product or company announcement in one or all of various media outlets, whether television, radio, magazine, Internet or elsewhere.  Marketing-propaganda is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. Publicity-propaganda is the business of promotion or advertising to attract public notice.  In reality, there seems little to distinguish one of these from the other.  However, since Bernays time, the industry has insisted on these gray-area distinctions so they deserved clarification here.

I will especially focus on unintentional propaganda or concealed propaganda (derived from intentional propaganda above), propaganda that is disseminated within small groups of people, the types of propaganda that do not “look like” propaganda to the naked eye.  For example, the standard view of distorted history that we were taught in grade school by our teachers fits so well into actual public opinion-propaganda that it is considered an automatic “fact,” one that only a historian or an extreme radical would question or notice.  The “likes” of various products, events, and companies by our friends on the front page of our Facebook accounts are another form of unintentional propaganda where a product is liked and talked about where our friends are not paid marketing-propagandists for the companies or products in question. The same occurs in the day-to-day conversations I have observed in public where one person talks about their latest electronic purchase or what he or she ate for lunch, for example.   While it is completely intentional by the companies in question, the dissemination of that advertising-, marketing, or public relations-propaganda by our friends is unintentional or concealed in that they are not consciously or deliberately promoting or even aware that they are promoting it, and they are obviously not paid advertising-, marketing-, or public relations-propagandists for the products, companies, or events.

Specifically, for this research proposal, I am interested in the relationship(s) between local musicians and their fans, where local musicians “fight” for promotional-propaganda space in the interested minds of their potential audience in the same way as the larger labels and the major media conglomerates.  This “fight” becomes one where musical artists utilize their own intentional propaganda to promote their music and their local, regional, and national music tours as well as their musical product.  Realistically, an artist does not have the large budget(s) of the media conglomerates so he, she, or they improvise(s) with what is available:  a real and virtual social network of fans who are unintentional propagandists who engage one another by talking to their friends and acquaintances about their favorite music and their favorite bands without deliberately intending to engage in promotional-propaganda.  Rather, their intention is to tell their friends about the music they are hearing, hope that their friends will appreciate it as much as they do, start exploring it, and tell their friends and acquaintances.  The cycle is and can be endless.

 

II.        Conceptual Framework

This research proposal will take a symbolic interactionist perspective on small group propaganda (Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1959; Goffman, 1974) that builds upon the literature of propaganda studies (Doob, 1935; Doob, 1946, 1948; Ellul, 1965) and build upon participant interviews, observations, and participant conversations.  From this vantage point theorizing, interpreting, and engaging the world and constructing a grounded theory in order to understand how small group propaganda operates within the context of propaganda in general.  Specifically, I am interested in how intentional and unintentional propaganda operates within the small group dynamic of local, independent, and unsigned bands, their fans, and the friends of those fans as well as the extent of the propaganda in question.

Literature that deals specifically with small group propaganda, intentional and unintentional is limited within Leonard W. Doob’s Public Opinion and Propaganda (1946, 1966), Propaganda:  It’s Psychology And Technique (1935), and Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda:  The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965).  However, both are the most detailed discussion of propaganda as a whole to date.  Influence within small groups, i.e. symbolic interactionism is discussed at length within Goffman (1959, 1974), Blumer (1969), and Mead (1935)

There is little current literature specifically related to small group propaganda, but there is a more thorough discussion of the symbolic interactionism of small groups within various subcultures in two longitudinal studies:  Pam Hunt’s Where the Music Takes You:  The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures (2013) and Lisiunia Romanienko’s Body Piercing And Identity Construction (2011).

Within Hunt, there is discussion of cognitive social schemas as they relate to group dynamics and what is and what is not acceptable behavior within a particular social group.  This behavior extends to musical discussions and musical appreciation within the group as well as new music to be introduced to the group.  Significant symbols, whether they are of mainstream culture (rejected or accepted) or of the particular subculture, are also discussed in this context.  It is this particular acceptance or denial in its relation to promoting, reinforcing, or denying specific ideas, concepts, and objects that is of particular interest.

Within Romanienko, the discussion of subcultures and influence probes much deeper than a single varied (musical) subculture and explores several related subcultures ethnographically over the course of a longer period of study.  These groups may appear to be externally unrelated but are internally united by their “membership” within the body modification community.  Communication within these groups takes on the same characteristics observed above:  Significant symbols of acceptance, denial, and persuasion are communicated from member to member within each small group.  Significant symbolic texts within these small groups are reduced to tattoos, piercings, and articles of clothing with specific meanings within each group.  This textual symbolism is the same that exists within the relationship between music artists and music fans.

