Age of Propaganda: The Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson

Today, we are attacked not only by information but also by text messages, electronic messages as well as marketing messages. Along with the progress of modern technology, advertisers compete for consumer's attention. When we were crowded with these images, we no longer knew them, and fell into their well-designed trap. This action has led the mass media to adopt a more extreme strategy to draw demographics' attention. In the end, these companies promote and promote. This trend is pointed out in the nonfiction book "An Era of Advertisement: Persuasion of Use and Abuse" by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson.

Psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson (2001) wrote books on publicity to advertise telecommunications equipment and psychodynamics to Americans. People know how to offset their effects (p.xv). They are seeing publicity as abusive persuasive power, and I realize that publicity is not just a clever fraud. In a series of case studies they elaborated on advocacy strategies such as hiding important information, calling heuristic equipment, and using meaningless things.

When considering documentary as an example of publicity, it is necessary to clarify the distinction between persuasion and publicity. Not all media information with a compelling agenda should be seen as an example of publicity, or can not be seen. Persuasion can be defined as a process of attracting attention by providing a series of reasonable and emotional complaints to recipients of messages, with the purpose of enabling them to take action. According to Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, "(p) Ropapanda was originally defined as spreading prejudice and opinion by lying and fraud" (11). In the age of propaganda, persuasion against everyday use and abuse, Pratkanis and Aronson continue to define the evolution of more sophisticated tools.

Human beings have been shown to be cognitive demons; we are always attempting to protect "cognitive energy" by simply overcomplicating complex problems (Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992). With this in mind, propagators have long used persuasive devices that are overly simple to convince many people that they replaced them with "instinctive beliefs" rather than thinking carefully . For example, a typical political advertisement might describe a smile candidate wearing jeans and plaid buttons at a steel mill's factory. He may talk about plans for candidate tax increases for working-class families. Through a 30 second attack ad, politicians effectively provided "working cognitive shortcuts" to many working class voters (Franz, Freedman, Goldstein, and Ridout, 2007). Without careful consideration of the political parties, these voters were persuaded to vote for steelworks smile candidates.

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