Category: Critical Sociology
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Conspiracism, Denialism & The “Danger of Incomplete Critique”
Conspiracy theorists erase the human aspect of history. My child — who lived, who was a real person — is basically going to be erased. Lenny Pozner, father of one of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims. As interesting as exploring the crazy and sometimes quirky world of the things and batshit alternative histories…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Geopolitical Propaganda & “Multipolar” Confusionism
I’ve already mentioned imperialist and militarist propaganda: those are part of and intertwine with geopolitical propaganda more generally. In this modern world-system built on social hierarchies, state/colonial violence and the “uneven and combined” geography of capital, so-called geopolitics/international politics is merely the sphere of the cruel and Machiavellian competition and interactions between the representatives/agents of…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: The Culture Industry & The Spectacle
As I mentioned in the previous section, I’m not familiar enough with the critical discussions/literature on the “culture industry”, the “spectacle” and modern culture/art (Friedriech Kracauer, György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertol Brecht, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Roland Barthes, Oskar Negt/Alexander Kluge, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, etc.) to get into an…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Influencers, Religion/Cults, Quackery and Scams
Religious and cultic propaganda certainly cannot be overlooked, insofar as both religions and specific cults like Scientology or the Moonies, have developed and always rely on extensive systems of both internal and external propaganda. The internal front refers largely to relational and ideological indoctrination within the groups or institutions, while the external PR front slanders…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Copaganda
One of the most disgusting forms of propaganda is the ideological/cultural glorification and legitimization/rationalization of policing, often referred to as copaganda. This is something that E. P. Thompson already noted more than fourty years ago (and doubtless, many poor and oppressed people decades before that): Without using the term copaganda, historian E.P. Thompson in the…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Imperialist, Militarist and Genocidal/Settler Propaganda
Indeed, the anti-trans and anti-homeless propaganda cited above can and should be defined as a form of genocidal discourse, namely “a widely used and accepted language of negation, destruction and erasure targeted at a particular group or groups” (Townsend 2014 : 9). Trans and homeless people are not merely depicted pejoratively, their very existence is…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Dehumanizations, Reactionary Panics and Right Wing Propaganda
Structures of violence and oppression – as well as specific sociopolitical outbursts or projects that stand out in the scale and intensity of their brutality (from lynchings and pogroms to full systems of apartheid and/or genocide) – rely on the systematic dehumanization of certain groups (usually marginalized, but not necessarily). This process of ideological and…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Capitalist Propaganda & Bourgeois Ideology
One of the least recognized/discussed yet most blatant forms of propaganda is capitalist or bourgeois propaganda. There are two dimensions: what we might call economic propaganda – as a direct part of the capitalist production/”consumption” process – on the one hand, and the broader ideological-cultural hegemony of capital, on the other hand. The latter is…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: State, Media and Nationalism
States – and their respective regimes/govts – obviously use and rely on both domestic/internal and transnational/external propaganda. A lot of their actions can be simply defined/explained through a so-called “realist” viewpoint on both levels: in a word, it’s about defending and reinforcing one state/country and/or regime’s own power, interests and resources, “sphere of influence”, reputation/image,…
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Notes on Media Ecology, Disinformation & Propaganda, Pt. III: Outline
This section is (slightly^^) less theoretical and more straigthforward, because it’s an overview of some of the primary actors of modern propaganda and their concrete ideological and strategical intentions. While the theoretical (e.g. causal) relationship(s) between the structural or collective level of systemic ideology/dehumanizations/culture, and individuals’ specific ideological developments and politicizations, is very complex and…