Week 6 Blog: The (Early) History of Propaganda
This week was pretty busy with interviews, conventions, and the general hassles of life so I didn’t get to write as much as I planned to so I’ve decided to pivot away from making a video as well. I do believe for this project to fully reach the scope I’d want it to that I’d need to make the video essay version of my work, but I think my lack of video-creation skills compounded with the fact that the writing I’m doing is far heavier than I expected has made it impossible to create two products I’m genuinely proud of. While I have dropped the video essay portion of my project, I have added a sixth section onto the essay portion that fleshes out my reasoning for investigating right-wing propaganda and extremism while not looking at other extremist violence.
This section is going to have a primary focus of capital motive that often lies behind right-wing extremism and the statistical significance held by right-wing extremism that makes it significantly more important to speak on and document than left-wing or religious extremism. This section will likely be one of the shorter sections as I don’t believe it’s entirely necessary, but rather that it’s better for me to cover all possible angles at which someone could attack my research including, but not limited to, biases.
In terms of work I did this week, I spent most of the week expanding on the history section of my essay and touching up my outline. For my history section, I decided to break it into five parts that would adequately document the history of propaganda in a rather small window. Those five sections consist of:
- Ancient Greece, Egypt, and China
- The Roman Republic and Empire
- Reformation and the Birth of the Printing Press
- The 17th Century until the United States Civil War
- Newspaper, Radio, and Television to the Birth of the Internet
These five sections were the ones I felt best expanded this topic whilst also establishing concepts that are going to be integral when discussing modern-day propagandists. By drawing from previous propagandists, I believe I can better put a spotlight on how the internet has facilitated some of the most manipulative forms of communication to live on to this very day.
When it came to editing my outline, it was mostly a focus on adding in bits and pieces about my newest section and editing the history section to adapt to my new format.
Photos from My Draft:
Photos from My Outline:
Photos from My Research:
