Overlooked ordinary wonders, World is expressly designed for human, Political marketing through rumors, points to ponder, Political marketing through peripheral route, perspective into theories.

Overlooked ordinary wonders, World is expressly designed for human, Political marketing through rumors, points to ponder, Political marketing through peripheral route, perspective into theories. By Dr. Sohail Ansari

Conceived and worded by DR Sohail Ansari (originality of concepts and originality of words).

He believes that there can never be a zero scope for improvement and appreciates criticism if it is not for the sake of criticism.

Overlooked ordinary wonders

·       Sacrifices come today to us all, in the form of glow and thrill of a great movement against apartheid; in a great war for the emancipation of Europe from the thralldom of a military caste; in a holy endeavor to foil the diabolical plans of maniac to plunge the world into a welter of bloodshed and death.   These are sacrifices because individuals could not resist the drumbeats of wars; they could not resist the harangues of the charismatic figures.

 Inconspicuous  though greater sacrifices come despite the drabness and weariness of spirit and make up the compelling family sage in which each sacrifice is a remarkable tale in itself; a celebration of love powerful enough to rise above oneself to tolerate foibles and to respond kindly to tantrums. These sacrifices are the moving glimpses into the world of ordinary.

World is expressly designed for human

·       ‘No longer sustained by the belief that the world around us was expressly designed for humanity, many people try to find intellectual substitutes for that lost certainty in astrology and in mysticism’.

Every invention is because of the discovery of the inherent characteristics of the things of nature such as water and wind. Each invention is the testament to the belief that the world is keyed to humanity. 

Political marketing through Rumors     

·       People not known for their credulity are known by society as the reliable people (trust-worth source). People attach credence to things they believe. For rumors to become accepted as fact by society it is important that people accepted by society as the credible people accept rumors as fact. Political marketing consultant embroiders rumors with detail so that neither they can be not denied because of elaboration nor can be confirmed immediately as they are so far removed from accepted realities that it is difficult to reconcile with them but they live on for years nor mere longevity ultimately lends credibility.   

Points to ponder

·       Intelligent children are dangerous. Creative engagements are to be devised for them because often the depravity on their part is merely the effect of boredom.

·       Forgiveness is often because of no alternative. Forgiveness despite the capability of taking revenge is a genuine forgiveness.

·       ‘People should not be praised for their virtue if they lack the energy to be wicked, in such cases; goodness is merely the effect of indolence’. But as individual must thank God for his piety that is because of having no chance to be impious, people should not but God  must be praised for protecting this virtue by making them indolent.

·       Every heretic responds to the charge of heresy by saying that every new theory is charged heretical because it contradicts older ones. Every theory old or new is heretic if it contradicts accepted principles.  

Political marketing through peripheral route

·       Peripheral cue directs the extent of information processing through the use of the ‘saints, prophets, icons are always right’ heuristic and thus is a shortcut to persuasion. As audience do not cognitively process the merits of the message if source is perceived to be credible; therefore, any message can gain currency if linkage is established because source expertise can either serve as an argument or as a biasing factor. 

Political marketing consultant fabricates message (for literally putting his words into somebody’s mouth) and links to the credible source: false attribution of concocted words.  Political marketing consultant uses the original words of B and links them to A especially in case when A would not have been expected to say them: false attribution of words. Political marketing consultant having done a significant pruning directs the words to the source: right attribution of words significantly diluted of substance. Political marketing consultant reproduces the original with the deliberate disregard to its context and links to the source so audience can not have the contextual understanding and message automatically becomes susceptible of various interpretations.

Internalization has the ripple effects as every individual has his own sphere of influence and every individual n his capacity is the opinion leader. Actions are the outgrowth of beliefs one internalizes; the unity of belief is the unity of action; however the society whose members imbibe diverse influences is always riven by schism.  

Political marketing consultant by the use of preexisting ideas and superficial qualities creates the intellectual anarchy, mental mayhem and dissension, creating the division of opinions when nation needs to mount a united front.

Perspective into theories

Humans always have their lives compartmentalized between work and leisure. Work that occupies most to most in pre-industrial societies was either to grow or hunt food, and unoccupied moments were spent in various group-plays. Life was simple and everybody knew everything he needed to know for his social cultural and political survival.

In consumer culture endeavors of significant segment of population are not channeled in food-related concerns. Groups-plays are possible at a very limited scale, as people have neither time nor familiarity with people nearby nor has physical power comparable to that of inhabitants of agrarian or hunting societies. But man needs diversions and old ways are inadequate; therefore media crafts its own role for this end.

Each individual of consumer society has independent life paradoxically intertwined to that of others: changes in one sector are not confined to that sector and though none has none with the business of other, as long as it has no interference with the business of his and that is rarity in interconnected world of consumer society.  Decisions from the people at the helm determine the course of community; but first community picks people through election and then participates in every action of government through channels of mass media.              

Needs of modern man make media the need of modern man. Consumer society is the big consumer of mass media. It devours media for entertainment, enlightenment and airing of grievances. Dominant presence of media in modern society has subjected it to numerous investigation regarding its influence and power in fashioning personalities of individuals.

The advent of media was startling if epoch-making; impulse response of King Henry VIII of seizing control of the printing industry and strict control over printing by Puritan establishment in Massachusetts Bay Colony was the few examples of the failure to come to terms with the enormity of this invention. Further examples of failure to determine exactly the power of media were due in large part to the context in which media was placed to act. Hypodermic model was developed when whole world was convulsed by the violence and economic unrest. Period from 1920s to early 1940s spawned Hitler and success of Nazis in manipulating people’s mind suggested irrational yet somehow controlled mass group behavior. The use of Radio by Roberto Mussolini in Italy and Father Charles Coughlin in the USA to stir support seemed to be simply confirming long-held beliefs about the strength of media for not only changing people’s attitude but to alter their behavior. For researchers studying media in this context media “loomed as agents of evil aiming at the total destruction of democratic society by rubberstamping ideas upon the minds of defenseless readers and listeners”.

