This past Thursday in our Media and
Society course a local artist and professor in the UW–Milwaukee Peck School of
the Arts came into our class and gave his take on the Latino/a mural movement
and how it originated from its indigenous roots in large, highly Socialist
leaning public works like those of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and
David Alfredo Sequeirios, the “Big Three” Mexican mural painters who began to
use highly politicized imagery to reshape their shared and perceived Mexican
history, to what it has become today. The overarching principle that I
personally took away from Professor Deal’s talk was that there is a deep-seated
power in imagery, the power to persuade and influence and reorganize the often
times misinformed conceptions of aspects of one’s personal identity within the
social structure. I have always been attracted to the powerful and excessively
utopian imagery present in propaganda imagery, specifically that of WWII pro-war
posters from both Allied and Axis forces. Deal shared some of that imagery in
his talk, emphasizing how Nazi as well as American and Chinese visual
propaganda demonized the enemy they were facing, poisoning the minds of scores
of citizens in the name of nationalism and communal pride. Here I think it
would behoove me to relate a description of my understanding of propaganda. In
its most basic form, propaganda functions as a misrepresentation of reality
that is constructed in such as way to influence and direct one’s understanding
of the world in which they live; it is meant to illicit an emotional rather
than realistic response to whatever information is presented and often times
seeks to influence one’s thinking through the dissemination of misinformation.
With this description it is
definitely possible to recognize a number of different and varying forms of
propaganda that have developed into the varying forms of mass and social media
we all experience everyday. Several news organizations present their biases and
personal leanings quite readily in not only the types of stories they choose to
cover, but also how they construct these stories to influence the viewer’s
understanding of the facts (Fox News on the far right, and networks like
National Public Radio on the left, which claims to be completely unbiased, as
well as a slew of others). With the advent of social media, the dissemination
of misinformation has even often times gone viral. This new kind of viral
propaganda was nowhere more evident than in the almost absurdly presented
information of the KONY 2012 campaign. KONY 2012 stigmatized and called for
justice for the crimes of a long-disappeared ex-military war criminal through a
film produced by the “social activist” group Invisible Children, Inc., was
distributed via YouTube and spread across the Internet like wildfire. I still
remember seeing those videos first pop up on my News Feed, often times along
with a plea to donate to the cause of the forced child-warriors of the African
continent.
However, after watching no more than
a minute of the video I stopped it, because I recognized the way that the
narrator was speaking was in a very disingenuous way and maintained a deeply
persuasive tone, obviously ignorant of the actual truth and rather speaking to
illicit a response; to want to do something, to give him money so him and his
organization can do all they can to help these “Invisible Children”. After a
couple of days people slowly began to see through the empty promises and
deluded goals of the KONY 2012 campaign, however a good amount of donations filtered
into the organization from people wanting to literally show their support for the campaign, with a KONY 2012 t-shirt and
other swag provided in return for donating. The legitimacy of the organization
was later shaken when on of the founders of the Invisible Children group was
arrested by police on the San Diego streets naked, screaming incoherently,
interfering with traffic, and obviously on some kind of powerful drugs. It
became painfully evident that this groups was simply exploiting the pain and misery
of actual child-soldiers they claimed to be trying to help in Africa for their
own gain through the implementation of the highly affective and persuasive
propaganda in their video released on YouTube. Social media seems as good a
disseminator of misinformation as any other kind of propaganda channel because
of how extremely quickly information can spread, especially in our fast-paced
almost ADD-like media environments wherein new kinds of visual media are meant
to only grab attention for a moment and then forgotten, in the interest of experience
(think of the meme). None of these experiences are really genuinely new
however, because they simply recycle the tropes of success rather than focus on
unique expression. I can see through these facades because of what my studies in
school. Graphic Design & Visual Communication is just that, and behind
every piece that someone creates there is a purpose.
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