 

III.           Research Questions

The classic literature exploring propaganda has looked seldom at small groups with as much detail as it has looked at “traditional” propaganda on the mass level. The past and current literature on symbolic interactions and small groups discuss the influence of individuals within small groups but it has not looked at propaganda as a phenomenon within those small groups.  In this, I propose to unite the study of propaganda with the study of small groups, studying and analyzing the symbolic interactionism of propaganda in small groups, engaging the world and constructing a grounded theory.  I want to better understand how small group propaganda operates within the context of propaganda in general.

In this study, I propose to ask the following research questions: 1. To what extent does propaganda exist in small groups in the physical and the virtual worlds? 2. How is propaganda generally used within these small group contexts?  While propaganda has been studied before, from a biased perspective of opposition and a rarely from an objective perspective (Doob, 1935, 1946; Ellul, 1965), it has never been academically studied from the point-of-view of a small group.  Other questions may arise that will need to be address but they will relate to the main research questions asked above.

 

IV.           Research Methods

Research will be gathered through data collection of interviews and extensive observations of small groups in live music settings as well as small groups in larger gatherings of festival-sized concerts and social networks through the Internet.  Data analysis of interviews from respondents will be combined with data analysis of additional study results to fully explore propaganda in its small group context.  It is these results that will be applied to propaganda in its wider context and to perhaps continue work into the small group propaganda nuances in another small group.

 

V.             Validity

To deal with any bias in the study and the results, I will exercise extensive reflection and reflexivity in each small group member interview and observational setting while observing any similarities and contrasts that exist between groups.  To deal with any reactivity, I will engage with each interview respondent extensively to determine the depth of their understanding of the small group propaganda that they are using within their small group or groups.

Ultimately, this study is designed to be generalizable to the larger population and other small groups, whether they are mainstream, whether they are a subculture small group, or whether they are a loose collection of individuals forming small groups occasionally or rarely over time. This study is designed to verify that propaganda is used to influence large groups and each member of those large groups as they individually and unintentionally influence their friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances.

 

VI.         Conclusions

While propaganda has a negative connotation in this country, it nonetheless exists in the embodiment of its transliterations:  public relations-propaganda, advertising-propaganda, marketing-propaganda, and others.  In the mind of the general public, propaganda is viewed as something that the enemy engages in, something that a government that is adversarial to one’s political ideas does.  It is something that is viewed as having a less than noble purpose, something evil, akin to what the Germans did in World War II, and something the communists did during the Cold War.  It is generally not viewed as something that is performed and perpetuated by television stations, news media, advertising agencies, or multibillion-dollar corporations.  And it is certainly not viewed as something that is unintentionally perpetuated by individuals in small groups.

But propaganda is all of those things individually and collectively.  The results will verify the goals of this study of intentional and unintentional propaganda in small groups.  It is something that is ever present and “ignored”.  It proliferates our society to such a point that the general public knows it is there because they discuss it individually, but they don’t see it.  This study aims to study propaganda in small groups, how it is perpetuated unintentionally, and to teach inform the academic and general publics that it is everywhere.  It is at this point of the results that the research will not conclude but will continue as I research with others, propaganda in other venues, in other small groups, to determine the extent of propaganda in these other areas and to inform the public what propaganda is on a deeper level.

Sources:

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Goffman, E. (1973). The presentation of self in everyday life. Woodstock, N.Y: Overlook Press.

Hunt, P. (2013), Where the Music Takes You:  The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures. United States:  Cognella Academic Publishing

Mead, G. H., & In Morris, C. W. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Romanienko, L. A. (2011). Body piercing and identity construction: A comparative perspective—New York, New Orleans, Wrocław. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Interpretation Of Current Concept Map

29 April 2013 23:15 in Intentional Propaganda, Personal-Propaganda, Promotional-Propaganda, Small Group-Propaganda, Unintentional Propaganda | Permalink

The current concept map encompasses almost the entire history of Propaganda from the beginning of recorded time to the present day and the current study of propaganda in small groups.  However, because this is such a vast subject, the map has missed many areas, including the Greek and roman “origins” as well as several others.  I will cover as much as I am able to here and add these topics to an updated map at a later date.

Propaganda, in spite of its Catholic Church origin, existed long before the word was created by them and coopted by everyone else.  With the Greek use of sculpture, painting, and oratory, propaganda vehicles have existed since the very beginning to influence public opinion.  With the Greek as well as later Roman empires, Graffiti was also pervasive within the city-state limits to influence public opinion propaganda from the small group propaganda and a personal perspective.  Graffiti is still pervasive everywhere in the world on a local level with the same local powers attempting to legislate its illegality and paint over it.  Small group graffiti propagandists use walls where they find them, utilizing another temporary canvas to reach their audience.  It is interesting to not that the graffiti propaganda of the roman era still survives today. Can you see the relationship that graffiti-propaganda has to the early and later incarnations of advertising-propaganda posters that inundate our daily lives?

