Book Review: Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2006. 280 pp. ISBN 0—252—03059—1 (hbk)
To human consciousness, the epoch of the machine is one of hope and horror, ambiguous and confusi... more To human consciousness, the epoch of the machine is one of hope and horror, ambiguous and confusing. While at one moment technology is equated with progress and promises us a world of plenty, free from toil, in the next it evokes the vision of a world gone mad, out of control, ...
Ingenieros en la sombra: biografía de una idea: Unseen Engineers: Biography of an Idea
... Stuart Ewen is also author of Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of ... more ... Stuart Ewen is also author of Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Society (1977), All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary (1988) and, written in collaboration with Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images ...
... Requests for reprints should be sent to Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Annenberg School for Communic... more ... Requests for reprints should be sent to Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Annenberg School for Communica-tion, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt ... Senate inquires led by Senator Pastori), and in civil disorders (eg, the McCone Commission and the 1967 Kerner Commission). ...
... I agree with what both Donny and Jerry in terms of the impact of political advertising if, ... more ... I agree with what both Donny and Jerry in terms of the impact of political advertising if, by that, we mean paid-for, placed political advertising ... people who defeated national health care for the AMA in the late '40s, and they were the real tutors of both Reagan and Nixon in terms ...
Below is a selection from an essay titled "Poverty," written by Ira Steward, a machinist turned l... more Below is a selection from an essay titled "Poverty," written by Ira Steward, a machinist turned labor organizer who was a key founder of Grand Eight Hour League of Massachusetts. Steward was an influential activist and a leading American figure in the struggle to improve the general living conditions of working men and women and to bring an end to the poverty that he saw as a pervasive product of industrial capitalism as it expanded exponentially in the years following the Civil War. This essay first appeared in 1873, in the Fourth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, published under the stewardship of Carroll D. Wright, who would later become the first U.S. commissioner of labor. Wright was one of the United States' most influential early sociologists and believed that a combination of statistics and critical analysis could help bring about "the amelioration of unfavorable conditions" affecting a growing swathe of the country's population. During his leadership in Massachusetts, the bureau's reports promoted the idea that an informed populace was the best route to bringing about social and economic justice. "Any means which the Legislature can adopt which will add to the information of the people on subjects which concern their daily lives are of untold value," he wrote. "To popularize statistics, to put them before the masses in a way which shall attract, and yet not deceive, is a work every government which cares for its future stability should encourage and enlarge. " Under Wright's direction, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics sought to enlighten laboring people that they might be in a position to comprehend the scope of injustice and bring about the reforms that indus
Pensar la Publicidad. Revista Internacional de Investigaciones Publicitarias, Apr 17, 2008
Publicamos en el presente número un nuevo capítulo del libro del destacado investigador norteamer... more Publicamos en el presente número un nuevo capítulo del libro del destacado investigador norteamericano Stuart Ewen PR! A Social History of Spin (Basic Books, Nueva York, 1996), cuya traducción al castellano ha cedido expresamente el autor a nuestra revista. En esta nueva entrega, continuación de la publicada en el número 1 de Pensar la Publicidad, Ewen prosigue su indagación en torno a cómo se sentaron las bases de la ingeniería del consenso durante el periodo comprendido entre las dos guerras mundiales, en este caso centrándose en dos figuras clave en la historia de dicha ingeniería social: Walter Lippmann y Edward L. Bernays. Stuart Ewen es autor, además, de obras como Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Society (1977), All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary (1988) y, en colaboración con Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (2ª ed. 1992), la segunda de las cuales está traducida al castellano con el título Todas las imágenes del consumismo. La política de estilo en la cultura contemporánea (México, Grijalbo, 1991). Palabras clave: ingeniería del consenso; opinión pública; publicidad no pagada; agentes de prensa.
