EOTO Project

For my EOTO project, I decided to pick the term propaganda. I think propaganda is really harmful, and I wanted to study more about it. According to Wikipedia, the definition is information that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. After my research, I thought deeply about propaganda, its past, the news, and how it could still be used in today’s society.

What this definition means to me is that propaganda is loaded advertisement that is used to sway viewers' opinions through strong or misleading language or imagery. I think that this form of information can be really harmful, and we should avoid allowing propaganda as much as possible. Some examples that come to mind include in Star Wars. I remember playing the old games and having my character walk through a planet controlled by the evil empire. I would see posters that explained how good the Sith emperor was, and how cool it was being a stormtrooper. I remember looking at it and wondering how anyone could possibly believe that. As we know from the movies, the sith are ruthless murderers, and being a stormtrooper is not very cool, all they do is get shot. But then you look at Nazis, which the Empire was based on, and their propaganda, and you see just how much it worked. They portrayed Jewish people as devils that needed to be killed, and how Hitler was a genius. These creations work really well to get German people to follow Hitler and start a second World War after they had just lost the first one. But the Nazis weren’t the only government to use propaganda. We also see racist examples of propaganda that the United States used. This is a very crude drawing of exaggerated features of a Japanese man with a gun saying, “Go ahead, please – TAKE DAY OFF!”, to try to scare people into working. This type of communication is wrong, harmful, and misleading. While it may have motivated people in the past, which was the government's intentions, it also embedded racist stereotypes which we still see used today.

I think overall, propaganda is a very poor technique that we need to outgrow. They may have been acceptable back in the 1940s when the entire world was at each other’s throats, but I think they should not be continued to be used now. I did a quick google search, and it seems at least in America and other democratic countries, propaganda has mostly died out. The idea is mostly still prevalent in non-democratic nations and in third world countries to try to control the populace. While I was happy to see that in the majority of first world countries it is dying out, I wonder about the validity of those statements. Propaganda has a negative connotation with it. Many Americans know it is bad, so I wonder if there are still ways that the government tries to sway our opinions without our knowledge, that is not outright propaganda. We have grown since the 1940s, but maybe the government’s abilities to influence our opinions have as well. Another video game reference, if I may. I have played many Call of Duty games, and similar games as well. In just about every single one of those games, the bad guys are the Russians. They are always the ones killing innocent people. They are portrayed are violent, ruthless, and almost inhuman. I remember playing a mission from Call of Duty Modern Warfare where you play as a Russian whose job is to carry out a mass shooting at a highly populated airport. Then you turn on the TV to watch a blockbuster movie about spies and war, and in so many of these instances, once again, the bad guys are the Russians. Air Force One, Rocky IV, Iron Man 2, all have Russian bad guys. The good guy American swoops in at the last possible second to stop the evil Russian overlord. I wonder if this is some form of modern propaganda to get us to dislike Russians. Tensions are high between us and them, as they recently hacked out elections, and tensions about a third world war were high earlier this year. I wonder if the reason why Russians are portrayed so negatively in our media is that the government wants us to feel this way so that we’ll be more supportive if a war breaks out. That’s just a theory, but for now, I’ll take off my tin foil hat.   

Anyways, we all know propaganda is bad, but I think there are also examples of modern propaganda. Politically loaded news companies leave people uninformed about the entirety of issues. We see Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC only telling viewers their side of the story, whether that be the right or left. I think this is, while certainly not outright propaganda, could be a modern form of it. Propaganda, based on its definition, is information that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda. I think by only telling one side of certain news stories, like these companies do, it could be seen as following that definition. In order for everyone to get a clear sense of what is actually going on in the world, and not hear the brainwashed ultra-liberal or conservative version of things, we must try to remain balance where we receive our news. These news sites have negatively influenced society to the point that I believe our country is more divided than ever before. They create tensions between different groups, whether that be the rich and the poor, the old and the young, and the Republicans and the Democrats. In order to limit this divide, it is important that these news sites tell both sides of every story, instead of trying to further narratives.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#History
https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/gi-roundtable-series/pamphlets/em-2-what-is-propaganda-(1944)/the-story-of-propaganda