The writing of history, whether it be religious or government-patriotic, is primarily written by victors and is nothing more than propaganda.  Take a look at your American history books that trumpet the history of pure white patriarchal landowners and slave owners who are painted as pure and patriotic and coincidentally fail to mention their slave owning, their patronizing of women, their exclusion of people of colour and women from the right to vote for more than a hundred years.  This is just the surface, but patriotic propaganda helps the medicine go down more easily, and if repeated oft enough, it becomes “fact” that is not questions, and when repeated as “fact” the mere pawns of our society, local school teachers, parents, “journalists”, and other local “leaders” repeat the party line as unintentional propaganda, leaving the harsh criticism to scholars who study history at such depth and to opposition leaders who are imbued with their own propaganda that they believe is “fact” as well.

The media, except for the time when attempts to create “legitimacy and objectivity” in their institution, have always been biased towards the powers that be that own and control them and the individual biases of the reporting staff.  A deeper look at the American Revolutionary War, reveals, several fine examples of newspapers, broadsheets, and posters utilizing political and wartime propaganda to paint the rebellious colonists as put upon and sainted.  This is the history that has been handed down to us for better or for worse and most of us believe it as “fact”.  Get beyond the idea of right and wrong and one begins to see propaganda everywhere.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does depend upon your perspective of what is done with the propaganda in question.  Fast forward almost a few hundred years to Edward Bernays writing of Crystallizing Public Opinion in 1923 and Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels’s use of that very text on the German population, and one realizes very quickly that it doesn’t matter which side your on.  Propaganda is used in a myriad of ways to benefit the power in question.  In the case of the Nazi’s, it didn’t matter that Bernays was a Jew.  The information was too valuable to dismiss. The bottom line, then, and now, was, that as long as there was an element of perceived truth in the propaganda itself and it was repeated often enough, it was effective.

But let’s not forget that because of the actions of Bernays’ on behalf of George Creel’s U.S. Government sponsored Committee on Public Information, propaganda was introduced in the World War I propaganda posters as something that the Germans were perpetuating but not the U.S. government.  Thus propaganda became a dirty word to the people of the U.S.  While it may be a negative term elsewhere in the world, it remains a dirty word here as something that an enemy does but not “our side”.  After the way, Bernays sincerely attempted to return propaganda to neutral ground but failed each time, possibly because the propaganda was so very effective and the word was newly introduced and foreign during that war.  So what to do. Bernays realized he had to find another phrase to get the job done (though he did write another book, Propaganda, in 1928 that fell on deaf public ears but a very attentive corporate public).  So Bernays created another term for himself:  Public Relations Counsel.

Thus, public relations begat publicity, advertising, marketing, promotions and a host of other euphemisms that mean the same thing, any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice, whether deliberate and intentional, or unintentional in the case of the media repeating things as “facts” and school teachers repeating things as “facts” based on the writing of school history books by victors and the dominant culture.  We see this most recently and most prominently in the “teaching” of the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City and the other plane crashes that occurred on the eleventh of September 2001 when not all information has been released to the general public and possibly not even to academic scholars to assess the facts surrounding the incidents.  In fact, in spite of the conspiracy theory association, there may even be some suppressing of information to serve the propaganda agendas of one or several parties.

In the case of small group propaganda which most concerns us here, I am specifically interested in advertising-propaganda, marketing-propaganda, publicity-propaganda and several similar varieties of propaganda, including personal-propaganda.  These propagandas include the intentional, defined as deliberate, premeditated propaganda that has a spokesperson that knows exactly what he is doing in his attempts to sway those around him, as well as the unintentional, where individuals in a group subconsciously influence each others, body modification tastes, as well as musical tastes, for example.

To cite a recent intentional and unintentional propaganda example, I attended the recent Final Four free concert in Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta.  What I witness was a variety of propagandas inundating me everywhere I walked and everywhere I looked.  There were Coke Zero signs, there were people wearing Final Four t-shirts and reinforcing their support with loud raucus discussions in support of their team, and there was even Flo Rida on stage talking about and singing about the wonders of Coke Zero (I was pretty pleased with this reinforcement of Flo Rida as an intentional propagandist.).  The observations that I made on Facebook were similar in that the advertising-propaganda on the side panels were encouraged as “likes” with one’s friends encouraging friends to “like” products and companies by example.

