Today we had Marquis McNeil from msinteractive come in and demo his Perception Analyzer in Technologies of Persuasion.
Rushkoff had the idea of going all meta and using the dials to register our feelings about Frank Luntz’s uses of the same technology in The Persuaders.
It was really interesting to see the effect the dials have on how you rate the thing you’re watching – they definitely bring their own personality to the proceedings. The class noted a tendency to keep some extra space in reserve in case you hate something even more in the future than you do right now.
Speaking of The Persuaders – the best line in it is when a guy who’s just been asked to tell a market researcher how eating bread makes him feel. He is asked whether he feels anxious, lonely, trusting and all these other things. At the end he’s like “Can I ask a question? Do you find many people say eating bread makes them feel lonely?” He is my hero.
For class we read The Culture Industry. What fun. I love Theodore Adorno’s grumpy old European man thing – hating Jazz and going on about how much more discipline is in old forms from an age where artists were patronised by the aristocracy.
That aside, it is one of the most prescient pieces of writing I’ve ever read. It’s proven an extremely useful model for my understanding of the world since I first read it.
This is what he has to say about language:
“By the language he speaks, he makes his own contribution to culture as publicity. The more completely language is lost in the announcement, the more words are debased as substantial vehicles of meaning and become signs devoid of quality; the more purely and transparently words communicate what is intended, the more impenetrable they become.”
He could almost be talking about Frank Luntz except he didn’t quite anticipate his disingenuousness and willingness to deliberately mislead.
