[The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term “propaganda,” incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.” These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

Noam Chomsky - “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream” June 1997

(Source: wilkinsky.us)

In Europe, they call this ‘the right to be forgotten.’ And there’s been a public dialogue over the past six months or so about honoring the ‘right to be forgotten.’ Here in the United States, we’re just starting to have that in the context of the broader privacy debate. But everybody understands this is an issue.

Keeping Your Kids Safe Online: It’s ‘Common Sense’

Steyer says he thinks websites and apps should allow kids under 18 to opt in, not opt out, when giving out personal information. He also strongly advocates for an “eraser button” to remove personal information and for tracking programs to stop tracking kids.

“Last year, the Wall Street Journal found that 30 percent more tracking cookies were being used on kids’ [websites] than on ones for general audiences,” he says. “So these are very basic things, but they will have an extraordinary impact on protecting privacy if we would just enact them.”

(Source: wilkinsky.us)

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook. Over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook.

“Affairs happen with a lightning speed on Facebook,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who authored the book “Facebook and Your Marriage” with his wife Kelli. In the real world, he says, office romances and out-of-town trysts can take months or even years to develop. “On Facebook,” he says, “they happen in just a few clicks.” The social network is different from most social networks or dating sites in that it both re-connects old flames and allows people to “friend” someone they may only met once in passing. “It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair,” he says.

Does Facebook Wreck Marriages? [read]

(Source: wilkinsky.us)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is now, by far, the largest funder of work in this country on childhood obesity. They’re spending $100 million a year on the problem. The food industry spends that amount every year by Jan. 4, just marketing junk food – just to children.

Psychologist Kelly Brownell on how food companies market junk food to kids. (via nprfreshair)

(via nprfreshair)