My discussions with two musical artists and one publicity-propagandist yielded some interesting results.  Granting this was my first foray into sociological interviewing, my first interview may have to be rescheduled at a later date for additional in-depth questions because I did not obtain any new information that I did not already have from previous experience in the local unsigned musical community and industry.  However, during the second and third interviews, I was able to dig a little deeper. What I discovered is that the people I interviewed actively practicing intentional propaganda on a small group level do not have any formal education in this area.

In the case of the second musical artist, he is also an active musical fan who has been recording music since his early teens.  Once he realized that he wanted to begin performing and recording for an audience larger than his bedroom, he looked at the bands that he admired and considered successful and studied their promotional-propaganda tactics, asked a lot of questions to determine what would work best for him and read a lot of promotional-propaganda literature to self-teach himself.  In addition, he believes that the more Internet coverage he has the more publicity-propaganda he can obtain for his musical project.  Towards that end, he has a presence on several web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and Bandcamp (a music-hosting and selling web site). Before his last tour, he also deliberately had the van that he would be using for his tour painted with his likeness and his web site name, thus becoming a mobile advertising-propaganda vehicle wherever he traveled.  I discovered that, with at least this musical artist, lack of funds to support a big budget advertising-propaganda campaign, he became very creative with what he could do. He even enlisted local bands with a following on his tour to engage in promotional-propaganda prior to his arrival.

In the case of the professional promotional-propagandist, she learned promotional propaganda in much the same way but from the inside, becoming an intern at a major label, concentrating on radio promotion only, seeing the segmentation that she cited as the reason the industry failed later.  She engaged in promotional propaganda first hand and was given free reign to promote bands however she could, but was forced to stop short when she was informed that the good bands that she loved did not have a lot of money invested in their success as there were in other bands.  Thus the propaganda engagement at the major level was based upon the investment that the label had in the band rather than the talent that the band possessed.  At a smaller label, she was allowed a little freer reign since there was a smaller budget and creativity was emphasized above all.  Now as an Independent Publicity-Propagandist, she selects artists that she likes, facilitating her ability to engage in the necessary promotional-propaganda with as much sincerity as possible.

While this is by no means a complete interpretation of what can and could be an infinite concept map of and interpretation of a propaganda article and thesis, my focus at the moment is on small group propaganda, the intentional and the unintentional that occurs within the musical community between musicians and bands and fans as well as between fans discussing favorite songs and albums in small groups in physical space as well as virtual space.  This study begins here and it never ends as there are infinite aspects of this topic that I will uncover and discuss.

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Preliminary Propaganda Concept Map With Latest Revisions

19 March 2013 18:10 in Advertising-Propaganda, Cultural Conditioning, Cultural-Propaganda, Gender-Propaganda, Inequality, Marketing-Propaganda, Media-Propaganda, Music-Propaganda, News-Propaganda, Personal-Propaganda, Promotional-Propaganda, Propaganda, Publicity-Propaganda, Religious-Propaganda, Sexual-Propaganda, Small Group-Propaganda | Permalink

 

Please click for larger view.

Please click for larger view.

 

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Reflections On Chapter 2 of Where The Music Takes You: The Social Psychology Of Music Subcultures

12 March 2013 16:01 in Cultural Conditioning, Music-Propaganda, Symbolic Interactionism | Permalink

While I agree that the idea of attempting to distill the contents of a book into a few pages after only reading one chapter seems a little far-fetched, it is a rather broad chapter that introduces us to the phenomenon of jamband subculture.  I would also like to dig a little deeper into the remaining chapters later.  For now, there is Chapter 2, “Introduction to Jamband Subculture,” that introduces the subject to students and the general public interested in jam bands and their communities.  It is a comprehensive chapter encompassing everything from Durkheim’s rituals, symbolic interactionism, and even small group music and promotional-propaganda. The latter is never mentioned directly, but it is obvious in this context.

I have friends interested in jam bands, but I was never really interested in jam band music as such because I never saw jam bands as anything other that the spiritual and musical children of the Grateful Dead’s living homage to Bill Monroe:  Acoustic folk-rock with extended jams thrown in to prove musical prowess.  However, I have always had a fascination with music and attending as many music festivals as possible (This apparently places me on the fringes of jamband subculture.).  It seems that jam bands are more than that and are everywhere, from rock, to folk, to Black American Music.  And like emo, some bands are eager to shed themselves of that jam band label.  But the jamband communities seem to appreciate all of the culture that is associated with such a subculture, and so do I.

