Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture To Popular Culture

Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive
it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text
i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda
in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively
it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts