"Useful Cinema," of What Use?: Assessing the Role of Motion Pictures in the Largest Public Relations Campaign of the 1920s
Using testimony and subpoenaed exhibits published in the seventy-two-volume record of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, this article traces the role of motion pictures in the private utility industry’s public relations campaign against municipal ownership and federal regulation in the 1920s. This article reconstructs the utility companies’ decision to employ films in its campaign; the production, distribution, and exhibition strategies for its motion pictures; and the relationship of producers to sponsoring organizations. Ultimately, the article argues that the use of film in this campaign was experimental and, relative to other media, limited, but by investigating such experiments with film, we can identify institutional agents struggling to find a “use” for cinema, thereby enabling media historians both to identify what determinants might cause an organization to find cinema more or less useful at different historical moments and to better assess cinema’s changing cultural status and social functions.
The fact of uncertainty, the uncertainty of facts and the cultural resonance of doubt
Sixty years after industry executives first decided to fight the facts of tobacco, the exploitation of doubt and uncertainty as a defensive tactic has spread to a diverse set of industries and issues with an interest in challenging scientific evidence. However, one can find examples of doubt-mongering before tobacco. One involves the early history of electricity generation in the USA. In the 1920s, the American National Electric Light Association ran a major propaganda campaign against public sector electricity generation, focused on the insistence that privately generated electricity was cheaper and that public power generation was socialistic and therefore un-American. This campaign included advertisements, editorials (generally ghost-written), the rewriting of textbooks and the development of high school and college curricula designed to cast doubt on the cost-effectiveness of public electricity generation and extol the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. It worked in large part by finding, cultivating and paying experts to endorse the industry’s claims in the mass media and the public debate, and to legitimatize the alterations to textbooks and curricula. The similarities between the electric industry strategy and the defence of tobacco, lead paint and fossil fuels suggests that these strategies work for reasons that are not specific to the particular technical claims under consideration. This paper argues that a reason for the cultural persistence of doubt is what we may label the ‘fact of uncertainty’. Uncertainty is intrinsic to science, and this creates vulnerabilities that interested parties may, and commonly do, exploit, both by attempting to challenge the specific conclusions of technical experts and by implying that those conclusions threaten other social values.
Philosophy in a new key : a study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art
A Prefatory Notes to the Third Edition Preface to the Edition of 1951 Chapter 1: The New Key Chapter 2: Symbolic Transformations Chapter 3: The Logic of Signs and Symbols Chapter 4: Discursive Forms and Presentational Forms Chapter 5: Language Chapter 6: Life-Symbols: The Roots of Sacrament Chapter 7: Life-Symbols: The Roots of Myth Chapter 8: On Significance in Music Chapter 9: The Genesis of Artistic Import Chapter 10: The Fabric of Meaning