Introduction to Language and Power

Questions to get you thinking!

1. How does language work—or fail to work—and, why?

2. How do people use language to generate influence and control?

3. What processes underlie the formation of a powerful or powerless

impression, and how are these processes related to speech features?

Activity:

Can you think of any words that are ok

in one language and offensive in

another?

Propaganda

Propaganda - information, especially of a biased or misleading

nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a

population toward some cause or position.

Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an

audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly

lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to

produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.

While the term propaganda has acquired a strongly negative connotation by

association with its most manipulative and jingoistic examples (e.g. Nazi propaganda

used to justify the Holocaust), propaganda in its original sense was neutral, and

could refer to uses that were generally benign or innocuous, such as public health

recommendations, signs encouraging citizens to participate in a census or election,

or messages encouraging persons to report crimes to law enforcement, among

others. READ THROUGH PROPAGANDA BOOKLET

Propaganda

Questions for Consideration

Since propaganda is a topic that is so highly misunderstood and difficult to define, here are some

questions might be relevant in understanding the overall nature of this issue:

1) Where do you generally draw the line between persuasion and propaganda?

2) Do you feel that your education used propagandistic techniques to create consensus (for

example, in high school history textbooks? How so?

3) Do you think propaganda can at times be used in positive ways?

4) Is it necessary, to some degree, to keep people in the dark (specifically when it comes to

policy decisions made by the government)?

5) Does human psychology make us susceptible to propaganda, or is its use a byproduct of the

society we live in?

6) How much responsibility should the public take in educating themselves, and how

responsible are the media and government for providing accurate information?

7) What do you think would be the effects of having a well-informed, critically thinking public?