Propaganda and the Role of the Audience?

Hello everyone!

I wanted to start off by saying that I am enjoying this book much more now that I got through Chapter One. I thought Chapter Three was easier to read and understand and had clearer points.

Anyway, I think I might have somewhat of an idea for this first paper, but I'm not really sure what direction I want to go in with it, I guess.

I really liked the section in Chapter Three about advertising and propaganda. Ramage says, "Near propaganda, thus, one might position marketing, advertising, salesmanship, talk radio call-in shows, political campaign speeches, and the like..." (75). This got me thinking about all the encounters we have everyday with advertisements, television, and political speeches where we, as a collective audience, simple "buy into" what we're told.

Then, about a page later, Ramage adds, "...subscribing to the propagandist's ends seems the surest way for the audience to act in the name of their beliefs. Which is why propagandists and advertisers study their audiences so acutely, reading and perofrming extensive research, forming "focus groups' to test appeals, conducting opinion polls, and so forth; as a general rule, the more to the left a persuasive activity is situated, the more thoroughly and scientifically do the practitioners study their audiences, not so as to learn from them but so as to find out how best to take advantage of them" (77).

The entire section on propaganda, especially the last quote from page 77 made me think about propaganda in terms of the audience who receives it and subscribes to it. I'm hoping to talk about propaganda from the audience/general public's perspective and discuss their role in some way, since without a subscribing audience, there would be no propaganda.