In relation to the problem that I noted with the obvious and announced ideological screwing with Wikipedia, which is not only known about but bragged about by groups like the Guerrilla Skeptics and other groups, and the apparent manipulation of Google results, also known to be real by the announced intentions of Google-bombers, such as Dan Savages "Santorum" effort, I've got to mention that the "Mere Exposure Effect" as something which could be enhanced by the hundreds of millions or more of Google searches done every day. If you're not familiar with the theory, which has some experimental evidence to support its existence, here is a very short definition of it.
Also called the familiarity principle, this psychological tendency causes individuals to prefer an option that they have been exposed to before to an option they have never encountered, even if the exposure to the first option was brief. The Mere Exposure Effect can be useful in marketing, as many forms of advertising can be used to create a feeling of familiarity with the product.
I chose that definition from "BusinessDictionary.com" to highlight the clear truth that for-profit companies know about and use that effect to sell products to people, and not only products but ideas. They have reason to believe they can convince people to pay for something merely by exposing them to the identity of products, with no more information about it than that. If that is true, and, unlike much of the psych research that is widely believed, this does look like it is based on some good experimentation, it poses a massive problem for democracy, made bigger by the existence of mass media of the type that Google is.
The mere exposure to what is at the top of the search results, most often in my experience, Wikipedia, will sell an idea, no matter how bad that idea is, how false it might be, how intentionally deceptive or malignant it is. While I've been called to work this morning and I won't get to write this up more fully, I don't see how the intentional manipulation of this skewing of our unintended tendencies can't but be a problem for democracy. In one of my most detested examples, there are those oil industry spots using the icy blonde to shill oil industry propaganda that are on over and over again, especially, in my experience, during TV news shows and during the liberal ghetto hours on MSNBC. What those ads sell is a major danger to life on Earth as is possible, a counter to the obviously correct science that tells us the oil and other extraction industries could end up getting us all killed and are, in fact, destroying species and entire environmental systems to make money for their owners and investors.
Democracy can't survive unless it adapts to the challenges it faces, especially those that are a result of corporations using science and the lessons of its successes in swaying public thought and opinion, often to the harm of the public. And there is no more serious lesson for us than in the successes of people such as the putrid "father of public reliations," Edward Bernays. If you are unfamiliar with him and his popularity gained by, literally, selling death to a dupable public, here's a description of one of his early campaigns of mass deception and his announced intentions of sabotaging democracy.
Bernays is known for inventing a number of the public relations and advertising techniques that revolutionized marketing in the early decades of the 20th century. For example, Bernays was a pioneer in creating what Daniel Boorstin would later call "pseudo-events:" staged happenings that were covered as news. One of his most famous stunts was to hire a number of young women to march in New York's Easter Parade in 1929 while smoking cigarettes-at that time public smoking by women was still widely regarded as taboo. He made sure photographers and reporters were on hand, and had encouraged the women to refer to the cigarettes as "torches of freedom." The women were thus depicted as fashionable rebels against the discrimination that forbade public smoking by women.
The event was front page news in papers all across the country on the following day, and in many cities women took to the streets with their cigarettes to show their support. What didn't come out until much later was the fact that Bernays had been under contract to the American Tobacco Company to expand the market for cigarettes among women.
In everything he did, Bernays began with the basic principles of the psychology of his time, and not only his uncle's. He felt that it was not reason but emotion and instinct that moved the common man, and throughout his long life he held onto the elitist view that those who understood this could and should control the masses. As he said in the first paragraph of his influential book Propaganda. "Those who manipulate [the habits and opinions of the masses]...constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
Any "civil libertarian" who pretends that self-government by people with an accurate grasp of reality hasn't been under the active attack of corporations and the scientists they hire to lie and manipulate an effective margin of deceived people is obviously in the pocket of the corporate liars or a duped, deceived fool who doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. And the free-speech absolutists are the main cheerleaders in the enablement of those stinking rich liars. I despise them even more than I despise the cynical ad men who they cover up for.
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