Hypodermic effect or Hypodermic needle model proofs the clouding of rationality by external factors and sweeping away of researchers by engulfing upheaval. Researchers studying the power of media   were not impervious to happenings around them and appeared to have failed to differentiate the power of media in inducing feelings with the power of war and economic depression in arousing national sentiments and attributed all hysteria to the influence of media.   

War was not the right time to judge the response of people to media messages and then to generalized the findings to the normal situations. This mistake was uncovered, when three social scientists from Columbia University discovered that most of the voters did not follow the dictates of media in 1940 presidential campaign and subsequently coined the term ‘limited effects model’.    

Researcher went from one extreme to the other; in first theory media was the harbinger of all that was evil and in other had little impact at all. These two theories are inadequate in many regards. Researcher judged effects on a one-dimensional level_ persuasion; and ignored informational or cognitive function and media effect in such important areas as voter turnout, political activation. Due to limited availability of tools of mass media (T.V and Radio), the medium was taken as having little direct influence on political behavior and viewed only as reinforces rather than opinion formers, thus implying that voters were limited perceptually by their past. 

Technological stride in making inroads into people continued and while in 1950’s television news was typically read by one person, it became a drama by 1970, featuring live coverage of national and international events; rendering basic tenets of social influence model untenable and consequently, to bridge the gap between two previous extremes position diffusion of knowledge perspective emerged. Diffusion research maintained that “media can have under certain conditions a direct impact on individuals and interpersonal communication is only a response to media reports” (5). This perspective attempted to address the inadequacies of limited effects model by focusing on the acquisition of political cognitions.       

With the passage of time people came to recognize different purposes media could serve. This recognition became the basis for the uses and gratification perspective that was formed on the assumption that “a wide range of motives exists for using the mass media and that an individual’s media requirements are dictated by such factors as their social roles, situations, or personalities.”(6) This approach became popular due to its middle-ground positions as it viewed audience as active and sensible receivers neither vulnerable nor immune to media messages.

Beliefs regarding the political influence and power of the mass media came full circle with Agenda-setting hypothesis that came closer than any of the other approaches to reaffirming the early assumption that the media exerts influence on what we think about. Political scientist Bernard C.Cohen said: “press may not be successful in telling its readers what to think, but it successful in telling its readers what to think about.”

Qualified support to power of media makes this perspective not only different but also important as it helps in exploring the role of media in structuring social reality. Origins of political communication was inspired by the grand thinkers, prodded by social forces associated with the rise of modern society to understand the impact of the transition from traditional to modern, public institution-based, legal rational orders on communication:

“Emerging modern social structures led Tarde to understand the flow of influence through groups and status systems that cued how people learn from others what ideas and fashions to adopt. Freud struggled in Civilization and Its Discontents with the problem of how the conformist pull of external roles and distant symbols of allegiance in modern society inhibited the formation of independent egos, creating the modern pandemic of neurosis, and the propensity toward mass movements. Following Freud’s prescient mass diagnosis, a generation of scholars later discovered the perils of conformity (The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd) that were the foundation for the mass society in which mass communication processes later flourished for several decades”.

W. Lance Bennett1 & Shanto Iyengar  write “In The Changing Foundations of Political Communication: A New Era of Minimal Effects? that “the famous era of ‘minimal effects’ that emerged from studies done in the 1940s and early 1950s. The underlying context for this scholarship was of a pre- mass communication media system and relatively dense memberships in a group-based society networked through political parties, churches, unions, and service organizations. At this time, scholars concluded that media messages were filtered through social reference processes as described in the two-step flow model proposed by Katz and Lazarsfeld . Later communication researchers began to find more substantial evidence of direct effects, and ways to incorporate social cueing with mass communication models”

But World seem to be at the threshold of another time of unsettled findings. Modern man pushes his isolated existence through the throng with the help of media that becomes his surrogate partner of life and capitalizes on his increased capacity to choose from a multitude of media channels (many of which enable  user-produced content) and the substance of messages and media sources are greatly influenced by receivers: the effects picture may be changing again as impact become increasingly difficult to produce in the aggregate, creating new challenges for theory and research.

The research  by Chaffee and Metzger was the scholarly efforts to alert the field to this coming possibility, authors predicted: “the key problem for agenda-setting theory will change from what issues the media tell people to think about to what issues people tell the media they want to think about.”

Societies have changed dramatically since the political, social, psychological, and

economic transformations at the dawn of modern industrial society; new questions have come into being and begging for answers: “People have become increasingly detached from overarching institutions such as public schools, political parties and civic groups which at one time provided a shared context for receiving and interpreting messages. What are the implications of this detachment on how people respond to media messages? Information channels have proliferated and simultaneously become more individualized. Is it still relevant to conceive of “mass media,” or has that concept been made obsolete by audience fragmentation and isolation from the public sphere?”

Answers of such inquires need new studies; which will differ having agreed that world has entered another important turning point not just in communication technologies, but in social structure and identity formation that affects  the behaviors of audiences.

Steps have been taken toward it. For example this transition has been studied by Bimber  to find out message delivery and social organization that affect the balance of power in society and by Schudson  to examine the broad interactions of political processes, communication systems, and emerging citizen styles that affect consumption and response to communication.