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Observation On My First Sociological Interview

12 March 2013 15:56 in Music-Propaganda | Permalink

monica2I began this interview and wrote the interview questions making certain assumptions, blindly, without considering the context of the questions I was asking and the results I was looking for.  This wasn’t just an interview like the others I had conducted in the past for www.radiocasbah.com, where I engaged in an informal conversation with a musician and posted it to my web site.  There was and is a more specific agenda, a deeper sociological implication to this.

I wrote the questions, expanded them as effectively as I thought I could and, I received a great response from the musician I interviewed.  I received some responses that hint where I want to take this subject.  But I did not dig deep enough.  I did not ask any follow up questions based on her responses.  Reflecting on the interview, I now realize that I asked questions that I knew all of the answers to, more or less.

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Observations On Visual Data

12 March 2013 15:54 in Media-Propaganda, Music-Propaganda, Personal-Propaganda, Promotional-Propaganda | Permalink

Most of the visual data that I selected was deliberate, from my collection of photos taken over the last several years for my Internet Radio web site, www.radiocasbah.com, and from the front page of my Facebook feed relating to musicians that I know and the ever-present promotional-propaganda on the Facebook side panel.  The only errant photo was the photo used from Subjectivity, Role, Access, Ethics.  The subject of that paper did not lend itself too readily to the photos that I have since none were ever taken as I interviewed the various musicians I interviewed since 2005.

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Reflections On Facebook Observations

12 March 2013 15:53 in Marketing-Propaganda, Media-Propaganda, Music-Propaganda, Promotional-Propaganda, Symbolic Interactionism | Permalink

facebook2While I made my observations of musical artists’ publicity-propaganda on my Facebook page feed over a week ago, I observe this activity daily in my personal life so these observations are ongoing and continuous.  Facebook is just the latest, but not necessarily the greatest addition to self-promotional-propaganda.  There are thousands of platforms on the Internet that all foster this ethic.

Facebook allows for small group conversations around all sorts of topics, fostering these small group gatherings through the avenues that are used to advertise on Facebook through the “Likes” of individual, band, product, and even company web pages.  Daily, hourly, this happens, and it happens often enough where I see multiple friends talking about a product or service (defined as the above page “likes”), “liking” it and telling additional Facebook friends.  This is promotional- and advertising-propaganda in small groups, specifically unintentional propaganda.  While this has always happened in public spheres, the Internet has made it more visible and has caused corporations to reassess and implement additional creative means to promote themselves.  Viral video contests sponsored by these corporations are another means of promotional-propaganda from person to person.

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What Is Institutional Ethnography?

25 February 2013 16:29 in Cultural-Propaganda, Inequality, Media-Propaganda | Permalink

What is institutional ethnography?  At a basic level, institutional ethnography is the study of the social organization of everyday life.  What it does not do is objectify the subjects or people into objectifications of the everyday world that one is studying.  The social ontology of institutional ethnography, its underlying fundamental, essential principle, is that the social is something that unites people’s activities.  As I see in the day to day everyday, people “do” things.  However, there is more to it than this basic definition.  There are key features that determine its scope and its facets.

Institutional ethnography’s emphasis is on research as a form of discovery rather than the testing of a hypothesis.  In sociology, the emphasis is on conducting studies, interviews, and research to support a preexistent hypothesis rather than exploring a problem from the bottom, from the people affected most and tracing it up a chain of command to the very institution or institutions “controlling” the subjects.  Institutional ethnography accomplishes this through the use of interviews “for the investigation of organizational and institutional processes.” (IEAP:  15) As a result, practitioners of institutional ethnography begin where they are and discover the institutional organizations of power that control people experiences.

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Facebook Promotional-Propaganda Observations

22 February 2013 20:15 in Media Studies, Media-Propaganda, Music-Propaganda, Promotional-Propaganda | Permalink

This is an observation from the main page of my Facebook feed.

This is an observation from the main page of my Facebook feed.

While I completed this observation on 18 and 19 February, I observe this phenomenon daily on the Internet and in the external world.  I have observed all varieties of propaganda in the everyday for far longer than Facebook has been around, Facebook exemplifies what is most fascinating about this phenomenon:  the example of unintentional propaganda of an artist’s performance at a Renaissance Faire and the unintentional propaganda “like” of a large music information web site on the top right. Both are examples of small group propaganda in the social network sphere.  They appear on the pages of the companies in question, and they appear on the artists’ pages themselves.