Buggy A ttack Batallion, E.P. Dutton &Co., New York, 1971,412 pp.* ". .. those who brought him up... more Buggy A ttack Batallion, E.P. Dutton &Co., New York, 1971,412 pp.* ". .. those who brought him up had declared a war of extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him the idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only a thin covering of the human."-Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf. As Charles Manson's "Family" prowled the Beverly Hills section of southern California, they (among other cultural contributions) created somewhat of a controversy among some of the more vocal elements in the "revolutionary youth culture." As Manson and his cohorts were longhairs and communalists, many among the forces of opposition in America felt themselves drawn to the defense of these desperados. Yet, considering the grotesque nature of the deed, it was not without difficulty that some among the enraged claimed Manson as their own. One of these whose initial interest in the Manson case was to try to vindicate these "wronged" members of the Woodstock Nation was ex-Fug, ex-Yippie, Ed Sanders, who has recently published a book on the Manson gang. And yet it is clear from his book, that intimacy with the mystical and satanic world of Manson's nomadic entourage proved too much even for Sanders' heroic adherence to what he had envisaged to be his people. For there in the desert sands of what some claim to be California, Sanders met Beelzebub himself. In terms of the contemporary "psychoanalytic" culture, he had seen that which according to Freud millenia of western civilization had socialized and domesticated: the Id, savage man in the savage state. Stripped of his civilization (in Sanders' mind the result of Manson's systematic and institutionalized rejection by that civilization), full of "mind-bending" drugs which divest the subjective self of its objective context, Manson had assembled a gang of various other lumpenized people, and had founded a community bound by the *The thoughts that I am trying to express in this piece are not primarily a review of Ed Sanders' book on Charlie Manson and the "Family". Neither are they a very well focused and documented discussion of Manson, per se. Rather, they are an attempt to develop certain ideas, relevant to our existence as a revolutionary movement, for which Sanders' book and the events and people which it depicts provided some insight. Second, I think that something must be emphasized if it does not convey itself effectively in the text. That is that the non-liberational violence that I am talking about is primarily expressed in American society as the violence of men. Its contours are essentially sexist and racist. Both of these forms of domination are clearly revealed by the Manson case. While violence is not intrinsically male, it social expression is male, and that is the empirical and concrete reality that we have to confront and alter, be it in a Manson, in the reactionary sections of this society, or in our history as a radical movement and our own daily praxis. One final note. There is always a difference between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. For, in the case of non-revolutionary violence with which I deal in this essay, it is clear that it is in the interest only of the oppressor. Yet, it is also true that in the madness of Imperialist society the acts of rage of oppressed people are often turned against themselves. This is a part of imperialist development, not in the sense that imperialism is the geographic and merely quantitative extension of the bourgeois means of production. Imperialism is the mode of late capitalism. Beyond gobbling up and transforming the productive capacities of pre-capitalist societies, there is the need to colonize all forms of existence, ultimately the intimate and sensual selves of all people under its power. To the extent that authoritarian violence, as I develop it below, has infiltrated the daily lives of the oppressed, it is none other than the tracks of this imperialism. At the same time, this is not to say that people hold no responsibility for their own lives. They do. Manson does. We do. Without such responsibility revolution is impossible.
Some of the most trenchant analyses of the relation between media and society are found within th... more Some of the most trenchant analyses of the relation between media and society are found within the products marketed by the media industries themselves. The arts historically have provided a haven for critical awareness and transcendant vision, but now products created ...
Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness
Contemporary Sociology, Jul 1, 1983
... to develop a means by which the law, knowledge, information, transactions, and priorities of ... more ... to develop a means by which the law, knowledge, information, transactions, and priorities of an expanding world market econ-omy ... forms of "culture." For more than five hundred years, the growth of capitalism has depended on the ability to manage and ... "Mass communication" is ...
There is a tendency in the study of mass communications to begin to fantasize about the social po... more There is a tendency in the study of mass communications to begin to fantasize about the social powers of technology to the point where the dimensions of the social context become essentially irrelevant. With the move toward consolidation and monopoly in the broad economic context, the consolidation of culture by technological forms of consciousness manipulation presents us with the illusion of a public mind that bodes either affirmative visions of a new perceptual order (e.g., ‘global village’ of McLuhan) or catastrophic csonceptions of a robotization and virtually unassailable totalitarianization of the thought processes. In the case of the former, affirmative, vision of mass media, John Fekete (in “McLuhanacy: Counterrevolution in Cultural Theory,” Telos no. 15, Spring, 1973) has offered an effective critique.
All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture
Journal of Marketing, Jul 1, 1991
... Steve Heller who brought my work to the attention of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, ... more ... Steve Heller who brought my work to the attention of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the ... high, my self-confidence flourished and I was one of the most popular teen age girls in Los ... has done some shots for agencies and he said that I should definitely take photos for a ...
Uploads
Papers by Stuart Ewen