internet

Actor Audie Murphy was the most highly-decorated soldier in World War II, from which he later suffered insomnia, depression, and nightmares. Today some people want to use him as a propaganda symbol in support of current wars.Viral emails have emerged as a form of stealth propaganda recently, most noticeably in the recent U.S. presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was dogged with false claims that he was a Muslim, that he was refused to salute the American flag, that he was not a U.S. citizen and so forth. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, attempted to trace the chain of one of those emails and found what the Washington Post called "valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age." She noted that the anonymous nature of viral emails, combined with the word-of-mouth way that they spread, makes them hard to counter. "This kind of misinformation campaign short-circuits judgment," she said. "It also aggressively disregards the fundamental principle of free societies that one be able to debate one's accusers."

Recently a friend forwarded me a viral email that has apparently been circulating since at least June of this year. I haven't seen it previously, but a Google search turned up several copies on various websites. This particular viral message was unrelated to Obama or the presidential campaign but carries its own load of rhetoric aimed at shaping public opinion. On the principle that these subterranean propaganda campaigns ought to be openly discussed and exposed, I thought I'd respond to this one publicly.

A coalition of open records, good government and research groups submitted "a lengthy to-do list for President-elect Barack Obama and Congress." Their recommendations include overturning the "Ashcroft memo," which made it easier for federal agencies to refuse requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); rescinding Executive Order #13233, which limits access to historical presidential records; directing the new Attorney General "to advise agencies how to increase the presumption of openness" under FOIA; encouraging Congress "to establish a criminal penalty for willful concealment or destruction of non-exempt agency records requested under FOIA." The Obama transition website, Change.gov, "once contained pages describing how it would use technology to provide more information to the public," reports ProPublica, "but the transition team took down the pages to 'retool' them." The since-disappeared transparency ideas included establishing a public "contracts and influence" database of federal contractors and their lobbying expenditures, and posting all non-emergency bills on the White House website for five days, before they're signed into law.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to open up the "white spaces" on the television spectrum that will be available when the U.S. switches from analog to all-digital in February 2009. Sascha Meinrath, research director of the wireless future program at the New America Foundation, said that "All the PR spin and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) failed in the face of physics and the ground reality of engineering." Wired.com sees consumers as the big winners, but there are corporations that will benefit as well. Intel's chips could power new devices made by companies like Motorola, Philips, and Dell that will be used to access the broadband services in the newly available whites spaces. On the other hand, there are industry losers as well. Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast "have paid billions over the years to gain exclusive rights to the spectrum," which will now disappear. "All those problems of diversity on the airwaves and access to internet broadband connectivity are predicated on the artificial scarcity of airwaves," Meinrath said. "They will be alleviated."

The fictional roommates"'Brand integration' and 'immersive' commercial environments" are becoming more commonplace, as the range of media formats and platforms widens and viewers can increasingly avoid commercials, reports Gloria Goodale. This "blurring of story and selling" goes beyond traditional product placement. For example, actors in the MySpace web video series "Roommates," which is sponsored by Ford and a contact lens company, use "their characters' online profiles to chat with fans and dish out information about their clothing and other products." Marketing professor David Howard says the trend creates "more potential for manipulation." In one instance, amateur-seeming web videos "depicting cellphone signals powerful enough to pop corn kernels ... ignited a flurry of news coverage about the topic of possible brain damage." But the videos were "subtle" ads for wireless headsets. Another online video, of a girl "leaping to her feet to make a spectacular catch at a minor-league baseball game" and then returning to her seat, next to a bottle of Gatorade, "easily passed as an actual event." Instead, it was a Gatorade ad, which played on television (identified as an ad) after the online version had generated enough "buzz." Global spending on all types of product placement is expected to nearly double, "from $3 billion in 2006 to $5.6 billion by 2010."