Tuesday 5 November 2013

C Wright Mills strikes with a vengeance

Consider this, from "White Collar" -

Manipulations by professional image-makers are effective because their audiences do not or cannot know personally all the people they want to talk about or be like, and because they have an unconscious need to believe in certain types. In their need and inexperience, such audiences snatch and hold to the glimpses of types that are frozen into the language with which they see the world. Even when they meet the people behind the types face to face, previous images, linked deeply with feeling, blind them to what stands before them. Experience is trapped by false images, even as reality itself sometimes seems to imitate the soap opera and the publicity release.

False images, false imagery. This is the way our world is built - not through knowing people and power as they are or as they should be but through the manipulation of a few. Dr. Mills was speaking from the perspective of the early 1950s when he wrote this.
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