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Public Relations Propaganda At Its Best

6 February 2013 11:34 in Cultural Conditioning | Permalink

Subjectivity, Role, Access, Ethics

3 February 2013 20:21 in Advertising-Propaganda, Cultural Conditioning, Marketing-Propaganda, Media-Propaganda, Music-Propaganda, Personal-Propaganda, Publicity-Propaganda | Permalink

(This something that I have considered since working for local network television news.  The readings lately and the other students viewpoint on this have just codified what I have known all along.  Now I just have to find a way to research with this in mind.  Stay tuned.)

Everyone has a bias, and objectivity is an illusion.  If one admits and begins from this assumption, then individually, each of us can step back and analyse those biases to determine each of our qualifications or disqualifications for a particular study.  However, if each of us can scrutinize those biases in depth and lay them out in the research study for all to see, construct study questions in such a way that the bias is minimized (admittedly difficult), allow the study participants to speak for themselves without any interpretational editing after the fact, and minimize the usage of linguistically loaded language that implies inferiority or superiority, then a valuable research study might result.

All of these issues and more are built into what Davidson describes in the table of four-fold perspective on subjectivity in Qualitative Research Design for the Software User.  The subjectivity and role of the researcher are things that cannot be realistically controlled, given our individual environmental and cultural conditioning.  Subjectivity, especially, is something that most individuals take for granted.  Individuals assume that most people in their immediate surroundings are similar to  them, but when behaviour that is counter or alien to what they assumed or expected, the response can be inconsiderate, and sometimes even culturally insensitive.  Role can be controlled to some extent by certain personalities, but it is still subject to the same environment and cultural conditioning.  Admitting these shortcomings as much as possible places more value on an individual as a researcher and on the research he or she is conducting.

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My Driving Research Interest

23 January 2013 07:10 in Advertising-Propaganda, Cultural Conditioning, Marketing-Propaganda, Media Studies, Media-Propaganda, Music, Music-Propaganda, Personal-Propaganda, Propaganda, Publicity-Propaganda, Religious-Propaganda | Permalink

Changing Modes 8 June 2011, Atlanta, GA

Changing Modes 8 June 2011, Atlanta, GA

My driving research interests are more like lifelong passions, as any glance into one of several bookshelves of my library will reveal.  However, those interests are usually distilled into a few topics that contain a myriad of additional subjects.  I am fascinated by sociology in general, but I am especially fascinated by how people react and act in various contexts towards other people whether they are individuals or small groups and vice versa.  This fascination predates my knowledge of Erving Goffman, though Goffman and a handful of others have codified this interest into the myriad of interests that encompass small group propaganda.  That driving research interest has been and will be the subject of several papers, a thesis, and several conference presentations.

Previously, I stated that my driving interests contain a myriad of additional subjects as well. This is especially true of my interest in music, local, independent, and unsigned musical artists.  Here, my two lifelong interests in propaganda and music converged in New York when I attempted to be a big-picture propagandist, what is commonly called a publicist, for a few bands and one open mic night at a New York bar on the Lower East Side.  I succeeded in achieving some publicity in a few local newspapers (which I am pretty proud of), but I realized shortly that I was always mediocre as a publicity propagandist at best.  I have always understood the whys of propaganda better than those who practice it, but the how was always elusive.  When I decided to return to school for a master’s degree, I toyed with the idea of an MBA in Marketing for a quick minute until I looked into the propaganda bookcase and saw nothing but sociologists or practitioners influenced by sociologists. Marketing would have also bored me to tears.

And so I arrived at sociology and I arrive at Music and Propaganda as driving research interest.  I suspect that this driving research interest will be fine-tuned in the near future, but I would like to dig a little deeper into how musical artists, independent of labels (or signed to a label so small there is no advertising propaganda budget), use propaganda to promote themselves to sell “merch,” promote themselves as artists, and promote a series of shows, whether local, regional, national, or international.  It is independent artists that I am interested in,  and so it is small group propaganda that is still the most applicable.

Who I Am As A Sociologist

14 January 2013 09:42 in Cultural Conditioning, Media Studies, Music, Propaganda | Permalink

Baby Baby at Atlanta’s Drunken Unicorn, October 2011

Baby Baby at Atlanta’s Drunken Unicorn, October 2011

Who I am as a sociologist is, by turns, a complex question, as well as one that will never be fully defined as I continue to evolve year by year, learning and researching people and their environments from the simple to the complex.  How and why I arrived at this present destination is also complex, but it is also may be a little simpler to answer.

