Crystallizing public opinion
Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion is the first book ever written about public relations.
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- “Crystallizing Public Opinion” (1923) is another important Bernays text.
- Read Crystalizing Public Opinion by Edward Bernays, father of public relations, to understand the origins of this practice. As thundergolfer mentioned, Manufacturing Consent is also a great read, though not as directly related.
https://www.amazon.com/Crystallizing-Public-Opinion-Edward-B...
- Beat me to it.
Also recommended to read Bernays' works themselves, particularly "Crystallizing Public Opinion" and "Propaganda."
Its like reading an engineer's manual for social control.
- This subject has received significant attention because as hard as it is to accept, it is all true. There has been a deliberate "Brave New World" effort to control the masses of democracies, under the assumption that leaving people to their own devices will ultimately result in chaos and destruction by someone else manipulating them (case in point: the Republican Party fiasco regarding Donald Trump)
If you are willing to see how your life and role as a passive consumer has been designed, watch the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," read Edward Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion," and "Propaganda," and for an extra dose of depression, Noam Chomsky's "Profit Over People."
Sorry.
- This is a pretty good piece, but it did surprise me that they are casting themselves as non-"traditional" PR while espousing more or less verbatim the genera of paths to success in public relations as outlined by the father of PR, Eddie Bernays. Most of the ideas discussed here bring 21st century updates and explanation of platforms and propagation of information for profit, but are comfortably within the Platonic forms espoused in Bernays masterpiece, Crystallizing Public Opinion, [0] which I highly suggest anyone interested in content marketing in this style to read.
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193543926X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...
- > This is going to make a great case study in the future on how to manage the relationship with user generated content sites
By providing members of the general public with quality news aggregation and community management tools, Reddit has thrown a wrench into the gears of public relations, which today still resembles the model Edward Bernays outlined back in the 1920s. (Aside: I highly recommend "Crystallizing Public Opinion" for anyone who cares about PR. It is sill relevant after 90 years.) For decades there was a gaping chasm between the general public and public figures, their representatives, and little need to revolutionize the field. Today that chasm isn't closing gradually; it's collapsing with enormous force. The bubble is bursting.
On Reddit, it just doesn't matter how much money you have or how much you've invested in the community or how much perceived legitimacy you have outside Reddit; anytime you make a comment, you're throwing yourself to the lions. Lions who upvote the most caustic, brutal, and incisive questions they can come up with, focusing the community's attention and demanding more of public figures in a way no one could have predicted in 1995 or even 2005.
Do you know what happens when you type "reddit new york times" into Google? The top result is /r/nytimes. As a subreddit, it is essentially dead. Do you think it would be dead if the New York Times did not have its own user-generated commenting system? Do you think the New York Times would like to remain in control of its own user-generated commenting system? Of course it would. The point I'm arguing is that Reddit, by its very nature, has helped push the New York Times to adopt a policy of accepting user comments, and many other news sources have followed suit. Of course this point is impossible to prove, but even if there is merely a grain of truth to it, the implications are that those who own the news business are no longer living in a unidirectional media world.
The larger argument is that Reddit (and its predecessors such as Slashdot and Digg of course; I've unfortunately unintentionally marginalized their role in this comment), by its very nature, has systematically and irrevocably altered the public's expectations for online participation and engagement. There is much more going on here than textbook case studies.