People and their environments have always fascinated me.  History was a favorite subject in public school as I studied what was assigned and attempted to study what school didn’t teach from its unbalanced perspective of the United States as a victor in a series of national conquests where I looked for connections to my family’s history in the founding of California.  My grandmother filled me with stories of her life and the lives of my grandfather and their children, and the stories were always colourful, which may be why I love telling stories myself.  It was always easy to ask why and receive an answer receive and intelligent answer from my grandmother.  It is still a habit, and it fuels my love of research and inquiry.

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Propaganda as Musical Pop Culture Volume II

29 December 2012 22:36 in Cultural Conditioning, Media Studies, Music, Propaganda, Technology | Permalink

And there is still more, some popular and some early seminal punk.  We begin with Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry. As always, if you find pr write any worthy of consideration, send them my way, and we may get to a few more additions and editions of these.

 

Don Henley:  Dirty Laundry

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Memories Of Granny Josefina

16 December 2012 15:54 in Cultural Conditioning | Permalink

Josephine Pitti Kelsay is my grandmother.   Her presence looms larger in my life than any other.  She still remains as strong an influence as she ever was, guiding my better judgement in learning, desires, and even dreams.  Her memories, her laughter, her offbeat and lucid political commentary, and the cleanest dirty jokes you have ever heard continue to amaze and mystify me daily.  She spoke better Spanish than anyone I have ever known.  She was my first mentor and, along with my grandfather, Daniel Paul Kelsay, Sr., my primary parental figures and emotional support when I was growing up.  What good I contribute to the universe, is a direct result of their influence.   While we talked almost every day, and I will always talk to her, chatting, joking, debating, or empathising, she will not be able to quip back like she once did.

Stories and memories flood over me like a mountain river that chills with wonder, power and amazement:  The song, La Vie En Rose, walking to school in Illinois and California in her quaint little dress, running through a watermelon patch with her baby brother, Johnny, meeting the janitor as a high school junior who would soon become my Gramps, the black widow spider hiding near the gas pedal on her way to work, the coffee pot “accidentally pouring over Gramps at breakfast,” and even the song title, Goodnight Irene that would become a favoured curse phrase.  She was also the best damn publicist and campaign manager that my Gramps could ever wish for as a California county sheriff, remembering names and faces of constituents and colleagues that Gramps could seldom recall over the twenty-four years he held that post.  Granny Josefina was and is a rare gift, few will ever take her place.

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Propaganda And Goffman’s Face-To-Face Interactions

11 December 2012 23:55 in Cultural Conditioning, Inequality, Masculinity, Media Studies, Music, Propaganda | Permalink

While Erving Goffman expanded the scope and study of sociology to face-to-face interactions between individuals and small group gatherings, little has been said of the application of those ideas to propaganda on a personal level.  I will argue that Goffman’s study of frame analysis and impression management apply to propaganda of various types that he may not have considered, including the propaganda that occurs in public relations, advertising, marketing (terms that are used to avoid any negative connotation described below), “traditional” political propaganda, and “pure” personal propaganda (that is, not related to or influenced by any of the above, though this rarely happens today), that influence the personal propaganda that takes place in face-to-face networking groups, collectives and cliques, and Internet social networks, bulletin boards, and forums..

In this analysis, the application of expectation states theory is particularly relevant where external status characteristics, including age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, education, race, and ethnicity are the externally created status differences that “determine the power-prestige order of the group whether or not the initial status differences are relevant to the group’s task.”  (Berger, et al:  149).  In every group or gathering, large, small, or Internet-based, these unspoken hierarchies exist, hierarchies that are based upon the above characteristics fueled and fed by culture, environment, and the reinforcement of generalities that allow us to distinguish ourselves from others, to separate ourselves from those that are different.  David Hume calls this general rules, the source of prejudice.

An Irishman cannot have with, and a Frenchman cannot have solidity, for which reason, tho’ the conversation of the former be visibly very agreeable, and of the latter very judicious, we have entertain’d such a prejudice against them, that they must be dunces or fops.  Human nature is very subject to errors of this kind. (Hume 2000:  99-100).

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Inequality Viewed Through The Rromani Experience

11 December 2012 23:28 in Cultural Conditioning, Inequality, Music | Permalink

While general study can encompass a wide subject area, it does not cover every nuance of our population.  The subject of inequality touches upon almost everyone in our society and others, barring the standard bearer of privilege, the wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, but we can only discuss general aspects of that inequality within a given time frame.  It remains for us individually and collectively to research other important aspects more in depth. These include people of colour, women, the poor, and even the LGBT communities.  But there is also another that is of equal importance that receives short shrift in most societies, the Rromani, euphemistically referred to as gypsies (usually reduced to a lower-case word to emphasise their status as second-class citizens or worse as well as their unimportance.  This synthesis of readings from our study of inequality will briefly examine Rromani prejudice, state sponsored as well as those practices sanctioned by the state and perpetrated by individuals and groups viewed through those texts as well as additional texts related to the Rromani. While I will attempt to cover a wide area, this is only a brief introduction to the inequality suffered by the Rroma.

Even while violence and prejudice against the Rromani have continued for centuries, certain aspects of their culture have been embraced and absorbed by the dominant culture, including (aspects of) tango as well as flamenco dancing and music.  There are countless other influences, but it puzzles and shocks me that society, any society, could be so duplicitous to adapt certain rich cultural contributions but reject the people who introduced those contributions outright.  However, a majority of people in the United States has done the very same thing to its Black community in relation to its cultural contributions.  Witness the experience of Django Reinhardt during his tour of the United States with Duke Ellington’s orchestra.

As a Romany in France, Django suffered incidents of enduring racism against his own people and quickly perceived and rebelled against any discrimination of his fellow bandmates. . . . . Drummer Sonny Greer recalled:  “. . . .So he, a French boy, say, ‘Come on Sonny, we go have a drink.’  I say all right.  So we go in this high-class joint, se stand at the bar, cat don’t pay him no mind. . . . . And the guy says, ‘I can serve you Mister,’ but he wouldn’t serve me. (Dregni 2004: 217)

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Masculinities Viewed Through Cultural Crisis

11 December 2012 23:21 in Cultural Conditioning, Masculinity, Media Studies | Permalink

Masculinities can be defined from a myriad of perspectives, and so I reaffirm here what has been an obvious fact of life all along and should probably be a truism, that there are as many definitions of masculinity as there are people populating the planet.  When the traditional cultural definition of masculinity contradicts what someone is, the way someone wants to be in their skin, and the way he or she feels most comfortable, there is a crisis of identity, and there is a crisis of culture.  The two will clash and the result will be either a compromise or a loss.

In the face of a wave of research and writing that I have come to call “the new theories of sexualities,” we can now see that men change (just like women) across time, space, and contexts.  Sexualities are never simple, biological facts, however much some people protest that they are.  Indeed for some commentators, “Sexuality is so diverse, confusing, and culturally informed that perhaps it is beyond any real understanding. (Kimmel, et al 2004:  180).

It is precisely at the point where multifaceted aspects of masculinity contradict the varied aspects of a culture or, truly, multiple cultures within a society that the contrast becomes intriguing.  This is no more evident than in the following films:  Y Tu Mama Tambien (directed by Alfonso Cuoron), Boy A (directed by John Crowley), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (directed by Tommy Lee Jones), and The Namesake (directed by Mira Nair).

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The History Of Rromani Inequality

29 November 2012 22:07 in Cultural Conditioning | Permalink

At some point in the future, I may probably teach a class on this subject since it is something I feel very strongly about.  For now, this is an assignment for a class, an annotated bibliography for a class I would like to teach.  The following will be a bibliography devoted to the inequality and history of the Rromani Peoples (prejudicially referred to as gypsies by gadje or non-Romanis).  This bibliography will be primarily intended for the students of a class on this subject as well as those interested in further learning about the subject.  While not every book will be assigned in whole, certain sections will.  This may vary from class to class to give each student as broad an overview as possible.

Hancock, I. (2002). We are the Romani People. Hertfordshire: University Of Hertfordshire Press.  Dr Ian Hancock (a Rromani himself), presents an overview of the Rromani from their point of view.  This is an introduction to the diversity of Rromani life, culture, and ritual, including its history, Indian migration and the reasons for the shifts in migration, as well as the history of the enslavement of the Rromani in Romania. He also provides cultural sensitivity advice for the gadje in their encounters with the Rromani.

Stewart, M. (1997). The Time of the Gypsies. Boulder: Westview Press.  Michael Stewart gives an overview of the Hungarian Rromani in relation to Austrio-Hungarian policies and their evolution in Communist Europe, and post communist Hungary.  He uses the plight of the Rromani during these regimes to better understand the regimes themselves.  Spending time among the Rromani as an anthropologist, speaking with them in their tongue, he allows them to speak for themselves to show us that we are all part of our one shared social network, in spite of differing histories and cultures.

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Mark Twain On Propaganda

18 November 2012 14:23 in Cultural Conditioning | Permalink

While he does not use the word outright, his description is a dead-on description of our discussion, the application of propaganda to Goffman’s impression management in the frame analysis of small groups.  Indeed, it’s still a “duck,” as they say.

“In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” In revised edition, chapter 78, p. 401, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1959, Charles Neider, Harper & Row.

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